Forget “OK Glass,” MindRDR Is A Google Glass App You Control With Your Thoughts
Google Glass has made a name for itself (somewhat infamously) as head-mounted hardware that you can control with your voice and a sliding finger. Now, a team based out of interactive studio This Place in London …
Context & Ripple Effects
MindRDR lands mid-arc in Google's slow widening of what counts as a Glass input. Voice ('OK Glass') and the touchpad were the sanctioned pair, but the corpus shows the edges moving all of 2013: Google's own MyGlass update added Android-phone control of the UI that September, and hidden Labs features hinted at broader gesture and browsing modes by May 2013. What makes This Place's app notable is that it skips the sanctioned channels entirely — the signal comes from a wearable sensor, not from anything Google built into Glass.
The move also rhymes with the platform's governance tension. The December 2013 face recognition app built over Google's objection showed third parties shipping capabilities the company hadn't approved, and the January 2014 arrival of Glass videogames showed developers hunting for interaction models beyond the menu card. MindRDR, open-sourced on GitHub and picked up by outlets from the BBC to Fox News within a day, extends that pattern from capability to input modality itself.
First-order effects
- Glass wearers who can't reliably use voice or the touchpad — the accessibility case This Place cites — get a working hands-free control channel today, via an EEG headband paired with the headset.
- This Place converts a small London interactive studio's experiment into outsized visibility, with same-day pickup across BBC, Engadget, Telegraph and RT amplifying an open-source release.
Second-order effects
- Consumer EEG hardware makers gain their first mainstream head-mounted showcase, positioning brain-signal sensors as an accessory category riding Glass's developer base rather than a standalone product.
- Google faces a familiar fork: tolerate a third-party input channel it doesn't control, as it did with the unsanctioned face-recognition app, or formalize policy on external sensing peripherals in the GDK ecosystem.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, head-worn computing drifts toward layered input stacks — voice, gesture, and passive biosignals stacked on one device — making the operating layer, not the hardware vendor, the arbiter of which signals are allowed to drive the UI.
- Accessibility-driven input experiments become the R&D wing of mainstream wearables: features validated first by users voice and touch fail, then absorbed into platform roadmaps, echoing how Glass's own Labs features graduated.
The trend: Wearable interfaces are expanding from explicit commands toward sensed intent, with third-party developers — not platform owners — shipping each new input modality first.