The Nest learning thermostat and Google Glass have had a love child and it’s called Glass Nest. Developer James Rundquist got his Google Glass unit earlier this month wanted to get his hands dirty with some Glassware development, he tells me in an interview. The result is a mash up between two of the most buzzy devices to hit the Internet of Things in 2013.
Rundquist’s Glass Nest is an app for Google Glass that can control the Nest learning thermostat with voice controls, and enable the user to do things like check the temperature in your home hands-free, or turn the thermostat to “away-mode” when you’re leaving the house. The app is a functioning piece of glassware, and Rundquist has opened it up to a few other people who have both Glass and Nest — though, at this point that’s a very niche market.
His small amount of users are giving him feedback, says Rundquist, and “so far everyone is loving it,” he says. The code is open sourced and up on Github, so anyone who wants to help, contribute to the project, or play around with the code can do so. Rundquist says he’d like to open up registration for the app to everyone who has both Glass and Nest if Google’s Mirror API terms of service become less restrictive around distribution or if Google gives the O.K. to the project.
Rundquist lives in an apartment in Atlanta and after installing a Nest in his place he started thinking about how he’d like to check the temperature on his Nest from his new Glass hardware. He tells me that he built a different app before Glass Nest that pushed down the top images from imgur.com every ten minutes, but after about a day of use, he says he decided that wasn’t really what Glass was for.
As I wrote in this post in March, I think that using Glass to control the Internet of Things will be one of the most disruptive uses of Glass. Rundquist tells me that in his short experience experimenting with Glass, he see Glass apps more suited for passive and quick interactions — “less content consumption, more quick one off actions and passive information gain.” He says:
I imagine some day it [Google Glass] will basically be a device that is like Google Now on steroids, always just showing you relevant information based on where you are, whats going on around you, conversations you are currently having.
It will be interesting to see what Nest thinks of the unofficial Glass Nest app. Nest has taken a cue from Apple on a lot of its strategies, which makes its philosophy a bit more closed than Google’s mostly open ecosystem.
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