How Google Glass Could Be Your Smart Home Command Center...

If Google Glass blossoms into the everyday wearable of Google’s wildest dreams, we’ll have every incentive to keep the smart visor glued to our faces all the live long day. Glass is handy for travel, commuting and generally being out and about, and it could also mean big things for that nebulous future we’ve collectively dubbed “the connected home.” 

This realm roughly extends from just beyond the threshold of our smart-locked front doors through our automated thermostat-rigged walls on into the kitchen—a potential smart gizmo playground—to that epicenter of home life turned tech marketing cliche, the living room. 

Few would argue that such smart homes aren't one of the next big things. Homes in the U.S. already boast over half a billion internet-connected devices. Many of these are designed to work with smartphones and tablets, which may be approaching a saturation point, but a whole new class of gadget is about to barge in the front door. 

And Glass? Well, Glass is with us all of the time, in this hypothetical future scenario at least. So let's play along.

Glass As A Command Center

We don't surrender our smartphones as we cross into our homes—in fact, home smartphone usage shows quite the opposite behavior. For the connected-home relevance of Google Glass, that's a good thing. Glass is the perfect smartphone proxy. In fact, one of my favorite places to wear Glass is in my home office. It keeps me focused on the task at hand by freeing my mind from the digital itch to check email and have my attention whisked off by the ever-spinning social carousel. 

Smart home automation company Revolv clearly saw the potential for Glass at home too, releasing an early walkthrough of its Google Glass app, which replicates the features in its Revolv for smartphones. 

Other home-tech innovators should take note, particularly as Glass picks up steam with a wide consumer release and future hardware updates. Revolv has the right idea, tying an array of smart home devices into a single cloud controller (for $299, it's worth mentioning). 

The Contextual Home

With its heavily modified Android guts, Glass is essentially a vessel for Google Now, Google's eerily accurate software effort to serve up the information we need before we even know we need it. Triggered by cues like time and location, Glass knows when we're at work—it happily lets us know how long it'll take to get there in traffic—and it knows when we're back home too. 

It's not hard to imagine the possibilities with all that sensor data and the geofences that Google Now (or Apple's Reminders) use as cues. Wearing Glass, you walk into the kitchen and are met with the relevant apps—Allthecooks' recipe list, for instance. Settle down on the sofa, and Glass conjures up a directory of the night's best TV listings.

Or say those listings were culled from a not-yet-hatched bit of Glassware, such as Netflix, Xbox or even a proprietary smart TV app for Glass. You could discover and navigate shows and movies just by swiping and tapping Glass, all via your home Wi-Fi—similar to how mobiles already work with Chromecast. 

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