Here’s a pretty good application for Glass — maybe the first we’ve seen. Paint-maker Sherwin-Williams has developed a Glass app that allows people to get color swatches for colors that they see. From AdAge’s article:
“In focus groups, a lot of people said they pick colors by what inspires them while on vacation or what they see when they’re out and about. They want to replicate it but they don’t know how,” Sherwin Williams’s VP-marketing communications Ellen Moreau said.
A Glass user snaps a color sample, which is then uploaded to a Sherman-Williams server. The server analyzes the color (taking into effect the color biases in the Glass photo app), finds the closest match in a Sherwin-Williams color, and sends that swatch back to the Glass.
The company already has an iPhone app that does the same thing, but there’s a genuine qualitative difference between taking a snapshot of a color and seeing it relatively unencumbered.
Google doesn’t (yet) allow ads in Glass apps, so we’re seeing a bunch of experimentation before Glass’s wide launch next year. This is a good start — and solid thinking in content marketing — because it provides a genuinely useful service that happens to be branded, rather than a branded experience that may or may not be useful.