Sergey Brin talks about the motivations behind Google Glass

If you missed Sergey Brin’s spontaneous appearance at TED this year to talk about Google Glass, then we should have a little recap as he revealed some of the interesting motivations behind the project.

Brin started by making a fair point about the odd, socially awkward aspects of staring down at the ground checking your handset for messages. I tend to agree that smartphones are inherently distracting, and prevent you from continuing with regular activities whilst you check e-mail, etc. It’s pretty weird to think how many hours each day we all dedicated to staring at our smartphones, although I do wonder whether Google Glass really helps to solve this problem.

Anyway, one of the major motivations behind Google Glass is to free up your body and time to continue with regular aspects of life and social interactions, whilst maintain the connectivity of your smartphone.

The second driving force behind the project seems to be the desire to transfer away from standard web searches, towards more personalized information. Brin stated that when Google first started 15 years ago that he envisioned a time when you wouldn’t need to use search queries, instead the information would simply be made available as and when users needed it.

We’ve clearly seen Google leaning more towards this type of on-demand information with features like Google Now, and Glass is just the full implementation of this vision.

If you have 15 minutes to spare, then you can watch the full TED 2013 talk in the video below. But keep in mind that this wasn’t a prepared presentation.

Personally I quite like what I’m hearing about Google Glass, and the reasoning behind the protect seems to make a lot of sense. I can’t help but feel that one day I’ll be retiring my smartphone for some nifty Google head wear, but perhaps not for $1500.

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