The much talked about smart glass­es devel­oped by Google are now avail­able for sale in the UK for a cool £1,000.

Described as an evo­lu­tion in wear­able com­put­ing, the tech­nol­o­gy known as Google Glass has tak­en two years to come to mar­ket. The units are made up of a pair of spec­ta­cle frames that have a tiny, prism-based trans­par­ent screen mount­ed just above the right eye. The screen can take pho­tographs or record video images with its in-built cam­era. Its func­tions are con­trolled by either a voice com­mand or by a fin­ger swip­ing across the frame’s right hand arm. Data is dis­played on the screen and is only vis­i­ble to the wear­er. Its oper­at­ing sys­tem is an alter­nate form of Android mobile soft­ware and requires a smart­phone to become con­nect­ed. The bat­tery offers approx­i­mate­ly 24-hours of life, but only 45-min­utes if it is being used to record video.

Glass­es now available

Despite being only a pro­to­type, the glass­es have gone on sale in the UK for £1,000 and are avail­able to any­one over the age of 18, who has a UK address and valid cred­it card.

The head of Glass, prod­uct man­ag­er Ivy Ross, said, “We know there’s a pent-up demand for Glass, from all over the world. As we start to branch out we picked the UK first because we think it has a his­to­ry of embrac­ing tech­nol­o­gy, design and fash­ion, and I think there’s a resur­gence hap­pen­ing in tech­nol­o­gy in the UK.”

Google would like buy­ers to pro­vide feed­back on the func­tion­al­i­ty and usabil­i­ty of the Glass so that future mod­els will per­form bet­ter. It is antic­i­pat­ed that the cost will even­tu­al­ly come down to rough­ly the same price as a smartphone.

Accent recog­ni­tion

Google Glass is cur­rent­ly avail­able to fit with pre­scrip­tion lens­es and designs are planned which will have five swap­pable frames, as well as being made as sun­glass­es. The Google Glass has had sev­er­al cus­tomiza­tions to make it more suit­able for the UK mar­ket, includ­ing adap­ta­tions of its voice recog­ni­tion soft­ware so that it can under­stand the wide vari­ety of British accents.

The Google Glass is avail­able to buy online, but can also be tried on at a ‘Base­camp’ cen­ter cur­rent­ly locat­ed in London’s King Cross. This lat­est Google prod­uct launch should impress any chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cer and numer­ous tech­nol­o­gy addict­ed UK consumers.