Project Glass

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

+Babak Parviz +Steve Lee +Sebastian Thrun

Project Glass: One day...

youtube.com – We believe technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't. A team within our Google[x] group started...

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$5 for $10 at Starbucks, and Google Offers donates $3 to Create Jobs for USA

You don’t need an excuse to order your favorite Starbucks beverage (a venti half-caf vanilla soy latte, of course)—who does? Well, your coveted morning java just got a little sweeter, because today’s exclusive Google Offer not only gets you a pick-me-up of your favorite handcrafted beverage—it also gives you the unique opportunity to help create and sustain jobs in America. For every Google Offer purchased, Google Offers will donate $3 (up to $3 million) to Opportunity Finance Network (OFN) for the Create Jobs for USA Fund. Started by the Starbucks Foundation and OFN, Create Jobs for USA provides loans to community businesses, creating jobs for people across the country. No, you don’t ever need an excuse to pop by your second home (we think of it that way, too) for your go-to venti half-caf. But now, you can do it knowing you're making the country a little bit better.

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You Autocomplete Me

Could Web-search algorithms make spelling a lost art?

Want to know more about Brittany Griner, the 6-foot-8 dunking phenom who helped Baylor’s women’s basketball team win a national championship on Tuesday night? How about the war in Afganistan, the morgage crisis, and American Idle? Go ahead and Google it.

“Did you mean: American Idol?” Google asks. Oops. Sure did. With each of the other misspellings above, Google is so confident it knows what you meant that it doesn’t even bother to ask. “Showing results for brittney griner,” it notes, before offering, in small text, an option to “search instead for brittany griner.” (Microsoft’s Bing search engine does the same thing, with slightly altered wording.)

Over the past five years, Web browsers have become better at spelling than most humans. In a 2008 Slate piece, Chris Wilson noted that browsers had surpassed traditional spell-check programs as well. Microsoft Word will turn morgage into mortgage, but it sees nothing wrong with American Idle, and it thinks the way to fix Brittany Griner is to make her a Grinner or a Grinder. And while Word’s spell-check function has stagnated, browsers get smarter by the day, assimilating new search data in real time. Search engines don’t just catch errors; they prevent you from making them in the first place. To find the latest on Afghanistan, just type “Afg” and select from the options in the drop-down autocomplete menu.

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This functionality will soon be coming to a word processor near you: Last month, Google began applying similar algorithms to the spell-check feature on Google Docs, marking one of the first attempts to apply Web-based, contextual spell-checking to a word-processing program. Smartphone autocorrect tools are also improving, though embarrassing errors remain all too common. And mobile personal-assistant tools like Siri and Voice Actions for Android combine cutting-edge voice-recognition technology with search data to cut out the need for typing entirely.

With spelling becoming more and more optional, it’s easy to draw a parallel to the changing nature of arithmetic. Once upon a time, if you wanted to divide 154 by 19.6, you had to get out a pen and paper. Now, an electronic calculator—or the calculator on your computer or your watch or your iPhone—will do it for you. Just as long division has become all but obsolete, could autocomplete make spelling a lost art—something for kids to learn in elementary school, never to use again?

Probably not. Still, it’s a big improvement over what has come before.

Kids may struggle equally with spelling and arithmetic, but the latter is vastly easier for machines. Numerical calculations, which follow simple, unchanging rules, are right in a computer’s wheelhouse: Fourteen times eleven is 154 no matter what the context. By contrast, complement is a correct spelling if you’re talking about two things that go together but a spelling error if you’re doling out praise. To tell the difference, a computer needs to do something much harder than consult its internal dictionary. It needs to understand the meaning of your sentence. That’s what artificial intelligence researchers call a “hard problem.”

A “hard problem,” in AI, is more than just a problem that’s tough to figure out. Rather, it’s a problem that can’t be solved without also solving the fundamental problem of the field: how to make a computer think like a human.

Spell-check programs work best when they don’t have to think. Type typpo and any spell-checker will recognize that you probably meant typo. That’s what’s known as a “nonword” error—a spelling mistake that results in a combination of letters that doesn’t match any real word in the dictionary. Though many typos are of this sort, unfortunately these are the types of mistakes that humans are already adept at noticing. Both humans and spell-checkers struggle more with “word errors”—spelling mistakes that result in a real word but not the one that was intended. Homophones are one pitfall; proper names are another.

Far from making spelling obsolete, traditional spell-checkers often serve to reinforce its importance. A widely cited 2005 study found that students actually caught fewer spelling and grammar mistakes when their word processor’s language-checking program was turned on. The explanation: People placed undue confidence in the software, skipping over misspellings that the computer didn’t flag.

The same can happen with Web-based spell-checking, but it’s less common. That’s because search-based algorithms consider two things that spell-checkers don’t: context and human experience. Rather than checking a string of letters against a dictionary, Bing and Google check your phrase against the millions of other Web searches that people have conducted. The moment you type mor, a search engine will find the most popular search results that start with those three letters: mortgage calculator, morgan stanley, morgan freeman. It can work even if you start off on the wrong foot. Type tarmig and the first suggestion is ptarmigan, an oft-misspelled game bird. And while autocomplete isn’t perfect on homophones, it’s better than Word’s spell-checker. If you type here, it doesn’t know that you might have misspelled hear. If you type do you here what I here, however, it knows which Christmas carol you’re asking about.

Still, autocomplete is no substitute for human spelling skill, for several reasons. For one, you need to get somewhat close to a word’s proper spelling in order for it to be helpful. Second, it hasn’t yet been incorporated into most email and word-processing programs. The recent Google Docs upgrade is a significant improvement over traditional spell-check tools, but work remains to be done. Google Docs now flags the Brittany in “Brittany Griner Baylor” because that’s a popular search term. But when it comes to a phrase like “Brittany Griner of Baylor,” which you’d be more likely to use in an essay, Google Docs is mute. Spell-check programs will probably never make spelling as easy as a calculator makes arithmetic. But at least now they can put two and two together.

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Top 6 finalists team info below cast your vote!

Cast your vote!

We've chosen the six finalists for the Google Model Your Town Competition, and all of them are spectacular. Now it's your turn to help choose the winner. View the entries, then vote for the team you think did the best job. Take a look at the details page for criteria you can use to make your decision.

Public voting ends May 1, 2012. Please be aware - you will only be able to cast ONE vote. We'll announce the winning team (and town) on this website on or around May 15, 2012.

Top 6 finalists team info below:

Click on each image below to view team details.

Evansville
Indiana, United States

Getaria
Gipuzkoa, Spain

Leominster
Herefordshire, United Kingdom

Lowell
Massachusetts, United States

Toruń
Kujawsko-Pomorskie, Poland

Zielona Góra
Lubuskie, Poland

Getaria

Town: Getaria, Gipuzkoa, Spain
Team members: Josetxo Perez Fernandez, Pedro Domecq Aguirre

Take a tour of the models in Google Earth

View models in the Google 3D Warehouse

Vote for this town

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Crossing the 50 billion km mark and giving Google Maps for Android a fresh look

Every day, millions of people turn to Google Maps for Android for free, voice-guided GPS navigation to guide them to their destination. So far, Navigation on Google Maps for Android has provided 50 billion kilometers of turn-by-turn directions, the equivalent of 130,000 trips to the moon, 334 trips to the sun, 10 trips to Neptune or 0.005 light years! When getting to your destination matters most, Google Maps for Android will get you there:




A new look for Navigation on Android 4.0+ phones 
In today’s release of Google Maps 6.5 for Android we’ve redesigned the Navigation home screen in Android 4.0+ to make it easier to enter a new destination or select from recent and favorite locations by swiping left or right.

Left: New Navigation home screen   Right: Navigation in Google Maps for Android

Crisper, faster maps for high pixel density devices
If your device has a high pixel density screen, such as those on Galaxy Nexus, Galaxy S II, Droid Razr and others, you’ll now get higher resolution map tiles that take better advantage of the pixels-per-inch on your screen. The result is a crisper, less cluttered map that is easier to read:

Left: Previous style Right:New style in Google Maps 6.5 for Android

Compare our new map on the right to the previous map on the left. The road network is easier to see, less obstructed by labels, and has more color contrast. At more zoomed-in levels, you’ll notice a more controlled amount of maps labels to avoid cluttering the map and blocking out street names. The new style also helps maps react faster to panning, zooming and twisting. 

You'll start seeing the new style as you navigate around new areas on the map; however, you can see these changes immediately by clearing your cache from the Maps settings. 

Pick your preferred public transit mode and route option
Google Maps 6.5 for Android now lets you choose to prioritize a particular transit mode (such as the bus or subway) and route option (like taking the recommended route, one with fewer transfers or one with less walking). Whether you just need to get somewhere as fast as possible, or you want to avoid the risk of a missed connection or you prefer not to tire your legs, you can get the transit directions that best suit you. Transit directions and schedules are available for 475 cities around the world.

To start using Google Maps 6.5 for Android, download the update from Google Play. Learn more about how to use other great features of Google Maps for Android on the redesigned Google Maps YouTube channel that has 12 new videos available today. 

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Google worlds art projects how to use the site

South African rock designs. Brazilian street graffiti. Australian aboriginal art. Today we’re announcing a major expansion of the Google Art Project. From now on, with a few simple clicks of a finger, art lovers around the world will be able to discover not just paintings, but also sculpture, street art and photographs from 151 museums in 40 countries.



Since we introduced the Art Project last year, curators, artists and viewers from all over the globe have offered exciting ideas about how to enhance the experience of collecting, sharing and discovering art. Institutions worldwide asked to join the project, urging us to increase the diversity of artworks displayed. We listened.

The original Art Project counted 17 museums in nine countries and 1,000 images, almost all paintings from Western masters. Today, the Art Project includes more than30,000 high-resolution artworks, with Street View images for 46 museums, with more on the way. In other words, the Art Project is no longer just about the Indian student wanting to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It is now also about the American student wanting to visit the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi.

The expanded Art Project embraces all sizes of institutions, specializing in art or in other types of culture. For example, you can take a look at the White House in Washington, D.C., explore the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar, and continue the journey to the Santiniketan Triptych in the halls of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Delhi. In the United States alone, some 29 partners in 16 cities are participating, ranging from excellent regional museums like the Gibbes Museum of Artin Charleston, South Carolina to top notch university galleries such as the SCAD museum of art in Savannah, Georgia.

Here are a few other new things in the expanded Art Project that you might enjoy:

• Using completely new tools, called Explore and Discover, you can find artworks by period, artist or type of artwork, displaying works from different museums around the world.
• Google+ and Hangouts are integrated on the site, enabling you to create even more engaging personal galleries.
• Street View images are now displayed in finer quality. A specially designed Street View “trolley” took 360-degree images of the interior of selected galleries which were then stitched together, enabling smooth navigation of more than 385 rooms within the museums. You can also explore the gallery interiors directly from withinStreet View in Google Maps.
• We now have 46 artworks available with our “gigapixel” photo capturing technology, photographed in extraordinary detail using super high resolution so you can study details of the brushwork and patina that would be impossible to see with the naked eye.
• An enhanced My Gallery feature lets you select any of the 30,000 artworks—along with your favorite details—to build your own personalized gallery. You can add comments to each painting and share the whole collection with friends and family. (It’s an ideal tool for students.)

The Art Project is part of our efforts to bringing culture online and making it accessible the widest possible audience. Under the auspices of the Google Cultural Institute, we’re presenting high-resolution images of the Dead Sea Scrolls, digitizing the archives of famous figures such as Nelson Mandela, and creating 3D models of18th century French cities. Our launch ceremony was held this morning at the Musee d'Orsay in Paris:



For more information and future developments, follow the Art Project on Google+. Together with the fantastic input from our partners from around the world, we’re delighted to have created a convenient, fun way to interact with art—a platform that we hope appeals to students, aspiring artists and connoisseurs alike.

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