Google sees the promise in hardware

It was an event that included sky divers, stunt bikers and people rappelling down the side of a building. Then came another spectacle: watching Google, the Web search giant, reimagine itself as a hardware maker.

On Wednesday at Google I/O, the company’s annual conference for developers, Google unveiled a new 7-inch tablet computer, called Nexus 7, and a sphere-shaped device for streaming music and video that it is calling Nexus Q.

Both debuts paled in comparison to the company’s amped-up demonstration of Project Glass, a device that puts a camera and a tiny video screen into a kind of eyeglass frame. This involved Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, jumping on stage wearing the device and engaging in a live video chat on Google’s social network with a couple of wing-suited sky divers as they jumped out of a plane. They were followed by stunt bikers and rappellers who dropped down the face of the Moscone West convention center, all the while sharing what they were seeing through experimental versions of the glasses.

Mr. Brin said Google would make a $1,500 prototype of the glasses — which it calls the Google Glass Explorer Edition — available to developers from the United States who attended the conference. He said the glasses were slated to ship early next year.

Google’s focus on hardware is a strategic shift for the company, which makes the vast majority of its revenue from advertising. Google is likely to sell the Nexus 7 and Nexus Q at cost, or even at a loss, but hopes to make up for those losses — and then some — with additional revenue from purchases made on Google Play, its app and content store; additional traffic to its YouTube video site; and the advertising it reaps from all of its Internet products.