There's a lot of mystique surrounding Google Glass, but the high-tech specs just got a detailed teardown from a group of early adopters, revealing a deeper look at the inner workings of the device.

The team at Catwig.com has dissembled (and very impressively, reassembled) Google Glass, and even installed a pair of prescription lenses as an experiment. Alternative frames for Glass, which will accommodate prescription lenses, are reportedly in the works.

"The build quality is what you'd expect from a device that costs as much as a high-end laptop," the company noted on its website. "Everything fits together precisely, and has a solid feel and great surface finish."

To start, Catwig removed the titanium frame from the pod holding the technology. The touchpad on the side of Glass — which a user can touch to activate some functions — is a custom module created by Synaptics.

The tiny display, which is even smaller than a U.S. dime and has a resolution of 640 x 360, touts pixels that are one-eighth the physical width of those on the iPhone 5's retina display. The picture below shows just how small it is.

The weight of Google Glass is evenly distributed, but the battery lives in a rounded plastic casing behind the ear. Inside, Catwig discovered a single-cell lithium-polymer battery sitting at the end of the flexprint PCB. It is marked with a capacity of 2.1 Wh (about 570 mAh). A bone-conduction speaker, which doubles as a tactile switch, sits in front of the battery pod.

The dissection also revealed that the main logic board, which was glued to the thermal pad, includes the core chips powering Glass such as a TI OMAP4430, 16GB of SanDisk flash storage and an Elpida mobile DRAM chip.

Meanwhile, installing a pair of prescription lenses to the glasses was functional but "subpar" experience, according to Catwig, due to the head proximity sensor being unreliable when next to a lens.

Researchers at several institutions have created a new technology that will empower future smart contact lenses. The team developed a “transparent, highly conductive, and stretchy mix of graphene and silver nanowires” that it then attached to an off-the-shelf soft contact lens to give it Google Glass-like features, Technology Review reported. The lenses were tested on rabbits because of similarities with the human eye and were found to be fully functional. The researchers noted that the rabbits didn’t attempt to rub their eyes nor did they grow bloodshot after five hours of testing.

“Our goal is to make a wearable contact-lens display that can do all the things Google Glass can do,” said research leader Jang-Ung Park, a chemical engineer at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.

True smart contacts with heads-up displays are still quite a few years out, however — the “display” on the tested lens was only one pixel. Nevertheless, researchers have high hopes for smart contacts and have continued to test new and useful ways of implementing the technology, such as monitoring a person’s health using lenses with integrated biosensors or helping those with vision problems with lenses that can filter light.

Google Glass has been criticized by many as a device that would allow easy invasion of others’ privacy. Although Google has refuted such contentions, the company seems to act by itself. In its shareholders meeting, Google recently restricted anyone from bringing Google Glass to the venue.

According to the instructions provided by Google for its stakeholders meeting, “Cameras, recording devices, and other electronic devices, such as smart phones, will not be permitted at the meeting. Photography is prohibited at the meeting.”

Given the fact that Google Glass falls within this category, certain activist groups have taken the occasion to criticize Google for having created Glass. These groups allege that Google is being hypocritical by not allowing Glass into its own meetings but continuing to push it in the consumer arena.

However, these contentions seem fairly childish. Going by this logic, a smartphone vendor can be accused of conspiring to destroy users’ privacy by equipping a smartphone with a camera. One can easily snap a photo, in public, with a smartphone camera. But that argument does not hold up. And since it’s pretty much the same argument that is being levelled against Glass, it doesn’t hold up in this case either.

Like Google, any other entities who are sensitive about being photographed or filmed can simply ban Google Glass on their venues. For instance, if a university feels that Glass can lead to privacy violations, the device can simply be banned on campus.

Since the first trickle of Google Glass hardware began filtering out to the general public, the company responsible for the heads-up display sent out a message to the world: “These are going to chosen ones, and the rest of you will have to wait.”

Unfortunately, with more people poking, prodding, and forming their opinions about the device in the months that followed the hardware’s initial distribution, that divide seems only to be growing wider. Google Glass, it appears, may be for “Glassholes” only, as some have taken to labeling users.

First and foremost, of course, are privacy concerns. Yesterday, Rackspace released the findings of a study executed in parnership with Centre for Creative and Social Technology (CAST) at Goldsmiths, University of London that polled 4,000 adults from both the U.S. and UK about their feelings towards cloud technologies and Google Glass specifically. While some conceded that cloud technologies have enriched their lives (and 18% of people said they used wearable technology), there was a strong consensus that Google Glass’s privacy wasn’t enough to convince them. More than half of those polled said that their privacy concerns are a barrier to adoption, two-thirds believe Google Glass should have regulations, and one in five wanted the device to be banned entirely.

No matter how many times Google itself says otherwise, Google Glass is developing a reputation as a privacy breacher, and that’s something only really tech-forward people won’t flinch at.

If the privacy doesn’t irk users, then the price may. The introductory price for the developer model of Google Glass is $1,500 — more than a higher-end laptop and certainly more than any peripheral device out there. Heck, it’s even more than the cost of a 3D printer.

And, of course, wearing a cyborg-like face shield isn’t going to earn people any points at a party. There’s an inherent narcissism in Google Glass that stems from its use case — a wearer projects that he or she is more concerned with making sure that a notification is never missed than talking with other people.

The wearable technology movement is just getting going, of course, and Google Glass may simply be too different for most people to get their heads around. Even one of Google Glass’s biggest proponents, Rackspace’s Robert Scoble, told IBTimeson Monday, “It’s an expensive product and it’s a new product, but it’s a product that’s going to kick off 20 years of wearables, and I don’t think we’re going to know what this product means fully for 20 years.”

Bleeding-edge adopters, now is your time to become a Glasshole. For everyone else, it might be a while.

If you thought you could slip into the shadows and go unnoticed by someone wearing Google Glass, it’s not going to happen. Google is pushing a software update to Glass devices to improve the camera in low light. The new feature automatically detects a low-light situation and compensates to get a more detailed, brighter picture.

The Glass team is piggybacking the improvement for bright light photos as well. After the software updated is installed, Glass will automatically take HDR, or High Dynamic Range, photos in low light or bright situations. Several of the latest smartphones support HDR photography, which quickly captures multiple images at various exposure levels. The pictures are then combined to provide an improved picture with boosted brightness in low-lit areas and toned down pixels where overexposure is detected.

Google is sharing an image gallery with before and after images that illustrate the camera improvements on Glass. Here’s an example of two similar images, first without the new software and then with the update:

Without Software Update

With New Software 9

Another small feature addition is the ability to caption photos directly from Glass. When sharing a photo from the wearable device, Glass will prompt for a caption. Users can tap the side touchpad of Glass and then speak their caption before sharing the image.

While the software update may appear very incremental, Google is holding to its promise of new features in monthly software updates for Glass. That means Glass owners can expect a steady stream of new features, both big and small, for their connected glasses.

The Google Glass Explorer program is all about experimentation, hacking, and learning. With that in mind, Google has already posted the factory image for the XE6 update from earlier today. Hooray for openness! You know... if you're lucky enough to be in the super-exclusive Explorer program.

The XE6 update is 334MB and can be used to flash Glass back to its factory settings. There is also a pre-rooted bootloader image for XE6 to make rooting a snap. Well, it's more like typing five lines of code, but that's still pretty easy. These files join the pre-existing XE5 system image that was posted late last month.

Downloads are hosted on the Google Glass Developer site down below. Just remember: rooting and unlocking your device can make updates a pain, and you might break your $1500 face computer. Exercise caution, but please make cool stuff.

Lambda Labs, an early-stage startup out of San Francisco, is preparing to release a facial recognition API for developers working on Google Glass apps. The API will be available to interested developers within a week, company co-founder Stephen Balaban says. The move comes on the heels of a Congressional inquiry into Google’s new wearable technology, which is still very much in the prototype phase.

The startup’s facial recognition API, launched into beta last year, is already used by 1,000 developers, including several major international firms. It now sees over 5 million API calls per month, and is growing at 15 percent month-over-month. Balaban also says that the company has been cash-flow positive since November.

Now that same API has been tailored specifically for Google Glass apps to enable both facial and object recognition.

Applied to Glass, the technology will enable apps such as “remember this face,” “find your friends in a crowd,” “networking event interest matching,” “intelligent contact books,” and more, Balaban explains. (You can see what apps developers are tweeting about here.)

As potentially amazing/horrifying as that technology sounds, any apps using the technology couldn’t do so in real time – that is, you couldn’t just walk around automatically recognizing people you see through Glass. The way Google’s Mirror API works right now is that you first have to snap a photo, send it to the developer’s servers, then get the notification back. The lag time on that would be several seconds at least, and would depend on how fast you could take a photo and share it. A forthcoming Glass software development kit (SDK), though, may change that.

“There is nothing in the Glass Terms of Service that explicitly prevents us from doing this. However, there is a risk that Google may change the ToS in an attempt to stop us from providing this functionality,” Balaban says. ”This is the first face recognition toolkit for Glass, so we’re just not sure how Google, or the privacy caucus, will react.”

The privacy caucus he’s referring to has to do with the Congressional inquiry from earlier this month where eight members of Congress reached out to Google CEO Larry Page with over half a dozen questions about Glass’ capabilities and the potential impacts to user privacy. The Bi-Partisan Privacy Caucus, a group led by Texas Republican Joe Barton, wanted to know if Glass would collect data from users without their consent, whether or not Google would consider privacy before approving third-party apps, and a host of other things.

One of those questions was whether or not Glass would have support for facial recognition. That’s something Steve Lee, Glass director of product management, has already answered. In a statement offered to The New York Times, he replied, “We’ve consistently said that we won’t add new face recognition features to our services unless we have strong privacy protections in place.”

That’s not a solid “no,” of course. It’s more of a “no, for now.” Glass is simply too new of a technology to begin limiting what it will or will not do, at least in such definitive terms.

Facial recognition, however, doesn’t appear to be specifically prohibited in Google’s API policies, which inform Glass developers what they can and can’t do in their applications. That means, for now at least, Lambda’s facial recognition API for Glass developers would be permitted.

The only cause that would impact its use, according to Google’s policies, is one that says Glass is “not intended for use in connection with applications and services that might be subject to industry-specific privacy regulations.”

Obviously, lawmakers could still enact such a policy, if they chose to do so.

“Assuming Google and Joe Barton’s Privacy Caucus don’t attempt to stop us, [the API] will be available to everybody within the week,” Balaban says.

Google, it should be noted, has long since had the technology to build apps capable of facial recognition itself, but has always tread very carefully to not incite a privacy backlash.

In 2011, there were reports that Google was developing a mobile app that would allow users to snap pictures of people’s faces to access their personal information. That app never arrived, but facial recognition has since made an appearance within Google’s photo-sharing service Google+ Photos (previously Picasa), where users can now opt in to have their face recognized. This makes finding “pictures and videos of you easy,” explains the company’s documentation on the technology.

Perhaps one day, users will be able to “opt in” to having Glass apps identify their faces, too?

Time – and Congress’s reaction – will tell.