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With Google Glass app 'Winky,' a good picture is just a blink away

Are you winking at me or taking a picture? With Winky, a new Google Glass app, it may be hard to tell the difference. 

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Google
With the 'Winky' app, Google Glass users will be able to snap photos with a simple blink of the eye.
  • By Matthew Shaer

A developer named Mike DiGiovanni has published the source code for "Winky," a Google Glass app that will allow users to take a picture by snapping one eye shut. Not that you'll be able to get your hands on it right away – Google Glass itself probably won't go into wide release until 2014, at the earliest. Still, as one of the first crop of Google Glass apps, Winky shows us what might be done with Google's next-gen spectacles. 

"Winking lets you lifelog with little to no effort. I've taken more pictures today than I have the past 5 days thanks to this," DiGiovanni wrote on his Google+ page. "Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where I've been."

At this point you're probably picturing an army of Google Glass-wearing people wandering around the streets of your city, blinking wildly as they take pictures of everything they see. Kind of terrifying!

But as Marcus Wohlsen writes in a smart piece over at Wired, you shouldn't worry too much about privacy, because it's unlikely Google Glass is ever going to be as ubiquitous as, say, the iPhone. 

"Google Glass fails to acknowledge that walking around with a camera mounted on the side of your face at all times makes you look dorky," Mr. Wohlsen writes. "Think of the Bluetooth headset: it’s a really sensible way to use your phone without having to take it out of your pocket – so sensible that there’s really no reason not to keep that headset in your ear most of the time. But you don’t, do you?" 

The idea of wearing computerized spectacles, in of itself, is not the problem. Instead, the issue is with these particular glasses, which are clunky and conspicuous. They look like something out of a bad science-fiction movie. Style 'em up, shrink that camera/computer housing, and then we might be interested in picking up a pair. Until then, we'll stick with our 3-year-old convenience store aviators. 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut.

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