Sportsbet opens book on Google Glass down under

Local online bookie Sportsbet is taking bets on how much Google's hotly anticipated Google Glass will cost when it comes down under sometime later this year.

According to the bookies, Google will charge between $751 and $1000, which is a favourite at $3.50. Trailing a hairsbreadth behind is a price of between $500 and $750, at $3.75. Naturally, Sportsbet is happy to take your money on this one – and given the device won’t be cheap, having a tech-flutter could be a way of bolstering the piggy bank once they do arrive.

But once you’ve got your hands on them, what will you be able to do with it? Early indications from Google itself point to augmented reality as a major application for the device.

Augmented reality could be, for example, overlays of a specific place – say you were travelling to Paris – with local information. Take a look at the Eiffel Tower, and you’d get a load of statistics about when the tower was built, along with  opening times and potentially a way to book tickets to tour the tower.

Or walking through the Musee d’Orsay, you could have a personal guided tour of the artworks, in your own language.

And given Sportsbet’s interest in Google Glass, it’s conceivable you could have an app laying live odds over anything you wanted to bet on.

Whether Google would actually allow that, however, remains to be seen. One of the key things about Glass applications is that they are heavily heavily restricted in the way they run. Unlike apps on smartphones such as the iPhone, or Android hardware, Glass apps must run on a third party server, and serve their content via encrypted web links.

This third party application serving isn’t quite an outlandish as what it sounds. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he thought the vast majority of apps would run on the web. It wasn’t until several months after the iPhone’s debut that Jobs relented and allowed native apps and, by implication, the app ecosystem users enjoy today.

Along with the hardware, the search engine giant has made some strict rules for developers wanting to write code for the headwear. The key restriction is developers aren’t allowed to show ads to Glass users. Whether this restriction is lifted over time remains to be seen, but it’s important to remember Google derives the majority of its revenue from in-line advertising. It’s possible the company is simply reserving ad rights for itself.

The tech specs of the, erm, specs are also interesting. Google hasn’t indicated what sort of processor Glass is running, but it has said the device has 12 gigabytes of accessible memory, a five megapixel camera, 720p video, Bluetooth, wi-fi and a bone transducer for audio streams. It recharges over micro-USB, and Google said users will get about a day’s use out of them.