Google Glass has mini-games now!

Perhaps the first step towards real mobile augmented reality games, Google has released five demo mini-games for early adopters of the wearable smart phone. If you happen to be one of those early adopters, you can download the games here. The games available are Tennis, Balance, Clay Shooter, Matcher, and Shape Splitter. They are all really simple in their design, but they show off some of the lesser-known technologies and capabilities of Google Glass and how they could be applied to games.

The five games all seem to use voice or head tracking to play, which makes sense considering there’s obviously no direct controller or anything like that. “Shape Splitter”, however, tracks your hand movement to detect AR shapes that you can slice in half, which is pretty neat. Though clearly these games aren’t meant to be final builds, it shows what could possibly be done and spark third-party developers’ interest in designing apps for Google Glass, in fact Google mentions this in the video.

My only thought is why weren’t games developed sooner? It seems only logical to try some sort of gaming on Glass considering the popularity of some mobile games. I don’t think it’ll set the world on fire, it’s hard to tell considering the limited release of Glass so far. I would imagine considering the control scheme that you would look quite silly playing these games. Then again, if you’re wearing Glass at this point in time, you’re bound to look a little odd anyway.

Last Updated: February 3, 2014