If you count yourself as a Google Glass Explorer, you'll now be able to tell Glass to play a particular song by your favorite artist. Released on Wednesday, "Pandora for Glass" brings the powerful Pandora music streaming platform to Glass.
Pandora is the original "custodian" for the Music Genome Project; a service that enables a user to find similar artists and songs that suit their taste. Today, similar services exist with other streaming music options such as Spotify, iTunes Radio and Beats. However, since Pandora was the first to offer the service they still own a sizable chunk of the market.
In terms of how Pandora will work with Glass, your music will be able to be played the Glass's bone conduction listening feature or through one or both of the earbud accessories that were included with the second generation of the device.
Once a user is in the app, the app operates similar to how it always has. A user can pick a particular artist or music genre and launch their own "radio". If they are a Pandora One subscriber ($4.99/month), they will be able to remove all ads from their radio-listening experience.
The app was actually the product of one of Pandora's biannual employee hackathons. The 72-hour event encourages Pandora employees to create whatever they want in an effort to help drive innovation within the company. One Glass Explorer team in the hackathon decided to program what would later become the final app; an impressive feat given that they had a 72-hour deadline!
Once the programmers polished the initial prototype, Pandora executives presented it to Google and had such a positive response that Google decided to make it an 'official' Google Glass app.
A recent post on Pandora's blog gives us more information:
"Built by Pandora, our Glassware allows you to access your personalized radio stations from wherever you are, interacting with the service through voice command or by using the touchpad. Supported voice commands for Pandora include selecting an existing station and creating a new one. For a more advanced experience, you can use the touchpad, which offers the ability to thumb-up and thumb-down tracks, as well as access standard controls like pause, skip and stop."
If you're a Glass Explorer, here's how to get Pandora for Glass:
Go to https://google.com/myglass on your computer or device
Go to the Glassware page and find Pandora
On the detail page, turn ON Pandora and sign in
Give permission to access basic information
Pandora will be added automatically over the air; enjoy!
