Winky for Google Glass Lets You Snap a Pic With the Wink Of an Eye
A handful of bold developers are trail blazing the path for awesome and unique apps for Google Glass, and we’re particularly excited for an app called Winky. This particular utility allows you to take photos with Google Glass by simply winking an eye.
Before Winky, users would have to say “OK glass, take a picture” in order to snap a photo from the first-person point-of-view. Now, Winky allows users to instantly capture a photo in the moment without having to say a verbal command.
The developer behind Winky did release the source code in an effort to illustrate how it was created and to ensure users that the app doesn’t use private data in a harmful way. If you’re interested in installing Winky you will have to build it yourself from the source since there isn’t an APK available for it yet. Here’s what the developer Mike DiGiovanni had to say in his own words about Winky:
I just released Winky, a way to take pictures with a wink on Google glass. This was a fun project that involved a bit of decompiling of GlassHome to see what was going on. I discovered a few other interesting tidbits that I’ll be looking into as I get time.
Winking really changes things. You might not think it’s hard to say “Ok, Glass Take a Picture” or even just tap a button. But it’s a context switch that takes you out of the moment, even if just for a second. Winking lets you lifelog with little to no effort. I’ve taken more pictures today than I have the past 5 days thanks to this. Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where I’ve been.
The big technical hurdle turned out to simply be that at least one spot on Glass does some checking against the build type and disables the wink gesture completely if it’s a user build and it ever detects a wink. I was able to get around this by intercepting the wink with a higher priority than anything else.
To provide a little more clarity, this is being released as pure Android source code. It’s intended to be compiled and run as an APK. At this point, I’m figuring most of you guys with Glass know how to do thisI’m trying to stay away from providing just APKs since there may be personal information that is less protected than on your average Android device and I don’t want there to be any questions about whether I’m touching your data. This is different from the typical Glassware that the NY Times or Path provide.
Grab the source code at https://github.com/kaze0/winky
Winky is just the beginning of apps that we’ll see as a result of the hard working Glass Explorers and if this is an indication of what’s in store, then we can’t wait to see what else these guys will come up with.
