Rapid prototyping is a method used to accelerate the innovation process. At TEDYouth 2012, Tom Chi explains how this method was used to create one of Google’s newest inventions, Google Glass.
Tom Chi outlines this method into three rules:
Find the quickest path.
“Using this set up, within one day we were already able to start having the experience of what it looks like to have digital things overlaid on our physical world.”
Just do.
“Ultimately, what [this] taught us is, we probably shouldn’t have this in the product. We learned a lot of things about the social awkwardness of it.”
Use quick materials.
Chi utilized clay to mimic the weight of the glasses, and discovered nuances about peoples’ perception of weight: the same amount of clay placed on the nose felt heavier than when placed behind the ear. Using clay, Chi learned what could have taken days to prototype in under an hour.
Project Glass is a research and development program by Google to develop an augmented reality head-mounted display (HMD). Project Glass products would display information in smartphone-like format, would be hands-free, and could interact with the Internet via natural language voice commands. Interested in learning more? Check out more glass projects here.