When the iPad first came out, some poor woman got duped into buying a cardboard box she thought contained a shiny new Apple product. Now, thanks to 3-D printing and Google Glass, scammers have a way more sophisticated method of hawking fake tech.
During a hackathon in Shanghai, a Chinese entrepreneur named Sunny Gao has successfully used a 3-D printer to create a look-alike version of the wearable technology. Of course, the glasses don’t actually work.
Image via Baidu
Cool, I guess. But Glass looks dorky enough without the $1,500 functionality, so what’s the point of imitation Glass that does nothing? The only reason I could think of for making fake Google Glass is to start selling it to rubes on the Internet or on the street. The lesson is this: Don’t buy black-market Glass from some guy in a trenchcoat without first checking if it works.
If you want to run your own scam, and have a working 3-D printer, go nuts with the design. Gao has released it here. Enjoy it while you can, though: Google is currently patenting the Glass design, probably to prevent this exact thing from happening.
H/T The Next Web | Image via Quora