Much of the current applications of Google Glass revolve around navigation, displaying real-time data, or some form of augmented reality. But a group of rather imaginative students from UC Berkeley has just proven that the hi-tech eyewear can just be as useful inside the house, provided you choose to keep wearing it indoors.

Utilizing oft ignored Infrared technology and a few additional components, the group was able to setup a system that establishes connections with various household appliances and control them via Glass’ own touch-based gestures.

On paper, the setup is quite simple. An IR emitter, which sends out a unique ID, is attached to Glass and a receiver with a micro-controller is then connected to the appliances to be controlled. Simply looking at the direction of the receiver to initiate a connection and a few taps and swipes confirms it and controls the appliance. The setup even has provisions for cases where there are multiple receivers in the line of sight. LED lights indicate connection status, like steady red for out of range, steady blue for in range, and a blinking blue for currently connected. In case of multiple possible connections, glass wearers will also have a choice of which appliance to connect to. The video below explains the setup in a bit more detail without getting bogged down in technical terms.

In practice, the whole set up needs quite a bit of materials, such as the IR emitter and Xbee micro-controllers, which will require a bit of know-how in getting things to work together. Still, this is an interesting real world application Google and Glasssware developers could take note of in future apps or iterations of the Glass hardware.

VIA: Engadget

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