Google Glass might be the best thing to happen to baseball since Mariano Rivera.
Via an app called Blue, Glass can now give baseball fans real-time info as they watch games. The app, which has already been tested on an actual Glass unit during a Giants game at AT&T Park in San Francisco, offers information like the score, player stats, and detailed information about each pitch. It’s almost like having a JumboTron strapped to your face.
While the app sounds like it would get pretty intrusive over the course of a nine-inning game, Blue developer Aaron Draczynski argues that it’s actually a lot less distracting than a comparable smartphone app, which would require users to constantly look down at it.
All of this points to one of the biggest strengths of Google Glass and the inevitable flood of devices like it: Glass gives users an augmented view of the action without forcing them to look away from the action.
Blue, however, takes the conceptual accessibility of Glass a step further. While we’ve been talking about Glass with only a vague idea of how useful it will be to the average person, Blue is a prime example of how having a secondary data level on top of the real world can change how we experience even the most simple events of our lives.
As far as other sports go, Draczynski says that while he’d love to expand Blue’s scope, it’s tough finding the same amount of easily accessible real-time data for other kinds of sporting events. Hopefully, that will change someday soon.