Google’s (GOOG) Project Glass is one of the more intriguing gadget concepts that we’ve seen in recent years, but it does come with a fairly big catch — that is, wearing Google Glass makes you look pretty dorky. Researcher Nickolay Lamm, best known for his pre-release renders of the iPad mini and his futuristic iPhone design concepts, has tried his hand at making Glass look more fashionable by designing it more like a pair of neckband headphones that wrap around the back of your head. In this way, Lamm’s design puts most of Glass’s computing power out of sight and only leaves the tiny display lens and camera at the front of your head.
“The purpose of these concepts is to show how Google Glass can be designed to look normal,” explains Lamm, who was commissioned to create the new Glass renders by Mark Pearson from MyVoucherCodes.co.uk. “Right now, Google Glass looks odd because it has an entire glasses frame for just one piece of glass. I feel Steve Jobs would cringe at this type of asymmetry in design. To make matters worse, it has the bulky hardware on the side of the face. Before Google Glass can be adopted by the masses, it has to look normal. It can look normal by clearing up the face from as much technology as possible, or by turning Google Glass into a normal looking set of glasses.”
For good measure, Lamm has also installed a small green light on the front of his Glass renders that indicates when the headset is taking a picture or recording video so people are always aware when someone is filming them with their Glass headset. Be sure to check out the full photo gallery of Lamm’s Glass renders, which is linked above.
