Google Glass Gets Improved Camera Features, Bans Some Apps

The ongoing saga of Google Glass continues unabated as the new device garners new features, criticisms, and starts to more strictly police what it can and can’t do.

The newest update to Google Glass brings a couple of photo centric new features, primarily HDR. As with most HDR tools, it fires off a burst of images, then automatically combines them to try and create the best possible photo accounting for the vagaries of very light and very dark situations. You can see some samples of the HDR images here, and as far as these things go, it’s not particularly egregious. You’ll also be able to affix captions to photos, using Google’s speech to text abilities.

Meanwhile, Google has said that there are certain apps that it won’t allow on the Google Glass app store. For one, facial recognition apps are blocked until “proper protections” are set in place. Likewise, the arrival of an app with a decidedly NSFW title has prompted Google to establish a ban on adult content. But since Google Glass is an open platform, that just means that these sorts of apps won’t be available through Google’s own channels — there will be plenty of other ways to load them on.

Public perception on Glass still hasn’t remarkably improved. A new survey in the UK shows that half of respondents had privacy concerns about Glass, 61% think it should be regulated, and a full 1/5 believe it should be banned outright. While people will doubtless open up to the gadget as it becomes more common, this just shows that it has a long way to go before being widely accepted.