The new Google Glass technology is here and it is becoming quite controversial indeed. The glasses that overlay computer information into your field of view and are capable of taking photographs are something that will be possibly used for invading the privacy of members of the public. I would not want to use Google Glass myself; I think that they look quite strange. They do allow you to overlay map information onto your vision whilst you are driving, this would be better than glancing down to a GPS screen and taking your eyes off the road. This could prevent accidents; but time will tell whether this is the case in reality. They also allow users to take photographs by saying “Take a picture”. It is that easy. Everyone has a mobile `phone that they carry everywhere; this is just another device that will replace the ubiquitous iPhone or Galaxy Nexus `phone and allow hands-free recording of what you see whilst you are walking around. They run the Linux kernel with extra code added to run the Google Glass functions; this is good for the open-source community as the source is available and Google are giving back to the open-source community.
See the capabilities of the Google Glass technology here: http://www.google.com/glass/start/what-it-does/.
The kernel source code for the Google Glass device may be downloaded here: https://code.google.com/p/google-glass-kernel-source/downloads/detail?name=kernel-glass-XE04.0-RC06.tar.xz 65.7 megabytes. Someone will have fun picking through this code to see what has been changed. Using the diff(1) utility will work very well indeed for this. All you need to do is find out what kernel version this is and see what has been added and changed over the vanilla source code. Thank Google for using open source code and not implementing a closed source solution. It will be interesting if you could install custom code on this device and make it do other things. The hardware and software hackers will have a fun time with Glass.