Harbingers Of Apps To Come, Here Are Four Google Glass For Fashion Hacks We Saw At Disrupt

With an abnormally high population of Google Glass owners in one convention center and ShopStyle’s API open to participants at the TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon, it should come as no surprise that a number of hacks combined the two.

Between the use of Glass at fashion weeks past and present and magazines’ inclusion of the technology in photoshoots, the precedent (often kitschy but not always) is there. Glass makes every bit of sense for fashion apps, as it has the potential to make the physical world shoppable online. So let’s go out on a limb here and say that these hacks are just the first of many.

I caught up with the groups after Disrupt to talk about their hacks, all of which treat the Glass shopping experience differently.

StyleZapper

Yosun Chang, a developer with experience in augmented reality, has been working on Android apps for Google Glass since she received her pair in July. StyleZapper, one of two hacks Chang worked on at Disrupt, uses a platform she created called GyroFire, which uses Glass’s gyroscope to point a crosshair as the user moves her head and “fires” with a tap of the sidepad.

“It’s easy to move your head up and down, so I hacked together a weird new way to browse for clothing or any other online shopping,” Chang said. “You have a wall that you might consider choosing from, and instead of looking down at the screen, you’re just moving your head a little bit to point the cursor at the item you want to shoot to buy or something. It’s kind of experimenting with what Glass can do.”

Using head motion to navigate on Google Glass is intuitive, she said, since the device aligns with a natural gesture. Of course, the possible uses of GyroFire are much broader than a shopping app, and Chang said she is thinking about developing a simple shooting game called Target Practice.

“I like to compare it to five to seven years ago. If people were to tell you that you’ll be getting all your messages on a 3