Google Glass's Hidden Labs Features - ‘OK Glass’ Everywhere, Web Browsing, Video Stabilization, And More
Google Glass is very much an experimental piece of hardware and it turns out the software has been built with that ethos in mind, too. With root and a few carefully-crafted ADB commands …
Context & Ripple Effects
A month after Google opened up the Glass kernel under the GPL, the enthusiast community has moved from compiling code to switching features on: with root and ADB commands, hidden 'Labs' functionality — 'OK Glass' voice commands anywhere, web browsing, video stabilization — can be enabled on hardware people already own. That follows a year of Google X drip-feeding the project publicly, from the first sample video in May 2012 through the inside look at Project Glass.
The pickup across eight outlets — Engadget, The Verge, SlashGear, eWeek and others all ran the same finding within a day — says less about the tricks themselves than about how starved Explorer Edition owners feel relative to what the device demonstrably ships with disabled.
First-order effects
- Explorer Edition owners who root their units gain immediate access to capabilities Google has built but not switched on, without waiting for an official software update.
- Google's staged rollout of Glass functionality is effectively bypassed, since the features ship in the firmware and only need a command to surface.
Second-order effects
- Widespread evidence that users want always-on voice commands and browsing puts pressure on Google either to promote these Labs features into the default experience or to harden the device against root.
- The rooting scene becomes an informal requirements list for the platform, shaping which hidden capabilities graduate to supported ones as Google courts developers.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, experimental wearable hardware will keep shipping with dormant capability that its community surfaces first — making the gap between what a device does and what a vendor enables a permanent battleground over control of the platform.
The trend: Consumer wearables are following the smartphone playbook: enthusiast communities unlock shipped-but-disabled features faster than vendors officially enable them, forcing companies to choose between embracing or locking down their own hardware.