We are opening the interface

We are publishing the interface documentation and a development kit. Fetch a photograph, fetch a recording, trigger a shot — what a developer gets is the same set we use ourselves.

Because we cannot think of everything

People who build hardware share one illusion: that they know how the thing they made is supposed to be used.

But a device worn on your face, that takes photographs, records audio and leaves both hands free, is used according to who is wearing it. Someone taking a child up a mountain, someone losing weight, someone counting how long they actually get outdoors each day — the applications they want look nothing alike, and not one of them is something we could have invented sitting here.

What a pair of glasses can do should not be decided by the people who make the glasses.

What we do not intend to build, and hope somebody does

• Identifying plants and animals in the field. A child sees a plant on a hillside that nobody can name, and presses once. What comes back is a list of names with the pictures beside them.
• Picture notes. A line or two against every photograph, spoken or typed. The picture and the words together are worth more than either one stored alone.
• Time outdoors. An application that does exactly one thing: record how long you genuinely spend outside each day.
• A food diary. Twenty photographs across an hour-long meal, becoming a record of what you ate on their own — and something you can hand to a health analysis if you want to.

This is not generosity, it is self-interest

The ceiling on a piece of hardware is how many kinds of life it can plug into. A closed interface sets that ceiling at the limit of our imagination, and our imagination is not big enough.

The more practical layer: the people building the applications know what users want before we do. What they build tells us what the next revision of the hardware should change — information no amount of user research can buy.

What is open and what is not

Open: the interface and the documentation. How to connect, how to fetch a photograph, how to fetch a recording, how to trigger a shot.

Not open: things that belong to someone else. A user's photographs and recordings belong to that user, not to us and not to any third-party application. What a developer receives is the part the user has authorised, not a back door.

The documentation goes public before we ship. Write to us if you want it sooner.