‘Google Glass’ helps sports fans home in on the action

Facebook secretly manipulated the feelings of 700,000 users to understand “emotional contagion” in a study that prompted anger and forced the social network giant on the defensive.

For one week in 2012, Facebook tampered with the algorithm to place posts into users’ news feeds to study how this affected their mood without their explicit consent or knowledge.

The researchers wanted to see if the number of positive or negative words in messages the users read determined whether they posted positive or negative content in their status updates.

The study, conducted by researchers affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California at San Francisco, appeared in the June 17 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Google Glass is slowly becoming more common in sports as teams and broadcasters try to bring fans closer to the action. The American football team Philadelphia Eagles will test the internet-connected eyewear for in-game use, and a company with a key application for the technology says it has secured a new round of financing that will help roll out its Glass programme to sports, entertainment and other fields.

“When I talk to teams and ask them about what technology are they looking at, what technology are they keeping track of, the two answers I mostly commonly get are Google Glass and Snapchat,” said Eric Fernandez, a founder and managing partner of SportsDesk Media, a fan analytics and digital media activation company.

Google introduced the futuristic eyewear in a video and blog post in April 2012, naming it Project Glass. The US company started selling the $1,500 glasses to a select crowd later that same year, but they only recently became available to the general public.

The use of Glass in sports has progressed from trendy athletes dipping their toes in the water to a tool for teams looking to draw fans to arenas and stadiums, and then keep their focus on the action, instead of their omnipresent smartphones and tablets.