When you’ve already given your police force a multi-million pound fleet of vehicles that includes McLaren MP4-12Cs, Aston Martin One-77s and Lamborghini Aventadors, how exactly do you spoil them further? It turns out the answer is by giving them all gadgets which cost more than £700 a pop, if you’re as mad as whoever is in charge of the Dubai Police.
The sovereign Emirate nation is notorious for spending big on eye-catching infrastructure, and its police force is no exemption. The Dubai Police Smart Services Department has deemed that the traffic police may be better able to combat speeding or reckless motorists if equipped with Google Glass. It couldn’t hurt to try, right?
With police in the UK already a part of a trial which sees them wearing GoPro cameras, the Glass concept isn’t too far away from that mould. It’s just a bit more…Dubai-ish. Glass has only just been made openly available to the US public at a retail cost of $1,500. The Dubai Police Smart Service has already created two apps for the wearable – one which allows officers to take photos of traffic incidents which are then immediately sent to HQ, and another which helps identify wanted cars (making use of Glass’ HUD and text recognition abilities to match number plates with those on the police database).
The program is only in trial state right now, but if it passes their testing criteria then the Dubai Police will be willing to purchase more.
At a time when Google Glass’ commercial viability lays hanging in the balance, it will no doubt be of interest to the company to know that they could have some alternative routes to go down with their product should the consumer not take to it. And as for any UK police reading this on their Samsung whilst sat in their standard police-issue Ford Focus, we’re sorry.
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