Google Project Glass: Five Ways Project Glass Could Improve Life at Work!

By now, many of you have probably seen the video Google released featuring their augmented reality glasses (dubbed “Project Glass”). It’s a pretty fascinating concept – the translucent screen on the glasses allows information to be streamed right to your eyes at all times. The video shows neat ways the glasses can be used seamlessly in everyday life, but how could the Glasses’ functionality be tailored to the workplace?

• Cashless Solutions
  For businesses utilizing payroll deduction for payment, the glasses could display an up-to-date tally of deductions and wages for the current pay period to help employees decide how much they want to spend. Imagine having that information appear as soon as you stepped into the cafeteria (or another POS location within the facility)! You could even scan certain items or groups of items to see what your balance would be after you purchased the items in question.

• Contacts
  We all know it’s hard keeping track of all the people you meet. The glasses could support facial recognition software that would identify the person and bring up his or her contact information – you wouldn’t have to worry about calling someone by the wrong name, plus you could know at a glance whether or not you had the person’s phone number or email address.

• Access Control
  Security personnel and executives wearing the glasses could set up alerts to let them know immediately about attempted entries, hardware problems, or other security concerns. Employees on the other hand could receive an alert when they approach a door or area to which they do not have access – for example if an employee approaches a door outside of the hours when he or she has access to that area, the heads up display could let him or her know why access is denied.

• Presentations
  Giving presentations can be a stressful experience, to the point where you may occasionally forget some key points while worrying about impressing your audience. Imagine if you could sync the presentation to your glasses, and have reminders and notes pop up periodically. And as a viewer of the presentation, the glasses could provide more detail about graphs and charts and projections without being too cumbersome in the actual presentation.

• Workforce Management
  Everyone who uses a time clock knows the frustration of realizing late in the day that you never punched in at the beginning of the shift. The glasses could display a reminder as an employee walked past the time clock if he or she forgot to punch in or out. The glasses could also help improve workplace efficiency as scheduling conflicts could be identified immediately and alleviated on the fly – managers would be able to easily tell when their employees arrived (early or late) and who was in the office on a given day.

What do you think – how would Project Glass help you out at work? Would you even be willing to wear the glasses?