Some people may believe that Google's planned release of Project Glass to a small set of third party developers means that a full product launch is just around the corner (today I heard someone postulate about 1 year from now).
I was thinking this project is in its infancy and it would be several years before we were likely to see even a hobbled version released to the general public. This article at MIT's Technology Review by Farhad Manjoo, where he interviews Thad Starner of Google, solidifies my thinking:
At the moment, the biggest stumbling block may be the input device—Starner's miniature keyboard requires a learning curve that many consumers would find daunting
That is, it would fail utterly if it shipped with a small keyboard for input so...
The best input system eventually could be your voice, though it could take a few years to perfect that technology.
That statement resembles the ever present claim that in five years the voice recognition problem will be solved for general computing input. It will happen, but it will be slow in coming.
One last bit:
His tiny display is connected to a computer he carries in a messenger bag
So... were the glasses used at Google IO hobbled? Were they not full versions with computer attached or did I miss the attached computer bag on everyone that was wearing the glasses? This leads me to believe that the reason they couldn't demo the glasses doing anything except for photo and video capture was because they weren't full versions. And the sexy demo would have been crushed if they had shown a demo of the glasses attached to a full sized computer to do anything that was actually interesting.
I completely believe this kind of tech is coming and will be generally available some day, but if you're one of the hopeful thinking it's coming next year, you'll be sorely disappointed.