Smartphone gaming is a great way to waste time when you're out performing chores, but it can be a bit awkward to hold your phone out and look down at it as you walk about. A new demo of a simple Battleship-style game for Google Glass shows how the device could solve this problem with voice-activated gaming that always floats in your peripheral vision.

BrickSimple's three-minute demo video for GlassBattle shows how the game sits unobtrusively (and semi-transparently) in the corner of your vision as you walk around a park or shop in a supermarket. Players simply call out the grid positions of their attacks as vocal commands; those moves are then sent to an opposing player, who sees the hits or misses register on his or her own board.

The developers at BrickSimple managed this extremely basic game concept despite Glass' current lack of any heavy-duty interactive or animation APIs. GlassBattle works purely on Glass' basic Mirror API, which is meant primarily to push words and images to Glass users in the form of static "cards." As BrickSimple puts it in the video, all the developers did was "push everything that Mirror does and make it do something cool."

While Google encourages developers to "hack" their Android-based Glass units to unlock more features, the lack of more robust APIs has limited the development of games for the device. But that hasn't stopped people from dreaming about the potential for all sorts of Glass-based gaming, from a search-and-find game played out on the night sky to a truly augmented reality Battlefield 5 that's decidedly more advanced than current hardware would allow.

At Google I/O this year, Google teased new APIs that will allow developers to run code natively on Glass. This will enable more versatile apps than are available with the Mirror API, and we expect them to be available by the time Google expands its developer program later this year. At that point, we'll hopefully see some games that really take advantage of the unique features of Google Glass.