Watching the video, they mention that in order for the red team to reach their goal (downloading Google Glass schematics), they had to pivot from the users they compromised with the plasma globe (who were not working on the Glass project) to users on the Glass team. They seemingly did that using an image attached to an email that executed its payload when the email was opened. They didn't elaborate what the payload did, but mentioned that it "captured the user's fingerprint" and enabled them to use that to access the Glass schematics.

Although it sounds much less exciting, this sounds like a much more serious exploit than a compromised USB plasma globe - embedded in an image and requiring minimal user interaction to execute. I wonder whether they identified a novel 0day in a common image parser or something.