Updated Information I/O: Glass Hardware Specs from Patent:

Google Glass is likely to include a touch-pad, camera, microphone and see-through display all rolled into one to fit on the bridge of your nose.

A patent document submitted to the United States Patents and Trademarks Office gives a few hints about Google Glass' controls, specifications, features and design.

Google Glass is described as a "wearable computing device" in the document, comprising of a see-through display lens with a projector, a camera positioned on the extending side-arm and a touch-pad interface including a keypad.

Apart from the buttons and touch-pad, the glasses will also detect speech commands. Shout out a name of a friend, and it will open your contacts book. Start the engine of your car, and Glass could throw up GPS directions.

Controller

Even cooler is the mention of a "controller" which can determine the wearer's skin tone, hand shape and size based on an image of the wearer's hand.

The user interface for the glasses is located "outside of the field of view of the wearer", which means it is probably located near the temple of the user's head, along one of the arms of the glasses.

The patent, which names Google's David Petrou as the inventor, explains user interaction through an interface that "could be, for example, a touch pad, keypad, an arrangement of buttons, or any combination thereof".

For the sake of imagination, Google says it is considering using "coloured dots" for visual representations.

"Coloured dots may appear in response to physical contact or close proximity with the interface. Further, the dots may create an illusionary effect such that the wearer feels like that the interface is right in front of the wearer," the application reads.

Sources of input data

Some illustrations, which you can see as part of the patent applicationshow that the glasses include a microphone, a keyboard, a camera, and a touch-pad.

Project Glass speech commands can also be used to play videos, open applications, translate sentences heard or spoken, answer questions and convert spoken words to text.

Winter is coming? No problem

It seems like Google Glass is also winter-friendly. Glass will detect the temperature outside and switch to a hands-free mode, in case the user is wearing gloves.

Glass will include "an antenna and transceiver device" for wired/wireless communications between itself and "a remote device or communication network". This could mean 3G and 4G networks, as well as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

This will probably allow connectivity between Glass and phones, tablets or other "wearable computing devices or a server in a communication network".

Via SlashGear

A *slight* waiting game by Apple Re: #RFID technology

The Wall Street Journal profiles Apple's "go-slow" approach to mobile payments. In June, Apple announced the inclusion of a feature called Passbook to iOS 6. Passbook allows users to keep loyalty cards, tickets and coupons in one central app. Passbook, however, does not offer a full payment system which has been a rumored area of research for Apple. 


The Wall Street Journal reveals that this is a very deliberate decision from Apple:

Holding back in mobile payments was a deliberate strategy, the result of deep discussion last year. Some Apple engineers argued for a more-aggressive approach that would integrate payments more directly. 

But Apple executives chose the go-slow approach for now. An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment on the decision-making process. Apple's head of world-wide marketing, Phil Schiller, in an interview last month, said that digital-wallet mobile-payment services are "all fighting over their piece of the pie, and we aren't doing that."

According to the Wall Street Journal's sources, a small group within Apple was reported to have been investigating a new service that would embed payment methods into the iPhone or even build a new payment network. Discussions reportedly included Apple facilitating payments with merchants and even all the way to the possibility of Apple to begin acting as a bank. Apple also considered simpler wallet app possibilities or working with existing middlemen and taking a small cut of each transaction. 

Meanwhile, the Apple iPhone team had indeed explored NFC communications options in the next iPhone. Various concerns included impact on battery life, security, vendor adoption and customer satisfaction. 

Ultimately, Passbook is said to be the current compromise while Apple presumably waits to see how the mobile payment market matures.