Borg

Slowly but surely Google Glass is becoming more presentable and fashionable to wear. While earlier models may have had the fashion police go crazy, the 4 new prototypes does a better job of hiding the fact that you’ve got a camera strapped to your head. Still, until the camera becomes less noticeable, you run the risk of being mistaken for a borg drone.

Google is releasing four different frames that can both fit the Google Glass hardware and accommodate perscription lenses. Glass is still limited to the small group of people who have been accepted into the “Explorer Program” (a wider consumer launch is planned for later this year), so while it’s good that these frames make Glass usable for more people, it’s not yet available to all.

All four frames are available today for $225. That’s alternately pricey or reasonable, depending on how you buy glasses, but any potential buyers will also need to spend $1,499 on Glass itself — which is to say it’s likely only those with a decent amount of disposable income would be interested anyway. If you’ve already bought Glass, you can just buy the frames and attach your current device. Unfortunately the new frames does not have the new version of Google Glass yet, its the same technology with a new frame.

Google Glass gets 4 New Frames:

Google Glass 1 Google Glass 4 Google Glass 3 Google Glass 2

Will these new frames make Glass more socially acceptable, or at least make it seem less oddly futuristic? We will have to wait and find out. There’s no getting around the fact that you have a camera strapped to your head, but at least it’s attached to a piece of wearable technology that’s been around for hundreds of years instead of a half-dozen months.

Lead Glass designer Isabelle Olsson  is pretty relaxed when the weirdness of Glass comes up — it’s obviously the most common question she has to face when talking about the product. “It’s interesting to see the parallels with headphones,” she says. “The fact that people walk around with these huge headphones is kind of crazy, in a way. But now you don’t think about it as technology, you think about it as something that delivers music to you.”

What do you think? Ready to buy a pair?