Google Glass eye-cam to turn us all into right little winkers

Something in your peeper or are you just pleased to photo me?

Google Glass users are set to look even more ridiculous following the release of code which allows the headset's wearer to take photographs by winking.

Developer Mike DiGiovanni has released an app he calls Winky, which snaps an image when the user opens and then closes one eye. He has uploaded the Android source code to GitHub.

The diehard Oompa Loompa released details of Winky using his Google+ account.

He wrote:

Winking really changes things. You might not think it's hard to say "Ok, Glass take a picture" or even just tap a button. But it's a context switch that takes you out of the moment, even if just for a second. Winking lets you lifelog with little to no effort. I've taken more pictures today than I have the past 5 days thanks to this. Sure, they are mostly silly, but my timeline has now truly become a timeline of where I've been.

The big technical hurdle turned out to simply be that at least one spot on Glass does some checking against the build type and disables the wink gesture completely if it's a user build and it ever detects a wink. I was able to get around this by intercepting the wink with a higher priority than anything else.

Winky has been released as Android source code, which means it it needs to be compiled and run as an application package file (APK). This shouldn't be a problem for users of the Google Glass Explorer Edition, who are mostly devs.

DiGiovanni added: "At this point, I'm figuring most of you guys with Glass know how to do this. I'm trying to stay away from providing just APKs since there may be personal information that is less protected than on your average Android device and I don't want there to be any questions about whether I'm touching your data."

El Reg previously revealed that code within a Google Glass companion app allowed for winking as well as a two-finger zoom - both of which could be easily misinterpreted by sort of the aggressive, technophobic badboys found in most local boozers.

Privacy campaigners were outraged at the thought that Google Glass allowed people to snap away or shoot video constantly, perhaps without the subject's knowledge.

With the new wink-to-snap technology, at least people will know they are being photographed and can choose to react accordingly. It also comes with its own built in security measure because, let's face it, who wants to hang around with someone who's winking at them all the time?

To grab the code, click here. ®