Watch Skydivers Jump With Google Glasses on

What's it feel like to leap out a helicopter and land on the roof of the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google's I/O conference? Google just released a video of a practice jump showing skydivers fully loaded with Project Glass glasses falling out of the sky.

Judging from all the Twitter excitement for the live demo of skydivers using Glass to parachute down to the conference, it's a safe bet to say that many of the 6,000 attendees were absolutely floored by the possibilities of Glass.

Glass's built-in camera allows first-person perspectives that have only been possible with cameras such as a GoPro. You can see in this video below exactly how Google used Glass in the air to do live Google Hangouts.

The video feed from the Glass isn't particularly smooth — often choppy with a jittery frame rate — but we're going to cut it some slack for now, because it is still a prototype product.

As Google co-founder Sergey Brin revealed on day two of Google I/O, Glass doesn't have a built-in cellular antenna. It transmits data using either a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signal or tethering to a smartphone. In order to broadcast the Glass video live, Google had a bunch of men on the roof of the Moscone Center pointing amplifying dishes at the skydivers in order to boost the transmission signal.

The reason for that is "because the signal from a Google Glass device, falling at terminal velocity, isn't strong enough to maintain a video stream," according to Ars Technica.

What a bummer. That, and the glasses will cost $1,500 for Google I/O attendees, it won't be available until early 2013 (2014 for consumers) and Glass starts to lose some of its initial allure.

Via Official Google Blog

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