Now that anyone can buy Google Glass, you can expect the upcoming months to be filled with first-person videos of the oddest sort. But with all the unexpected uses people are sure to find with their new glasses, perhaps none will be as cool as Aki Watanabe's.

Watanabe is a paleontologist and graduate student at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As one of the first 2000 Google Glass beta-testers, he has been testing the limits of what the device can do for paleontology, taking the glasses as far away as the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Watanabe says Google Glass have already proven itself to be an excellent means for public outreach, showing others his first-person view of a dinosaur hunt. And as paleontology becomes increasingly digitized, the device could become a valuable tool for both fossil prospecting and research.

"When I took the device to Mongolia, it was mostly for the purpose of documenting my trip and sharing what it's like to be paleontologist." Watanabe says. "And the reception the videos have received has been overwhelmingly positive. People seemed to have really loved the first-person view. You can always watch a documentary from National Geographic, but this actually feels like you're out there in the Gobi Desert, searching for fossils across this vast landscape."

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Without an Internet connection, Google Glass currently doesn't add much functionality beyond what Watanabe already could do with a notebook and a video camera. But, he says, "this was a much simpler and less time-consuming experience." And for a dirty job like digging in the desert, there are obvious benefits to going hands-free.

While he had doubts about its durability at first, Watanabe says his Google Glass was sturdy enough to handle the grit and sand that comes with the Gobi's steady onslaught of sandstorms. The once place where the device fell short was when dealing with wind—you can hear it howling in the videos. That noise also affected the device's understanding of voice commands.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Watanabe sees plenty of promise for Google Glass to become a tool for collaboration. For example, a Glass-wearing paleontologist could stream photos or video to colleagues back home. "Of course, you're not going to have Wi-Fi or a 3G network in many of these places," he says, "but if you're trying to identify the fossil specimen you have right in front of you, you could potentially lend someone else that first-person view."

Dreaming even bigger, Watanabe imagines future apps for Google Glass that could geo-locate previous fossil finds and display them in your view, or something like a facial recognition app to identify fossils as they're uncovered in the field.

Glass could even allow paleontologists to instantly create digital models of their discoveries. "With your smartphone, you can already take dozens of flat pictures and feed them into a program like 123D Catch to make a 3D model," Watanabe says. "Nothing is going to ever replace looking at the actual fossils, but for the scientists, you can do your research from digital scans and 3D models. And that saves the hundreds of thousands of dollars you'd need to move fossils or people around," he says.

3D printers could turn those digital models into something tangible. From there, it's no pipedream to imagine that someday soon a researcher could find a fossilized footprint, clean it up, snap a few photos to create a 3d model, and stream the model to the museum, where it could be printed long before the real thing ever leaves the ground.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io