Google Glass gets early introduction at UNC

This semester, UNC students have the opportunity to be some of the first people in the country to use Google Glass — a device that won’t be released to the public until the end of this year at the earliest.

Thanks to a contest sponsored by Google, three UNC students won Glass, which is eyeglasses that enable the user to have a first-person experience with a smartphone. Two of the students created the Carolina Glass Explorers Club as a way to share the device with the student body.

The students entered into a competition for Glass that required participants to submit a 5-second video or a 150-character message with the hashtag, “#ifihadglass.”

But after winning Google’s contest, the students still had to pick up the technology in New York and foot the bill for the device — which sophomore Patrick Lung , one of the contest winners, said cost $1,633.

“And then you have the plane flight, and living in New York is not exactly cheap,” he said.

Luckily for them, the professor of their entrepreneurship first-year seminar, Charles Merritt , made an ambitious deal with their class.

“I just said that if anyone in here wins, we’ll find out a way to get it paid for and get (the students) to New York,” Merritt said.

Their trip was paid for by an anonymous donation to UNC’s Center for Entrepreneurial Studies.

Contest winner Pranati Panuganti, a sophomore biology major, said she founded the Carolina Glass Explorers Club this year to start a conversation about the ethics and benefits of wearable technology.

Patrick Lung, who entered a video, said he wanted to create a lending society and offer his device to students who want to write their own code for Glass.

“The University gave us this money, and I feel like we need to give it back,” he said.

Panuganti plans on taking the Glass to schools and hospitals, holding campus outreach events and working with student developers to come up with and code applications.

Nutrition doctoral student Amy Roberts , the third winner of the contest, said she is using the Glass to create a startup company called Healthy Bytes, which aims to develop a Glass application that would create custom diet recommendations for users. She won the contest by entering photographs of her proposed project.

The device also has potential for educational use, Panuganti said.

She said she hopes to develop a Glass application for deaf students that would turn verbal lectures into written ones. She said she wants to create a tool that would allow words to appear in the student’s eye as their professor writes on a class board or presents PowerPoints.

Panuganti said Glass has the capability to allow a professor to use hands-free capabilities to film an experiment or demonstration from his or her perspective and broadcast it to a large lecture hall.

Lung said Glass has the ability to bring people closer together, unlike smartphones, which he said have caused communication to gravitate to impersonal texts.

Lung said developers could seek him out and use the Glass to test out codes.

Google Glass, which looks like mini eyeglases when worn, has caused its student owners to be the subject of stares.

Panuganti said she avoids wearing the glasses in public because of the attention.

“Right when we walked out, there were hordes of people surrounding us. It felt like being a celebrity,” she said.

Roberts said she wears hers in public but is particular about the location.

“Just never wear it in Whole Foods, you’ll be stopped every two feet,” she said.

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