A man wakes up in a New York apartment, brews coffee and goes out into the world, and everything that can appear on a smartphone or iPad appears before his eyes instead: weather reports, calendar reminders, messages from friends, walking maps of New York, his girlfriend’s smiling face. This is the promise of Google’s Project Glass, which released the video I’ve just described earlier this month, as a preview of a still-percolating project that aspires to implant the equivalent of an iPhone into a pair of science-fiction spectacles.