One of the biggest highlights of Google’s I/O keynote was Android Wear, a new notification and interaction system for Android that’s built for wearables. While by default we’re only thinking about smartwatches using Android Wear, Google has also revealed that Glass will support this new wearable standard, too. Android Wear is a brand new way that Google wearables – notably smartwatches and Google Glass, will interact with the Android smartphones and tablets people own. The standard is built around three main types of notifications, which come from your phone. The idea is that information can come to your watch (or face) at a glance and will help you save time between those moments you want to get important information, such as directions to a nearby restaurant.
As Google builds a smartwatch platform with Android Wear, Google Glass users aren’t being left behind. In the next few months, Glass users will get the same notifications as Android Wear. Timothy Jordan, a staff developer advocate at Google, revealed the news at Google I/O during a talk on wearable computing. Android Wear is based on the same actionable notifications that appear on Android phones. The idea is that when you get a message, you can select a handful of quick actions so that you don’t have to take out your phone. For example, you can send a canned response to a text message, delete an e-mail or retweet a posting from Twitter. Some of these actions are available on Google Glass already, but as we saw during Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote, Android Wear will open up these notifications to all Android apps, giving developers more capabilities. During Wednesday’s keynote, for instance, Google showed how you could load recipe directions in an app on your phone, and then send them to an Android Wear smartwatch. A feature like that would be especially useful on Google Glass. Jordan said that developers wouldn’t have to do any additional work to make their Android Wear notifications compatible with Glass, though he dodged a question about whether developers should start targeting Wear in lieu of making Glass-specific apps.
