The battery is one of the biggest inhibitors to designing the shape and weight of wearables. If you ever forget that, just go back and look at the very first prototype of Google Glass, Google’s digital, multi-media glasses project in a photo taken by venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson. In addition to making you look like a Borg, you can see the first prototype’s got a backpack attached to it that Jurvetson says was full of batteries to power the device.
In the above photo Sarah Price’s Google X is showing off the original prototype in a slide, while sporting the current model, which is way more refined, has a much smaller battery and can still power the glasses for a day. The next prototype — but still an early version — is below.
And finally the current version below that you can see Googlers sporting around the campus and elsewhere (I saw a pair in the wild at a Mission pub this weekend).
Top two photos courtesy of Jurvetson, creative commons. Bottom photo courtesy of Thomas Hawk.
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