New Research Article: “Web for Wearables: Lessons Learned from Google Glass”

The following paper by researchers in Australia was recently made available online.
It appears a version of Google Glass might be on the way for enterprise/workplace usage.
Title
Web for Wearables: Lessons Learned from Google Glass
Authors

This paper presents a first look at some of the challenges associated with enabling a seamless web experience on Optical Head Mounted Display wearables such as Google Glass from the perspective of web content providers, client device, and the network.

We conducted experiments to study the impact of choosing the application layer protocol (e.g., HTTP vs HTTPS) and of individual web components on the performance of Glass browser, by measuring webpage load time, temperature variation and power consumption and compare it to a smartphone.

Our findings suggest that (a) performance of Glass compared to a smartphone in terms of total power consumption and webpage load time deteriorates with increasing number of web objects, number of servers accessed and number of JavaScripts on a webpage, (b) execution time for popular JavaScript benchmarks is about 3 to 8 times higher on Glass compared to a smartphone, (c) popular 3rd party analytics and ad scripts on Glass takes about 2x more time to execute than a smartphone (d) WebP is an energy efficient image format compared to JPEG and PNG on Glass, (e) cost of HTTPS on Glass compared to a smartphone increases with increasing number of web objects, webpage size and the number of servers accessed on a webpage, and (f) seven out of 50 websites studied in this paper are providing better wearable web experience by specifically serving fewer or smaller images, fewer JavaScripts, fewer CSS and no ads to Glass than a smartphone.

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