ALAMEDA, Calif. — As shopping experiences go, this one is about as out there as the product being purchased.
Sitting at a table inside a sun-streaked decommissioned air traffic control tower overlooking San Francisco Bay, Krystal Liu, 22, slowly lifts the lid off a big lily-white box and shrieks.
"Wow, it's so … beautiful," Liu says as she ogles her titanium-and-white-plastic Google Glass, a $1,500 graduation-timed gift that she plans to take on her summer travels to Tibet and China. "My phone is always glued to my hand, so maybe using this will give me an extra one. This is a new chapter in technology."
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It's certainly a new chapter for Google. After making its name and fortune in search and software, the California titan is using Glass to leap into both the hardware and retail space
Some 10,000 Glass Explorers — winners of an online contest who agreed to pay list price — receive the cyborg-like apparatus over the course of this summer, while the rest of the world comes on line in 2014.
Besides being first on their respective blocks with a futuristic wearable computer, Explorers provide feedback to engineers largely through comments collected via an online community dedicated to Glass pioneers.
Google is going to great lengths to ensure that its first consumer marketing effort is a winning one. In New York, Explorers are introduced to Glass by trained guides in an airy Chelsea penthouse buzzing with activity and high-end catering. In Los Angeles, the exclusive scene repeats itself in Google's sleek Venice Beach offices.
USA TODAY recently was invited to attend the Bay Area Glass Basecamp. A few dozen newbie Explorers were ferried over from San Francisco to this former naval air base and shipyard to drink champagne, eat organic boar sandwiches and slip on their personal looking glass to the future.
"People say manufacturing is dead in America, but we wanted to hold our event here where planes flew and ships were built to show that this country can do it again, and Glass is an example of that," says senior program manager Emily Ma. "We're not selling a device as much as we're connecting people. And that starts here."
The Explorers on hand have different backgrounds but share a passion for technology. Some hope to use the product in their professional lives, while others simply want a hands-free way to share photos and videos with friends. And all seem impressed by the VIP treatment that accompanies this kickoff experience.
"My friends and I all pay attention to packaging and design, and while we love what Apple does, this almost seems better than Apple," says Magda Schoeneich, 30, a New Yorker who flew west just for this event. "I expected it to be bulkier and more fragile, but it's solid and very intuitive."
THE WOW-FACTOR PLAYBOOK
By design. Google looks to have been highlighting pages from the Steve Jobs wow-factor playbook in conjuring Glass, from its all-recycled packaging to its minimalist presentation.
Once unwrapped, Glass is glimpsed under a sheet of translucent velum paper. Peel that back and Glass is revealed, nestled inside a cozy cavern with simple labels and arrows pointing to key features. Remove Glass and one layer down sits a microfiber pouch that took ages to source from a green Japanese manufacturer. Nearby is a power cable and plug crafted in a way that the user can connect the two correctly without looking.
There is a distinct boutique-purchase vibe to this event, one that trickles down to colors. Glass comes in five hues, but please don't use words like blue or orange. Glass guides are instructed to employ the appropriate names: shale, sky, cotton, tangerine and charcoal.
"I had never thought about a wearable computer before this project," says Google's Isabelle Olsson, who leveraged years of industrial design experience to guide Glass. "But quickly our goals became clear. Create an object of desire. Light, simple, and then make the technology go away."
Glass was born three years ago at Google X, a secret lab whose best-known spawn is the company's self-driving car. The first iteration was a pair of ugly white plastic frames with circuit boards and transparent prisms lashed to its temples and bridge respectively. But it evolved quickly into a comparatively streamlined device that does its best to keep the wearer from looking like a Borg extra from Star Trek.
The right temple does the heavy lifting, powering an operating system that allows as-yet limited access to the Web (think iPhone before developers inundated the market with apps) and powers a 5-megapixel camera capable of shooting bursts of 720p video (capturing images hands-free is a leading lure of this tech toy).
"I'm a cyclist, so it's great to be able to make a call (when Glass is tethered to a phone), see my texts or get navigation without my hands coming off the handle bars," says Steve Lee, Glass's product manager.
Lee describes Glass as providing consumers with a "glancing experience" meant for quick updates and communications, and as such is a supplement to, rather than a replacement for, other devices.
"You'll keep your other screens, but this is something that adds an element of ease to our lives," he says. "In time, we'd love for people to think, 'Why would I want dumb glasses? I want smart ones.'"
Designer Olsson took Glass skiing this past winter. "It helped me teach my mom," she says. "I'd film her from behind, then on the chair lift up she'd put on my Glass and watch what she was doing."
New Yorker Schoeneich works in strategy for Johnson & Johnson and in her spare time is a ballroom dancer. She sees applications for Glass in both worlds.
As a researcher looking into children's seizures, she says a patient wearing Glass can record an episode that, in turn, can provide scientists with a personal view of the experience. But it's the thought of using Glass while dancing that makes her eyes light up.
"I always wanted to see and really feel what the dancer was seeing and feeling, and I think recording while you dance will bring you closer to that," she says.
BACKPACKING WITH GLASS
University of California-Berkeley graduate Liu is keen to use Glass on her back-country travels, though she admits she'll likely "have to come up with an elevator pitch to explain to people in these remote places what I'm wearing," she says with a laugh. "I'm not sure they'll understand though."
Liu adds that she's read about privacy concerns surrounding Glass, namely that wearers will be able to photograph and film undetected (although Glass does require a physical or vocal prompt to do either). But her response is a shrug.
"If you're going to do something in public these days, you better think about it first because there are likely security cameras around already," she says.
Also preferring to set Glass' cultural implications aside is Texan Grant Heimbach, 28, who rolled into Basecamp with orders from his Austin scientific-instrument company to hop the first plane home so staff engineers could start dissecting his prized purchase.
"We see this as a paradigm shift," he says, sipping Champagne as the sun sets into the Pacific behind him. "It's like the Wild West right now, like iPhone before anyone knew what it could really do. So we just want to be on the frontier."
Not that his Glass will live at work; he's already got plans to show it off to friends on walks through town, his sunglasses visor accessory clipped solidly in place.
"I've only had it on 10 minutes now, but I'm already comfortable with it," he says. "They feel like my pair of Ray-Bans. I don't notice that I'm wearing anything different."
A few tables down, software engineer Tony Guntharp of Half Moon Bay, Calif., is brushing his right index finger across Glass' right temple.
A burly, brainy man who dives as a hobby, Guntharp requested to be an Explorer so he could see if Glass could be adapted to serve as a visual window into the actions of a radio-controlled submersible for which he is currently writing code.
But he, too, looks forward to the device cutting back on the heads-down, thumb-numbing, keystroke-intensive experience that is the modern smartphone.
"I sit in front of monitors all day coding, but I inevitably get pulled away by my phone, answering a text or call from my wife or a friend," he says, shaking his head. "With Glass, maybe I can keep doing what I really want to be doing."
Whether Glass lives up to its cutting-edge hype only time and consumer tastes will tell. For the moment, the self-selected Basecamp crew who ponied up $1,500 to have the latest and greatest bling from the world's top tech minds feels Google has justified both their expense and expectations.
Says Glass Explorer Schoeneich: "I feel like I just bought the Gucci of technology."
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