Google Glass Gets Mobile Payment App: Intuit Adapts GoPayment App For Smart Glasses

While concept videos dream about the potential for easy hands-free payments using Google Glass, few apps have actually surfaced. Intuit Inc. (NASDAQ: INTU), the Mountain View, Calif.-based software company behind Quicken, Quickbooks and other products for small businesses, adapted a version of its GoPayment app to allow Google Glass users to make payments using their smart glasses.

The only app out so far is GlassPay, which enables users to pay for items in-store using Bitcoins. For people that don’t use bitcoin, GoPayment actually syncs Google Glass with a user’s credit card information and allows them to make direct payments to a business using the GoPayment app.

After a business rings up a customer and checks them out with GoPayment, a customer with Google Glass can request to pay with Glass. The business simply needs to tap the “magic” option, and GoPayment generates a QR code associated with the transaction. The Google Glass user launches the app, taps the side of Glass and looks at the QR code to scan it. A receipt is displayed directly on the Google Glass eyepiece.

The app is still just a concept and doesn’t yet have a product name. Cindy Osmond, a senior software engineer at Intuit, said the team got the idea from a panel at the Google I/O conference when a consensus was made that mobile payments would be a “killer app” for Google Glass.

Intuit has also developed a Google Glass version of Mint, an app made for managing personal finances. The Google Glass version allows users to view their financial information on-the-go.

“When I’m out and about shopping, I can instantly see my financial balance so I know whether I can buy those pair of shoes I desperately want,” Osmond said.

The biggest challenge for the team was figuring out how to redesign the apps to be functional within the form factor of wearable technology like Google Glass.

“Just like when we had to rethink desktop software for the mobile phone, we must know rethink mobile phone software for even smaller devices like Google Glass, watches [and] fitness bands.”

Intuit doesn't yet have release date for the GoPayment and Mint apps for Google Glass. The team is waiting for the release of an official software development kit for Google Glass to put the finishing touches on the apps.