Earlier this year Google showed off its prototype for the long-awaited Google Glass, described as “a stamp-sized electronic screen mounted on the left side of a pair of eyeglass frames which can record video, access email and messages, and retrieve information from the Web.” The glasses apparently contain a wireless networking chip and essentially all the other technology found inside a typical smartphone.
But is Google about to be left at the starting gate with the latest development in memristors? Memristors are ‘resistive RAM’. They differ from traditional flash RAM by storing data based on electrical resistance rather than an electrical charge, and are approaching commercialization based on indium gallium zinc oxide.
However, the latest research shows that they can also be based on zinc tin oxide – which is much cheaper than indium gallium zinc oxide. “Products using this approach could become even smaller, faster and cheaper than the silicon transistors that have revolutionized modern electronics – and transparent as well”, reports phys.org.
Transparent electronics, continues the report, “offer[s] potential for innovative products that don't yet exist, like information displayed on an automobile windshield, or surfing the web on the glass top of a coffee table.” Or, dare we say, an entire PC in a pair of glasses.
You may wonder what a computer in a pair of glasses has to do with security – but we used to wonder the same about a telephone. And glasses are just as easily lost, and more easily broken.