Wearables and the potential of Google Glass

Abstract: The Mobile Life (TML) is a company with great passion for mobile devices that has set its primary focus on developing tailor-made mobile applications. Some of their bigger clients consist of airlines where TML designs, develops and delivers applications, in which travelers who travel with the airline can use to browse through, reserve and book flights. Wearable Technology is being more and more embraced as the future big addition to the ecosystem of mobile devices and exploring what some of the more prominent wearables have to offer is very much in the interest of aspiring companies like TML. To understand more in-depth what it means to develop applications for devices that might suffer from vast limitations in regards to interaction and feedback, we would first investigate what coming wearables could be recognized as prominent. The wearables that we concluded as suitable to investigate closer were Google Glass, Android Wear and various smartwatches. Out of these, Google Glass was the device chosen to act as our platform when exploring the potential of a wearable. A suitable way of understanding the possibilities and limitations of user interaction for Google Glass was to develop our own flight booking application for Glass. The realization we got was that there are various aspects of Glass that limits the kind of applications that can be made for it. The two primary things are the limits of the hardware and the fact that user interaction has taken a step back. From the graphical directmanipulation interaction that we nowadays are so used to in smartphones, to a simple menu system with limitations to how much the user can interact and how much feedback the program can show the user.