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What I envisioned back in the 1970s was this thing you would wear as 'glass' over your right eye, and you could see the world though that glass. The glass then reconfigures the things you see.

I discovered by working with actual glass models that the important thing is the play of reflections and not the effect of light and shadow, as in ordinary buildings.

I imagined there would be a way to crack the diffraction barrier. But of course I didn't know exactly how it would work, but I had a gut feeling that there must be something, and so I tried to think about it, to be creative.

The Explorer edition of Glass wasn't for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.

There is a new way with very very tiny fiber optics, which give an enormous high resolution. There are many many thousand fibers, very very close together with a very small diameter.

With light field technology, there is a huge opportunity for creativity in photography that hasn't been available in the past.

It was strange, in a way, because there were no ideas involved in the laser that weren't already known by somebody 25 years before lasers were discovered. The ideas were all there; just, nobody put it together.

I'm not too fond of really cool design. I've got quite kitsch taste really, in things like tableware. I'm quite a sucker for 1930s pressed glass.

I have spent many hours on the beach collecting sea glass, and I almost always wonder, as I bend to pick up chunk of bottle green or a shard of meringue white, what the history of the glass was. Who used it? Was it a medicine bottle? A bit of a ship's lantern? Is that bubbled piece of glass with the charred bits inside it from a fire?