Not how you will look in Glass. (Photo: In.com)

Though Google Glass makes even models look vaguely dorky, a host of celebs are lining up to try them out. Stanford computer science doctoral student Andrej Karpathy analyzed the winners of the #ifihadglass contest and pulled them into a neat little table organized by follower count. The result makes it super easy to see which celebrities were chosen as part of the lucky 8,000 winners of a Glass explorers kit.

The hip hop/R&B crowd is well-represented by Soulja Boy, he of recent hack fame, and beloved "Boy Is Mine" singer Brandy. Neil Patrick Harris also made the cut, as did driverless car enthusiast Newt Gingrich. Wonder what he thinks about wearing Glass and driving?

Your favorite bars are about to get a lot more cyborg-friendly: Local NYC tech celebs cleaned up too, including Foursquare's Dennis Crowley, Foodspotting co-founder Soraya Dorabi and Reuters social media editor Anthony de Rosa.

So are these celebs die-hard Glass fans, or are they just plain lucky? New York Mag writes that an outside firm was responsible for picking the winners, and may have used a random number generator (so not Google-y!) to pick the winners. That explains why someone who tweeted “#ifihadGlass, I’d throw it at your face ._.” ended up getting picked--and why Google started rescinding offers almost as soon as it doled them out.

Don't worry, Soulja Boy! We're sure you'll get to keep your pair, even if it doesn't run Windows.

HMMMM. (Photo: screencap)

Guess we finally have an honest answer to the question posed by #IfIHadGlass. The Next Web reports that this very minute over at Ebay, bidding is climbing steadily upward on a product listing for what purports to be a pair of the futuristic specs. Someone who claims he was chosen as "an early adapter for Google's upcoming release" says he'll sell his pair (unopened and in the color of your choice) to the highest bidder.

The price has already skyrocketed from $1,500 to $15,900, proving once and for all that some people have far more money than patience or common sense.

Come on, folks: Do you really want to pull the hardware equivalent of buying a tragically busted knock-off wedding dress? This is basic stuff, like how you shouldn't spend $200 on an "iPad" at a gas station that's actually just a mirror.

The product listing promises, in determinedly lower case fashion:

i will be personally attending and picking up my pair in either Los Angeles, or New York at Google's Project Glass launch event, which will take place some time after Feburary 27th. as for what colors will actually be available, will vary, if i am offered a choice, I will choose the color of your choice (see listing picture for variants). my cost to buy my glasses is $1,500 (USD), so obviously thats where ive started the auction at. Project Glass will be shipped with Insurance at my expence, and signature upon delivery, so please use an address you can accept delivery in person.

If you're tempted, it's worth taking a moment to ask yourself whether this is really a chance you want to take, lest you open your package to find a plastic widget glued to some fashion frames from Claire's. Most glaringly, the #IfIHadGlass contest isn't due to end until sometime today, so we're pretty sure there's no winners yet.

We've reached out to the seller, one "bla7kcat," and will update if we receive any more information.

Even if these are the real deal, do you really want to blow the cost of remodeling your kitchen on a product you'll probably be able to buy before the end of the year, anyway? Unless of course you're someone like Larry Ellison, in which case we say #YOLO.

Update: 

Just kidding, Ebay has now removed the listing. It's unclear why, but the Daily Dot speculates the posting violated Ebay's presale rules.

(Screencap: YouTube)

Google announced a campaign this morning that would allow non-developers to score a pair of Google Glass by tweeting a missive about what you'd do with the specs along with the hashtag #ifihadglass. The whole thing quickly devolved into a bunch of bad Twitter jokes. But techies, it seems, are pretty desperate to get their hands on Glass.

First, we have tech writer Jason Kincaid, who made a music video about how badly he wants Glass. If he doesn't win, at least now the Internet knows what a magical singing voice he has.

Business Insider writer Nich Carlson wants to use it to make "better, experience based slideshows." NEW MEDIA JACKPOT.

https://twitter.com/nichcarlson/status/304213322637660162

There were the suckups:

https://twitter.com/ajt/status/304233891315732481

https://twitter.com/nickbilton/status/304282064851726336

The impossibly topical entries:

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304260383093452800

https://twitter.com/spencerchen/status/304289259341369344

https://twitter.com/alexismadrigal/status/304279568301301760

The geniuses:

https://twitter.com/joshgreenman/status/304299102353649664

https://twitter.com/BarryTheArtGuy/status/304312879283322881

The humblebraggers:

https://twitter.com/jeffjarvis/status/304308390925049856

https://twitter.com/Natkinns/status/304313587592224768

And of course, the doubters.

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304300046164324352

https://twitter.com/bendreyfuss/status/304304671449808898

https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/304281088258359296

As for Betabeat, we made the completely rational and reasonable offer of our left kidney, but are still waiting for a response from Eric Schmidt, chairman of Google/Babies.

Only models look this good in Glass. (Photo: Google)

Attention fellow wannabe cyborgs: Google Glass can soon be ours! As long as you have $1,500 and are willing to use Google Plus. So, ya know, there's that.

In a new video, the notoriously tightlipped Project X team released some fresh details about Google's attempt at wearable technology. The video, which--yes--includes skydiving, shows users saying "OK glass" to get the attention of the system before sending it commands, such as "Take a picture," "Record a video" and "Say 'delicious' in Thai." The system also sends speech-to-text messages and livestreams video.

Not to sound like a total nerd, but it looks prettttty awesome.

Google also announced a campaign for "bold, creative individuals" who want to get in on the Glass preordering phase. Interested participants have to tweet (or post to Google Plus) a less than 50 character message with the hashtag #ifihadglass. Of course, you still have to pay $1,500 for the developer's kit and somehow make it to New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco to pick them up, but it's totally worth it for all that footage you'll record of you eating, right?

Perhaps whoever wins the #ifihadglass contest can help Google make the device look slightly less bulky and/or like glasses your high school science teacher wore. Also: maybe we can get them in pink?

(Photo: Road to VR)

A friend of Betabeat's recently tried on Project Glass, Google's hotly anticipated alternate reality glasses product, but was dismayed to find that because he had to take of his glasses in order to use the prototype, it was difficult to see when actually using it.

Special versions, we reasoned, would have to be constructed in order to appease our four-eyed friends: either prototypes that can be placed overtop a user's glasses, or ones that can incorporate prescription lenses.

A snap posted to the Road to Virtual Reality blog appears to have our answer: the photo, taken of a man in NYC donning a pair of Google Glasses, shows that the unit has prescription lenses, meaning that us four eyes won't be left out of the augmented reality trend. Hurrah!

Now the Google X team just needs to come up with a prototype that doesn't look like a nerd attacked your face.

(Photo: Google+)

A few days ago we lamented that even the models strutting down the runway at Diane von Furstenberg's fashion week show looked vaguely dorky in Google Glasses. Now, a video compiled from the footage taken by the models has been assembled and uploaded to YouTube. It's the first official video made entirely from clips recorded by a slew of real Google Glasses prototypes.

Prior to this mini documentary, entitled "DVF: Through Glass," there was a 15 second video recorded by one set of glasses worn by someone bouncing on a trampoline. And let's not forget the exhilarating live skydiving demo at Google I/O. But this seems to be the first time a documentary has been recorded with the glasses by people outside the Google family.

Raw footage of Ms. von Furstenberg overlayed with funky music is spliced together with backstage images of employees prepping for the fashion show. The 3 minute 50 second video pulses with a voyeuristic undertone, the point-of-view shot giving it an almost otherworldly feeling, almost like you're spying on someone. At one point, a model's hair even begins to eclipse the frame. It's both fascinating and unsettling.

"All the footage you see here was filmed using only Glass, Google's latest technology that lets you capture moments from a unique, new perspective," reads the video description. "See what happens when fashion and technology come together like you've never seen before."

The best part was undoubtedly seeing through the eyes of models as they take to the runway. It was almost like we were there ourselves, minus the perilously tall and undoubtedly uncomfortable high heels.

Correction: A prior version of this article misstated that this was the first ever video shot with Google Glass. Our apologies to the Google nuts out there.

Sergey Brin continued his whirlwind tour of "Look, wearable tech is totally swag!" by teaming up with fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. DVF published a series of photos to her Google+ page yesterday showing models from her runway show donning color matching Project Glass prototypes. Models recorded video on the glasses while walking the runway, which DVF plans to turn into a short documentary that will debut on Thursday.

As it turns out, even beautiful models look a little silly in wearable tech--though we do hope when Project Glass hits consumer markets in 2014, they're offered in that pretty salmon color.

Mr. Brin reportedly got a front row seat at the show, and even took a victory lap around the runway when it was over. It's no skydiving, but we really hope someone recorded that moment.

Mr. Mann (Photo: EyeTap Blog)

On Monday, a post by University of Toronto professor Steve Mann about an attack he experienced at a Parisian McDonald's made it to the front page of Hacker News. In an emotional retelling, Mr. Mann recounted how, while on a family vacation in Paris, a trio of McDonald's employees physically harassed and abused him for wearing a pair of computer glasses called "EyeTap Digital Glass," a version of which he's donned since the 1980s.

Apparently accustomed to shifty stares and inappropriately-timed questions, Mr. Mann carries around paperwork from his doctor that outlines the device's functionality, in order to quell any nervousness or dark fascination that might arise while traveling. Of course, stuffing your face with french fries at a fast food doesn't usually require furnishing medical paperwork.

The eyeglass system Mr. Mann was wearing is permanently attached and can't be removed without special tools. It includes a literal retina display that turns your eye into a camera. As such, the eye that uses the display has the appearance of  a digital glass eye, and also has the added benefit of making Mr. Mann look like a badass member of the Borg.

According to the blog post, three McDonald's employees attempted to rip the display off of his face, and ripped up the medical paperwork that accompanied it. The motivation here is supposedly that you aren't allowed to take pictures in a McDonalds, and the employees became angry when they thought Mr. Mann was recording them.

Indeed, Mr. Mann did snap photos of his alleged assailants. But ironically it was the employees messing with the device that caused it to record. Typically, the device only stores image temporarily. But, as Mr. Mann told Fox News, "[the person who allegedly assaulted Mann] was the person who took all the pictures in the last hour or so, by causing the computer to be broken.” Oops.

The bizarre event immediately ricocheted across the tech sphere. Fox News called Mr. Mann a "makeshift human cyborg" and ran an especially Matrix-looking photo of him wearing the eye glass and a gold, netted brain reading device attached to his skull. "First attack on cyborg," cried an ominous headline on the singularity futurist blog Kurzweil AI,  implying that this will be the first of many violent offenses against our transhuman brethren.

It's hard not to see Mr. Mann’s McDonald’s incident as a portent about the future of wearable computing. With Google claiming that the first version of Project Glass, the company's own augmented reality glasses, will be consumer ready as early as 2014, how the mainstream will react to a new swath of freshly minted cyborgs is a concept that most non-futurists haven't really begun to understand.

At the heart of the issue is the matter of privacy, a basic human right that the openness of the Internet has slowly chiseled away at over the last decade. We eagerly serve up location-encoded data and intimate dispatches about our puny lives, but wearable computing introduces an entirely new problem: How will we deal with the concept that eyeglasses with recording technology could mean we are on stage, 24 hours a day? Will our lives become ever-more performative, the stress that we already feel from being constantly tethered to our mobile devices amplified by the fact that anyone--at any time--could be watching you?

And what of police information requests, which are already so rampant for things like cell phone data. If the police can subpoena Google to deliver the information from your glasses, you'll never be able to get away with anything. Better luck next time, criminals and chronic masturbators.

The technology that invades our privacy today is largely self-inflicted. Don't want to give Facebook all your personal info? It's as easy as not signing up for an account. With wearable computing, even if you personally opt out, there will always be some other excitedly plugged-in soul near you who is capable of recording your every move.

Perhaps this is what the inexcusably abusive McDonald's employees were thinking when they attacked Mr. Mann. More than likely, though, is that they weren't thinking at all, and simply experiencing a visceral reaction to the unknown. Unable to properly parse their feelings about seeing the "world's first cyborg," they instead resorted to violence, and Mr. Mann suffered for their ignorance.

Before 2013, when Google churns out the clunky "Project Glass" and then Apple inevitably corners the market with a hipper design called iGlass (really, this stuff writes itself), perhaps we need to focus on educating each other about what the future of wearable computing might look like.

There's still one thing about our first encounter with human-on-cyborg violence that's left us scratching our heads: Why was Mr. Mann eating at a McDonald’s in Paris? Quel horror.

(Photo: Olympus)

Bonkers sky-diving demos really have a way of invigorating your competition, don't they? Not long after Google showed the world just what its Project Glass headsets can do, Olympus, the Japanese camera manufacturer, has announced its reentry into wearable computing with a prototype called the MEG4.0.

As The Verge notes, the glasses-mounted heads-up display has Bluetooth connectivity to work with smartphones. It will use Olympus' "proprietary optical technology" to optimize visibility of the world around you. The press release also promises eight hours of battery life (if you put it in "intermittent display mode"--i.e. switching on for 15 seconds every three minutes.) And a built-in accelerometer lets the device respond to the position of the user's head.

The company has been experimenting with head-mounted displays before and working on prototypes since 2005, but it's hard not to notice the timing.

GOOG shouldn't be that worried, however, considering Olympus hasn't figured out a way to work its core competency into the device: The MEG4.0 doesn't appear to include a camera.

(Photo: Game Informer)

The Oatmeal is finally free of Charles Carreon's bizarre legal machinations. Mr. Carreon decided to drop his case against Matthew Inman, who apparently was represented by the EFF. Everything about this was weird. [EFF]

Porn producers are all about Project Glass. We're sure you can guess why. [PC Mag]

Apple is reportedly planning to debut a smaller, cheaper iPad--terrible news for the Nexus 7. [Bloomberg]

Kim Dotcom has a grudge against vice president Joe Biden. [TorrentFreak]

Airport security apparently stole the Nexus Q used at Google I/O. [Dan Ellis]