Google Glass sales to begin by 2014

Google Inc., owner of the world’s most popular search engine, will sell eyeglass-embedded computers to consumers by 2014 after incorporating feedback from developers, said Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder.

Project Glass test devices with software and cameras, to give quick access to information in a display above the eyes, will be offered for $1,500 to developers who attend Google’s I/O developers conference in San Francisco and will ship in early 2013. The Mountain View, California-based company is sharing the design with developers to benefit from their work, Brin said in an interview.

“These explorer editions I’d like to get out early next year,” Brin told Jon Erlichman on Bloomberg TV’s “Rewind” yesterday. “And within a year after that I want to have a broad consumer offering.”

Brin showed a demonstration of Project Glass featuring skydivers wearing the glasses, which sent live video to the conference. The Google X lab that produced Project Glass is also working on other technology, including self-driving cars.

“With Google X I’m not really thinking about any sort of existing products or things to compare it to,” Brin said. “Google X is about brand new risky technological things that are sort of making science fiction real.”

Google also made another move into the hardware market at the conference yesterday, showing its $199 Nexus 7 tablet to take on Apple Inc. and Amazon.com Inc.