Google Glass Teardown

In public surveillance terms, this is basically the equivalent of gluing your camera to your temple. The Snowcrash quote is pertinent. Glassholes will be excluded from free spaces.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

I don't get why glass is so different from ubiquitous smart phone cameras or (in the UK) CCTV.

Parents already have problems taking photographs of their children at school events[1] and people are regularly harassed and arrested because they are taking photographs in public. Most people seem to think this is too extreme, but I get the impression that they wouldn't mind if it was happening to glass users.

As far as public surveillance goes there are much worse situations than actual people wearing (currently) expensive hardware wandering around. It's cheaper and better to mount CCTV everywhere; and it's good for the operators to have hidden[2] low[3] level cameras.

[1] Although I agree with Louis CK about this - don't video the kids, watch them. The resolution on the kid is much better than on that little phone screen.

[2] To avoid vandalism.

[3] Face height, not on a tall pole.

contingencies2• 13 years ago

One stays in your pocket.

galactus• 13 years ago

The difference between Google Glass and smartphones is that with Google Glass it is much more difficult to know if someone is recording you.

Amadou• 13 years ago

You'd think Star would be a little bit gunshy about wearable electronics. I kid, Star if you are reading this, I'm kidding!

driverdan• 13 years ago

Well done. Nice site design and beautiful high res images.

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Ideal for those who always dreamed of becoming a spy (or Stasi informant). $1500 gets you a stealthy camera with NSA uplink.

necubi• 13 years ago

Stealthy? Have you actually seen somebody wearing glass? It's the most noticeable thing about them. During IO there were a bunch of Glass wearers wandering around Moscone and people couldn't stop staring (myself included).

You'd be much better off with something like this: http://www.amazon.com/Waterproof-Camera-Watch-Video-Recorder....

Samuel_Michon2• 13 years ago

Sure, everyone can see they’re wearing glasses. However, outside of our little tech circle, most people don’t know that those glasses contain a camera, mic, and location tracker. And even if a Glass-wearer gets called out, they can deny that they were recording or taking pictures (unlike if you point a camera watch at someone).

suyash• 13 years ago

You just open sourced Google's IP related to Hardware Design of Glass. Now just waiting for cheap knockoff's from China flooding the Walmart's of the world or flooding eBay catalogs.

dannyr• 13 years ago

Hardware is going to be easy to copy.

Google services (search, maps, etc)? Good luck to the imitators.

vincentkriek2• 13 years ago

They could just use the software that is on Glass now. If the hardware is exactly the same it could work.

eisen• 13 years ago

Can anyone spot where the TI Omap 4 processor is in this?

lelandbatey• 13 years ago

Yep, it's right here: http://www.catwig.com/google-glass-teardown/teardown/mainboa...

Of the three largest chips, it's the furthest to the right (in case the large Texas shape didn't tip you off ;) ).

miahi3• 13 years ago

That's a TWL6030 power management chip, used for charging and powering the board from the battery. There are no side photos, but sometimes there is a trick you can do with the OMAP: put it under the RAM. It can provide pins for the RAM to be soldered on.

sas2• 13 years ago

Yeah it should be under the Elpida memory module. We did not desolder that for this teardown.

dreeves• 13 years ago

"Although functional, the experience was subpar, because the head proximity sensor was very unreliable when next to a lens."

I turned off my proximity sensor (that's an option in settings -- "On-Head Detection") because the false positives (like turning on or off because my finger covered the sensor briefly) were more annoying than having to turn it on and off with the power button.

So unless there's more use for the proximity sensor I'd say this is a small price to pay if you want to attach google glass to your regular glasses.

One possible use for the proximity sensor, though, is wink detection: https://github.com/kaze0/winky

On the other hand, there's a dedicated button for taking a picture so winking as an input method I think would only be useful in situations where you don't want to use either your hands or your voice. And there may well be such situations.

gcb0• 13 years ago

people haven't learned from microsoft office clipper!

Everyone rather have control than implied ominous prediction.

i hate that i can't press a button on my phone and switch from landscape/portrait modes. rotation sensor is silly most of the time.

dm22• 13 years ago

What are the QR codes used for?

I parsed two of them and came up with "|224010712|01294" and "0200014672"

ewang1• 13 years ago

Most likely for tracking parts during production.

DanBC3• 13 years ago

As a complete guess: Much electronics manufacturing requires items to have individual (or batch) numbers for quality control.

When items fail test you can investigate the batch to find and eliminate problems of manufacture.

Sometimes this is good and effective and it works. You see that batch #3762387 failed, and that they all used a component from a delivery, so you look at the other batches using that component and they fail too.

Sometimes, however, it's just a paperwork exercise. It's frustrating for everyone trying to do the work, and the results are hopeless for anything because people are just faking the paperwork, or the paperwork is garbage. The company is only doing all of this to get a logo for their letterhead, and they must have that logo to do business with some other companies.

In the UK some of these systems (ISO900x; BS5750; etc) are sometimes seen as expensive makework nonsense.

Let me know if you ever need to find flaws in someone's paperwork because there are a few things where it's trivially easy to trip them up once you know what to look for.

dm22• 13 years ago

The quality control and tracking reasons makes sense. It would allow for faster and more automated identifying of parts.

"Let me know if you ever need to find flaws in someone's paperwork because there are a few things where it's trivially easy to trip them up once you know what to look for."

I'm interested in this, can you give some more details?

6ren• 13 years ago

It uses an old OMAP4430, also in the Samsung Galaxy 2: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OMAP#OMAP_4

As chips get faster, wearable computing will benefit more than smartphones, because (eg) an iPhone 5 is more powerful than a smartphone can utilize (and more powerful than even a desktop needs to be, for most mainstream tasks.)

miahi3• 13 years ago

The chip is taken from the specs, you cannot see it in the photos.

lgeek• 13 years ago

I think the memory is mounted on top of the SoC as a package on package.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Package_on_package

ironchief• 13 years ago

For most use cases, current hardware is sufficient. This will have a profound effect on wearable devices as we use exponential improvement to make devices smaller and more battery efficient rather than faster. This is exactly what Intel and Apple did with the new Macbook Air. They made it slightly faster, but much more power efficient.

If you look into the future and imagine that every 1.5 years Google Glass will half in size instead of getting faster, it doesn't take the long before it's the size of a dime (~4.5 years).

That's why Glass matters: it's just the beginning.

Short blog on Medium about this: https://medium.com/adventures-in-consumer-technology/74c201b...

joezydeco• 13 years ago

I don't know if I would classify the OMAP4 as "old", unless you're Apple and spinning Cortex-A cores on your own silicon.

The OMAP4 is really no different than the Sitara AM335 being used in stuff like Beaglebone Black, with the exception of the video DSP. And I can see why Google would want that DSP on board to do things like hardware video encoding.

Google Glass Teardown

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