To my mind, the Google Glass is far more like the Microsoft Tablet, the Tesla Roadster and the Palm Treo: the initial realization of a concept that, before now, didn't exist in the world at all. It seems incorrect to compare it to the iPhone and the iPad because both of those were taking technology that had existed in the tech community for years and reimagining them in a way that appealed to the general public.
As a member of the tech community, I'm excited and looking forward to getting Glass for myself, but I don't see widespread adoption to the scale that the non-tech community can handle until we've innovated at least some of the uses and worked out the 1.0 bugs.
Perhaps Glass should be compared with the Sony Walkman (which may be a bit before the time of some of those on HN). When Sony introduced the Walkman, they also invented portable headphones. Because no-one wore headphones around in public before, there was a huge stigma relating to doing so. In particular, in Japan, ear-wear was associated with deafness and hence old people. So, Sony embarked on a mass media campaign to change the perception of wearing headphones, by showing attractive models wearing them, roller-skating with them, etc. They made them cool for youth to wear, rather than dorky.
If Google can also change the idea of electronic eye-wear from Borg-like to babe-magnet, then they may be onto a winner.
This sounds like a good strategy; perhaps taking on GoPro and making rugged models for extreme sports, with an emphasis on video recording and live video webcasting.
> Google Glass is [...] the initial realization of a concept that, before now, didn't exist in the world at all.
I don't understand. Heads up displays have existed in various forms for years. We've had versions that cover one eye, or that use lasers onto the retina.
And I never see anyone using one of these technologies in public as part of their everyday lives. We see it time and time again that technologies that have existed in one form or another for some time really take off when they are packaged in an attractive and consumer friendly form.
No, it isn't, it's just the first time that you're hearing about it because it's the first time that the tech has been pointed at your particular subset of consumer.
This is very much specialised stuff however - would you ever see your average consumer walk around in public with it? No - because these are ski goggles not normal glasses.
I think blhack is playing semantics with 'consumer'. They are skiwear consumers that bought them. I think it was pretty clear that you meant something like widespread public use.
I'm not sure whether it's similar enough, but the "Private Eye", a wearable, monocular heads-up display, had a bit of niche success when it was introduced in 1989. Here's a contemporary blurb from Popular Science: http://www.popsci.com/archive-viewer?id=dwEAAAAAMBAJ&pg=...
It's the first time it's being jacked into something like Google. The iPod wasn't as revolutionary as iPod + iTunes. The union of the heads up display with Google's software is similar to how the Apple II, while not the first microcomputer, is the first one that mattered.
Google glasses is not just about the heads up technology. I think equally important is the content they will be pushing in front of your eyes.
In order for this to be useful, you need to be providing very personalized information. And Google is in perfect position to provide this. They get under your skin via Google Searc, GMail and Google Calendar and can the supplement this with information mined from web.
Nope. The Treo 180 was the first Treo that had phone capabilities, and it was released in 2002. The first BlackBerry that had phone capabilities was also released in 2002, but the first BlackBerry that didn't require an external headset to talk with wasn't released until 2003. BlackBerry was in no way years early to the smartphone market - they just approached it from a different angle.
Don't forget the Handspring Visors and Compaq iPAQs that could be turned into smartphone-equivalents with the appropriate add-ons. Those came even earlier.
The inevitability of miniaturization notwithstanding, it's slightly challenging to imagine a less obtrusive version of something whose defining property is that it sits on your face.
Maybe in five years we'll all be wearing smart-monocles. Who knows?
I (and a great many other humans) already wear an accessory which sits on the face. :)
When spectacles were first invented, they may well have been obtrusive and required some social adjustment. Now they're thoroughly assimulated. They are unobtrusive, and one's choice of frames/style often serves as a fashion statement.
I wear glasses, too, but I think of it as a bug when there's something on the lens or when I talk to them. It feels like the very unobtrusiveness that makes them useful.
Maybe it's Google's habit of showing off Glass without lenses that makes me think of it as 'as screen on your face' rather than 'fancy glasses'. It reads as 'Bluetooth earpiece' more than 'hearing aid'.
Not hard to imagine but very hard to do. There are several huge challenges:
- Power. Contact lenses are too small to hold batteries that will last for a reasonable period of time. You could possibly use inductive coils in conjunction with regular eyewear but that means a fair electromagnetic field aimed right at your eyes and some obvious health risks.
- Optics. This is actually 2 issues - First, you can't focus on anything that's literally right on your eye so you'd need to do something very clever here. Possibly direct laser projection from the lens to the retina. Second, all the electronics in the lens will be opaque and could occlude your regular vision. Let's suppose you can move most of it to the outside of the lens (as with coloured contacts now), the HUD part is still going to cover part of your pupil. So it needs to be really tiny and still produce a clear image. Not impossible maybe but very hard.
- Health. Less of a showstopper, but contact lenses need to breathe. Impeding the flow of oxygen to the surface of the eye can lead to corneal neovascularization - the growth of blood vessels over the cornea. So ideally these contact lenses need to be gas permeable as well.
Very hard they are. But that's what we have engineers for :).
See what you just did: you outlined some real challenges we face if we want to improve this technology. And now we have something that is in domain of science and engineering, so we can discuss ideas and solutions. We're in a much better state than if we just left it on "it's hard to imagine" or "it's impossible".
I am dismissing it as something that Google couldn't pay me to use. I suppose that counts as un-productizeable for at least me. I don't see how making it better would change that - my distaste is for the concept, not the implementation.
I wish Google would focus on using Google Glass within the workplace before trying to take it to the streets for casual use.
I can imagine using them within the office, because anything that makes me more productive is totally acceptable "socially". Outside of the office however I have serious doubts to if I'd wear these around daily. My colleague will know why I'm essentially talking to myself to use Google Glass, where as people in public will think I'm batshit (much like people talking on bluetooth headsets).
Once I become very comfortable with them inside the office it's much more likely I'll start forgetting I should even remove them when I leave to go get lunch, coffee, etc.
Plus I'm much more interested in enhanced productivity than I am checking the weather.
What I will give them is the "record" feature could be incredibly useful within the office from day one. I can't count the number of meetings or brainstorming sessions I wish I had on video.
That's my take, too--it would be infinitely more useful in a work environment.
I can imagine how having a HUD could be useful while programming, even though I have two screens in front of me already.
I can also imagine how it would make certain elements of interacting with people working remotely--like seeing what someone's doing, whether it's programming in a terminal or sketching on a pad--so much easier.
That said, it'd definitely stay in an office drawer after-hours.
I love the idea of "shared views" when you're having meetings or collaborating with people. Whatever document or supplementary set of data you're talking about is on the entire groups HUD.
If everyday use cases can be performed without effort, then I think people will find that glass is invaluable. This would drive adoption and eventually acceptance in public.
For the time when I repaired the espresso machine or my laptop computer and ended up with leftover screws.
But analytics and AI is really where Google can make this shine, especially when the HUD reminds you that you need to leave early for the airport because of an accident on the highway.
And the video recording of leaving the house in a hurry so I can eliminate the doubt that I locked the door...
What has started in the workplace and ended up a common item though? I feel like something that starts off in the workplace immediately loses it's "cool", which is needed for rapid uptake
The closest analogy I see is with the segway. Something that could be useful and even world-changing but overhyped and dumped on a market without justifying it's existence. Apple could have released the iPad first but they waited to teach the market what it was with the iPhone first. Thus each step (iPhone, tablet) was a new form of a familiar thing rather than a new thing altogether.
If I were in Google's shoes, I would start by introducing the glass into existing items such as workplace safety goggles. Imagine a pair of carpenter's safety goggles that could measure a piece of wood, or track a list of supplies, or show a work plan as you go. It's not the big play, but you can try it in a bunch of contexts until it catches on. It will generate press and awareness, and then once the novelty wears off you can make a "smart goggles for everyone".
Google's mistake continues to be that the believe value is in novelty, when really it is in taking something people are already familiar with and reinventing it, better.
About six months ago there was a reddit post about a HDR welding mask (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM517kYS6kY). The thread had many interesting comments, including welders claiming that they didn't need such a mask, because they could already weld well with their sense of feeling and limited vision. To me, this is a really good example of what we will be seeing with a lot of these kinds of technology.
That's the opinion of the generation trained without the technology. What about a new welder who learns by using the HDR mask? Could that improve their performance and productivity overall given equal time and training?
> Apple could have released the iPad first but they waited to teach the market what it was with the iPhone first.
Amazing. They had both products in mind, considered them both, and thought that it would be best to lead with the iPhone, aye? And Steve told you this, did he?
Jobs has been quoted saying the concept for the iPad came first and there have been pictures come out in the Samsung case showing a prototype from 2002. The iPhone likely did help establish the market for the iPad which would have been a niche device otherwise.
“My recollection of first seeing it is very hazy, but it was, I’m guessing, some time between 2002 and 2004,” Ive testified. “I remember seeing this and perhaps models similar to this when we were first exploring tablet designs that ultimately became the iPad.”
In addition to the already mentioned quotes and biography, Apple had nearly 30 years of research in the space [1]; you've probably heard of the (failed) Newton. At some point in 200x, they decided to try one more time, this time as a smartphone. It kind of worked.
If anybody wants to get a good idea where something like glass could go, read the Phaethon series starting with "The Golden Age". It's a bit of a tough read, but the author spent some serious time considering the implications of a civilization built around always wearing these kind of devices at all times.
Glass acts like a layer on top of the real world, consider then that as the technology improves and the number of people using it increases, you can get rid of things like street signs as the glass will simply show you the pertinent signage for wherever you are looking, going shopping and the device will recognize the product you are looking at and tell you if it's a good deal, people can "project" their idealized image of what they want you to see to your glass, simply looking at somebody will pull up relevant information you need to know like their name and occupation and so on and so forth.
Now project this forward and add more similar layers on top of this. Imagine you can select from several layers according to your philosophy or needs. A Libertarian layer might allow one business to buy the virtual signage of another business and broadcast their brand instead. Or a Maslow Hierarchy layer may strip all branding from your view and simply distill down what they're selling to its bear essentials "food" "clothes" "shoes".
You could select filters in your layers to simply block out things that you don't want to see. "New Derelicte-Block omits undesirables from your world!"
Why build fancy metamaterials when all you have to do is hack the local View Layer broadcast frequency and hide yourself from everybody around.
Why hack it when you can simply unjack completely and rely on everybody's standard install of Derelicte-Block v3.2 to keep you suppressed from their notice?
No, replacing what you see instead of adding to it is a much more difficult and tricky problem. I wouldn't expect it in the near future in a consumer application.
I would imagine that much of the reason for that is that it's a v1.0 product. Accurately registering the display over reality at such a high resolution is no doubt a very hard problem...but one that could be solved.
Short term, glass introduces the concept of this kind of device to the masses.
Though you bring up an interesting point, we are still very far from being able to do much of what you described. Being able to erase people entirely from video in real time is something I haven't seen done, nor do I think it would be feasible in the near future. Additionally, from what I see Google Glass is off in the corner of your vision and translucent so you would be able to see through anything it shows you.
It's interesting that in HN comments, most people are very excited for the arrival of glass. They think of it as something that will enhance their lifestyle, their productivity, etc.
If you read comments about glass in other forums such as at the bottom of NYTimes articles or other more general public media, most comments seem to be just the opposite: fear and paranoia about the arrival of glass in terms of privacy, or "naturalists" who abhor the thought of technology being a ubiquitous layer in front of real world experiences.
This makes me think it will be awhile before glass will be universally accepted. Just like certain restaurants and cafes are declaring themselves as cell phone free zones, will they also make you take off your glasses before being seated?
Actually, it's been surprising to me that there are many, many folks on HN who view this the way you mention non-HNers do. I would have expected what you say to be the case, but lots of HNers also seem to be dismissive and afraid of this. :(
The paranoiac in me wants to suggest that they would be recording everything and sending it home. But there are probably legal issues with that, so instead I will suggest that you are going to be interacting with a device on your face that sends back information about every query you make with it.
If you are uneasy about cell phones recording your position at all times, this is probably worse.
The general tone here on HN is positive, for the most part people who aren't interested in glass stay out of the glass threads and comment on the things that excite them. The naysayers exist - I personally think it's a terrible idea, and I'm not a "naturalist" or somebody who cares overly about privacy. I just think it's a goofy idea.
This is true about most new technology. HN is full of early adopters. The general public will only be interested once it's socially acceptable and at a consumer price point.
It only solves one side of man machine interaction: the machine-to-man part. For many interactions, its solution for man-to-machine is voice, which is anything but unobtrusive in public.
Some of my favorite fictional technology is subvocal speech recognition. (For examples, see the motes in A Deepness in the Sky, and Jane's interface with Ender in the Speaker for the Dead series.)
I think the wearable tinkering community has plenty of ideas for input devices to draw from. Such as this little one-handed keyboard: http://chordite.com/ . A touch panel (doing the same job as the one on the side of Glass, so you could operate Glass without reaching up to the side of your head) could be located pretty much anywhere and blend in quite well, on a belt or watch or some such. Someone else mentioned Myo (https://getmyo.com/ ); that would be nice too.
As long as the interface makes the number of choices available at each "page" of the interface pretty low, then input devices get small and easy to hide.
What about you can use eye focus and movements to gesture in it? I'm thinking about a way to use it without words, or hands. An advanced Human Interface Device for Eyes only (optionally augmented with voice/hand gestures).
It's unclear from the article whether or not the author has actually used Google Glass. It's pretty vague, so I assume not. It's easy to wax on about the greatness of a device if, having never used one, you're free to project all of your hopes and fantasies onto it.
I would like my next car Google Glass enabled. It could display turn by turn directions, warn of upcoming traffic, and let me know what services are available at the next exit.
I can also foresee Google Glass being very useful for complex, domain specific tasks that require your hands: surgery, automobile repair, home construction, cooking, learning to play an instrument, dealing cards, sowing, tying flies etc.
It would hope the UX would be completely optimized for a heads up display.
For example, I would love a virtual pace car that I could just follow. I would slow down when its virtual brake lights went on, I would switch lanes when it did, and I would prepare to turn when it put in it blinkers.
This would require Google Glass to be completely integrated with the car's radar-based collision avoidance system.
And mostly useless. Most active people would prefer walking or cycling to maintain their fitness. Most inactive people don't have the coordination and would rather sit down on a mobility scooter. It was a cool idea with a limited market.
Glass will succeed if people find it useful enough and the dorkiness will become cool. It is really an extension of the smartphone user interface and smartphones are undeniably useful. People currently wear glasses and those ridiculous bluetooth earpieces so it isn't a big stretch.
I can't imagine Google Glass will be exactly cheap either.
Also, just like Segway has been facing regulatory issues [1], Glass deployment might be hampered by safety and privacy issues, at least initially and in some markets.
They're also somewhat dangerous, having killed the guy who bought the Segway company, among others. That is not mitigated by the fact that the Segway was marketed as something like better walking, discouraging helmet use (even while claiming in safety manuals that helmets are required).
AFAIK he drove off a cliff. He would just have quickly died if he had walked off the cliff, or ridden off with a bicycle.
While anything on wheels is more dangerous than walking, it's disingenuous to claim that this particular death is proof of the danger of travelling by Segway.
Something like this is far more accessible to consumers since you won't look weird in the goggles. Unfortunately it's VERY expensive (4 or 5 times the price of a regular pair of goggles).
The biggest problem with Google Glass is privacy.Anyone can record you without you knowing it. And it's not just walking down the street. There are so many bad scenarios. Usually we embrace new tech here but this device would bring privacy to a whole new level. Not to mention that Google is starting to be too powerful for our own good.
Well yes, but 95% of those people are buying those small cameras for a specific task (surveillance) and you still have to attach it to a device to make it work but the majority of people will buy Glass because it's cool and innovative thus "stalking" becomes an available option, "just in case" you want to do it.Temptation wins...
For the aver person a small camera is a smartphone, which needs to be obviously held up when filming. Google Glass would be omnipresent so you wouldn't notice when a camera is turned on.
There is a red light glowing when the camera is on. But what happens when you have 10 people with Glass?How will you stop everyone from recording?And 10 is a small number in a fast-paced environment like NYC.
What happens when someone zooms in on sensitive data in a company or home or anywhere you can think of.
The more Glasses you have, the less control you get.
I'm not aware of any mobile phone in the USA that has a light that turns on when recording (not including the flash). Glass won't have any special zoom capabilities. It's the same as a phone. If you're afraid of someone zooming in on sensitive data don't put it near a window where others can see it.
You are right.No phone has that but you can see a light in the prism on Glass when the device is recording. I am sure they can add zoom capabilities to the device.
The point is that no matter what alert signals you get, you can't just beat/accuse someone just because he is recording.It's a two-way street.
It seems to be an unpopular opinion, but what you see as the biggest problem I see as the most exciting feature (albeit Glass doesn't go far enough for my desires). I can't wait to see how machine learning can be applied to the corpus of audio and video recorded throughout my daily life. The idea that additional value can be "mined" from that data, retroactively, makes me even more excited.
It offers great insight into how he lives and works, and that is just from the analysis of his historic email, (rigorous!) calendar appointments and phone call metadata, not their actual content!
The image shown in this article does a good job of highlighting the usefulness of Glass. It's not just a heads up display. It's the smarts of knowing where you are, what you are doing, what you plan to do in order to provide relevant information in an automatic and unobtrusive way.
"Oh, I see you're at the airport and you have tickets on flight 644. Here's some useful departure info." Instead of finding a departure screen or tap-tap-tapping on your phone - it's just there.
I can see the contextual bit, but I'm not really sold—at least, not yet—on the HUD form-factor. Why can't I view the smartly-pulled-up, contextual information on a smartphone screen? There are a handful of situations where no-hands usage would be nice, but for the most part a screen works fine for me. There are lots of things I'd like improved about quick, non-frustrating access to information, but they're mostly the software/indexing/querying/"smarts", not the display technology.
Yes, as we all know, only obese, non-athletic people can be made faster by cars. Sigh.
Seriously, though, I know that my effective memory is thousands or millions of percent better than it would be without search and the internet. Google Glass just makes this faster and easier, and makes my life that much better remembered.
Sigh, you completely missed my point. There is technology which makes the human organism better and there is technology which just acts a crutch. Bicycles fall into the former category but not cars. Coursera/Udacity fall into the former category but Google glass does not.
Read "The Shallows."
Also, we are nowhere near the Singularity and all this tech will just make us intellectually obese in the end. Don't you agree that a car while making you faster in one sense does not really make you faster in another sense?
Once again, we don't have artificial legs which we can seamlessly integrate into our bodies to actually make us faster. We don't have chips that can integrate with our brains seamlessly. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
The hn crowd are of course a very tech minded group and more tolerant technology in their lives. My friends who watch the google glass video seem to come away thinking "what does it do?" - this is normal people, not geeks. They all laugh when I say you wear them and talk to them. Do we really want to start talking to our clothing. I immediately switched off Siri for much the same reason (other than it doesn't work at all except for canned demos) - People use their smartphones in the elevators, on buses, etc, they don't want to look like dorks saying "ok, glass, show me my schedule for tomorrow", instead they silently and discretely click on the app.
A walking still camera and video camera will immediately put people into a defensive frame, knowing that anything they say or do can end up on twitter/facebook etc within moments. Especially when google enable retroactive videoing, by keeping the camera looping until told to record, then it keeps the last X seconds of the video loop. The obvious use case for google is to collect more data about you to sell more ads, and guess where those ads will end up.
Of course this is ignoring the legal issues of recording in courtrooms, corporations, photography on private property, what happens when someone's reading their email while driving and crashes into the self-driving car in front of them.
I applaud google for trying to invent the future, and maybe in 100 years society will be a different place with new zero-privacy expectations and laws have caught up with the world, but until then, my prediction is this is the new segway.
Can't offer any predictions about Google glass, yet I think the Surface analogy just falls flat. It's not about Microsoft's 10k surface it's about failing to get the critical momentum going in the mass market.
There was such a thing called the Tablet PC[1] introduced by Microsoft in 2001, you could get one for below 1500 USD in 2003†.
They were marketed as a niche product if at all. For about a decade they were the only available portable devices that offered decent screen resolutions/pixel densities. The software was partly premature yet mostly usable. Some things just take time to mature to be seen as marketable to the consumer market.
In case if screen resolutions just too much time, its just kind of sad that you always seem to have to wait for Apple to push those technologies into bigger markets (touch interfaces/ high resolution displays) it's good to see that there finally is some competition is this area (Google Pixel, Retina Screens) and operation systems with with resolution flexible UI's are finally the norm.
† got a one back then which is still doing its fanless & meanwhile stylusless work as a trusty small home server.
The voice interface and the forced fashion statement will probably greatly contribute to the death of this product as it stands, but I think it's the next necessary step to something truly revolutionary.
I would like the next step to solve these two issues using something like subvocalization to replace voice commands, and having more say in the fashion statement, so you can custom order your Glass to make it look (more) like you're wearing normal reading glasses, or sunglasses, or whatever. The latter is just a brute force matter of getting hardware sizes down even more over the coming years.
Then eventually we'll just splice the display into our optic nerves, and drive the interaction with our thoughts, and the borg takeover will be complete.
Personally I am offended by Google glass! and I refuse to talk to anyone filming and recording my voice me on Google glass. It's offensive on many levels. Google should work on a social etiquette for their product. Showing you a small screen on your end is your business, pointing a camera toward me, recording me and my voice is my business, and it can only be done with my permission, and it is "no". The only scenario that makes sense is that I am wearing Google glass and I can set a permission on my glass that others can film me with their glass or not.
If you value privacy, you don't want me looking at your private stuff. Don't show it to me or ask me to leave.
But if you allow me to look at you, then I can remember what I see. I am allowed to remember everything that I see and hear, every single last detail, forever, and without requesting permission from anyone.
If I have trouble remembering, I may write it down or draw pictures of what I saw and heard, and also store these forever without asking for permission or forgiveness.
Glass is just a widget that helps me do it slightly more accurately.
The problem isn't that you're remembering it. The problem is that Google is remembering it. Google will make a database of every frame recorded by every Glass device, indexed by the people in it. Now, everything I do in the presence of a Glass user is cataloged for Google to pull up and use in advertising.
It's also available for law enforcement to subpoena.
I'd be more comfortable if it was all stored locally, and the Glass devices were running 100% free and open source software that could be examined to confirm that Google never gets a copy of any of the video or images.
Because the law says they have to. In some settings, privacy and wiretapping laws will apply to using Glass. In some other settings, they won't. Different US states have different laws governing the use of audio and video recording hardware in private versus public settings.
Glass is going to force new discussion about one-party versus two-party consent to recordings. It's a conversation that needs to happen.
Some US states have audio recording laws that can still apply even "walking down the street". Look at some of the cases of individuals attempting to record police who were charged under wiretapping laws.
I'm not really arguing about the details of how current laws are, I'm arguing about the morality of technology and how the laws should be.
If I'm talking to you over the phone, I'm allowed (both morally and legally) to remember your conversation. I'm allowed (both morally and legally) to write it down, to remember it better. And I'm allowed (both morally and legally) to remember it perfectly forever, if I'm able to.
Should we legally forbid to actually fulfill that if I need some assistance to remember it exactly as happened? My fuzzy memories and notes are allowed, why should better, exact memories/notes be forbidden?
I'm allowed and may be even required to remember past events in courts - should we forbid remembering things as they actually happened and require them to be stuck in the noisy, lossy and distorting channel that is homo sapiens memories?
But a recording allows you to share what I have shown you (perhaps assuming it would remain a private matter) with the world. A video recording has a higher truth value than oral reproduction.
It does have a reputation of being a bit more trustworthy as it's (temporarily) harder to fake - but it is orthogonal to privacy. I would be able to disclose your secrets from memory, despite your assumptions.
In this sense Glass simply replicates a rather unusually good memory - and it may be obtained in natural ways; for example, some people really have absolutely 'photographic' memory due to a genetic or birth 'defect'.
And it is possible (likely?) that I might in future obtain such unusually good memory as well - through brain-improving drugs, genetic engineering or implants that augment my brain . Or, in a rather limited way, through Google Glass.
What I'm aiming at is that by banning such recordings in essence you would be banning people having a better / more accurate memory. And I see that as a Bad Thing - globally speaking, I'd like to see that people have a chance to improve beyond current body limitations. All of them.
Making a law that states "your memory must be fallible, imperfect and degrade with time, since that's how it's Always Been Done Here" seems, well, evil.
Actually, it doesn't require any permission whatsoever so long as you are in a public area. If the owner of private property says you can't film there, then you can't, but simply being the subject of public filming doesn't give you the right to object.
> Comments about legality or western perspectives on privacy are off base.
If you want to participate in Western society, you need to be able to interact with people who will observe you in public. My parent poster does not accept the basic implications of being observed in public. It's not at all off base to point out that his fundamental understanding of privacy is in conflict with the world around him.
There is absolutely no such requirement. Where would such a requirement come from, and how would it be enforced? It is an absurd fabrication. The ability and right to ignore people in public has a long and proud history in western society.
Again, the parent poster rejects the basic implications of being in public: people observing him and knowing what he did in public. He is offended by people seeing him, hearing what he says.
Disagreeing with being observed is incompatible with Western life, since you can't get very far without leaving your private property. I do imagine in 50 years or so, you'd be right: you'll be able to live an entire life in (say) America without ever leaving your house. I'm not sure I'd want to, but the parent poster clearly requires it, if he can't handle being perceived.
He has every right to hold whatever opinion on privacy he wants, and he can act on those opinions in any legal fashion he wishes.
If he intends to drag people to court and thinks that will work, then he is delusional. If he is just choosing to abstain from unnecessary contact with people who are wearing cameras? Not my cup of tea, but so what? He can do that all he wishes.
I have some rather similar rules that are less extreme but applied much more often in practice. For example, I refuse to interact with people on public transit or on the street when I am wearing headphones. You could say I am "offended" when people try to talk to me when I am actively ignoring them. Big whoop. You find his expectations of social conduct unreasonable. Big whoop.
You can say that I "can't" have that attitude towards social interaction in public, or that he cannot, but the simple fact of the matter is that we can. We have the ability and the right to choose how we wish to interact with others.
You don't understand (the Western notion of) privacy one lick. I recommend avoiding all public places until you figure it out and get comfortable with it.
The key problem with Google Now is that you have to remember to look at it, and so, most people don't get the benefit as much as they should. The act of having to physically remove the phone, unlock it, to see contextual Now card notifications IMHO is a transaction cost that makes it less likely you'll use it effectively.
You need to be able to see and dismiss a contextual notification within a second, like a warning light in a cockpit. It should be effortless and almost second nature.
That's one reason why the glass, or going further, direct-mind-machine interface, would be better - speed. Latency matters. I am often deterred by the time it takes to unlock a phone to perform an action. For example, I once witnessed a car accident and wanted to snap a picture, but it took too long to get my phone out, and I missed the moment. Other times, I want to translate something I'm looking at, but bringing up an app to do it is just too annoying. Look at the way the characters in Star Trek the Next Generation call on the computer to answer questions as if it is always just there for the asking. That's the kind of responsiveness you want.
I think a lot of people assume that a device that sits on your face would be "always on", constantly distracting you, but I'd argue that the ideal device is one that is out of your way, but activates extremely quickly on demand, or contextually as appropriate, like a subconscious subroutine or personal assistant.
Too much effort I think is focused on immediate mass mainstream adoption. It's as if, you can't have an iPhone level sales volume, it's not even worth doing. But there are lots of things worth doing that the masses don't necessarily adopt out of the gate. Someone needs to lay the foundation that the future is built on, that other people can build on. Google Glass doesn't need to "kill" the iPhone to succeed.
The true genius and revolution of Glass is the interaction system. It's the first large scale, consumer product which will really provide a much faster interface with our phones / computers. We have small computers that can do anything in our pockets, but the bottleneck for the past years has been passing commands onto it, typing them, taking it out etc.
Glass will provide a much more embedded experience, where you have constant access, where you never have to ask yourself is it worth taking my phone out of my pocket etc.
The scary part is what that will do to our memory, we'll slowly move towards a shared memory that sits on the net. When every question's answer is a ms away, will we still use our own memory? Maybe we'll use it as RAM :)
Anyway I'm very excited, I'm sure the interactions and seeing people with glass will be fairly odd, but the intrusive part of it will be resolved in time.
That doesn't mean that a wearable device embedded in your glasses cannot eventually become a 'bicycle for the mind' but I think the fact that the computer is so noticeable and strange looking means that this version 1.0 will not be too successful. Google is positioning itself well to be the one who figures it out first, but I don't think Glass will take off as a mass-consumer device on a smartphone scale for a while. First, the computer will need to become 'invisible'. Until then, Glass will be highly useful to a few professions (and a toy for nerds), while Google will gain invaluable data and continue to iterate.
Torrez/Gruber seem to be arguing smartphones are superior cause you aren't always focusing on them, but what is stopping you from not always using the glasses?
I've searched a little but can't find a picture of someone wearing them pushed up onto their head like people often do with sunglasses. But I too don't understand why people seem to be ignore that option in their objections. Or put a lanyard on them and wear them around your neck when you want to show everyone around that you are not splitting your attention.
Glass is such a personal experience that is not able to be shared with the world and can really only be explained by "you just have to try it". I am rooting for glass, but I have no idea how it will overcome the d-bag who always has their bluetooth in their ear.
I use bluetooth as a social analogy, not as a technical one.
Wearable computing, in general, is unlikely to be as successful as a tablet with a great capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen and a UI designed for fingers.
The modern tablet is a true breakthrough. Wearables are potential new market, and there is some excitement around the fact that both Google and Apple will enter that market soon. But wearables are far from a sure thing.
For one thing, Google Glass has a voice user interface. Google's speech recognition is the best there is, but on alternate days it still veers from astounding to laughable.
The most compelling application, face recognition, has a high creepiness factor, and Google probably won't touch it even though I would be first in line to buy if I could pick everyone in my contact list out of a crowd.
Personally i'm cautious with my expectations as I approach glass. It's clear that instant accessibility of information changes literally everything. For example as I drive to work, i like to listen to lectures from Itunes U. Today during the lecture the professor mentioned a concept I wasn't familiar with. Unfortunately there was no way for me to stop, and find out what that was. Which means there was some clear missed value on my part.
Google glass is an attempt to bring additional context related information into your life. That's a game changer, but until I see it, I have a really hard time believing glass can deliver this quite yet. But it might get us started in the right direction, and that alone is significant.
I have a really hard time believing glass can deliver this quite yet.
I would've agreed, except that I've been extremely impressed with what Google Now is already doing on my phone. Still in its infancy, it's often creepy how relevant the context it brings is to what I'm doing.
In the same way that most people now associate Apple with the iPhone, in the future Google Glass may become Google's piece de resistance ... the product for which they are most well known for. Google search will just be a service embedded in everything.
I'm still guessing how Glass would stand up to the performance shown in the demo video. For Glass to work like as shown it would need to have Internet connection everywhere (including ski slops and dessert roads) and batteries need to last for a significant portion of the day. One way it can do is to offload processing + connection to cellular via Bluetooth to phone in your pocket. In which case Glass becomes just interface device for phone like Bluetooth headsets but with camera and tiny projector. The projector could be LED based low powered device with a lens. I think whole thing can be made very cheaply, probably under $199. It would be a very cool thing for sure.
The internet connection is already external. It uses wifi or tether with your android/iphone. So no, it is not going to be cheaper. You can't offload processing because then it totally depends on the phone.
Google Glass solves output. But voice input is still problematic, it's generally only usable when the set of expected words is heavily circumscribed. Though, most people can talk faster than they can type, around 150–160 WPM, so in principle, it's better than a keyboard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_lis...
The first-to-market with new category of device doesn't always dominate the category. Consider the PC (Apple was first). Given an ugly version and a cool version of wearable computing, which will people prefer to wear?
Google Glass is the next step in the evolution of technology. It is the next generation of mobile technology, a stepping stone from cell phones. There was a time when the idea of carrying around a phone seemed ludicrous, now we all have one. In fact now these devices are more powerful than previous generations of desktop computers. So yes, give it 5 years and we'll all have something of the sort. I'll even go as far as to say devices like Glass could out sell mobile phones in the future.
I am a very cynical man. The current phones are toys, not tools, and I see no reason for google glass to be any different. Toy's make more money than tools.
Some nice thoughts but dcurtis missed the point: people do not criticise the concept or idea of Google Glass -- they sneer at the implementation. Once we have mores subtle devices or even contact lenses with embedded screens we'll see a breakthrough of this new medium but until then it's more kind of a R&D thing with a use case for just few niches.
dcurt.is is overrated. Didn't he tell us about 2 years ago how 3.5" is the perfect size for smartphones and how brilliant Apple was for making it like that? (never mind that people have different hand sizes, and they are willing to compromise on "thumb perfection" to get a larger screen). And then Apple introduces the 4", taller, iPhone.
I think a first big step is going to be conquering usability of Glass with respect to NLP. It's truly going to embody the vision that Dustin is talking about once I can get things don with my voice with no error and minimal overhead. Ideally we wouldn't even have to talk to the device, that would be the Holy Grail.
The difference between the two is just marketing and time. Glass's success crucially depends on convincing normal people that they won't look like dorks wearing it. It doesn't matter if it's a million times better than Xybernaut, if you can't get normal people to feel normal wearing it, it won't succeed. A million times better isn't good enough if it's still worse than not wearing it.
Technologists have always thought the problem with wearable computing was that the technology wasn't good enough. Nowadays, I think the real problem with wearable computing is fashion.
As a member of the tech community, I'm excited and looking forward to getting Glass for myself, but I don't see widespread adoption to the scale that the non-tech community can handle until we've innovated at least some of the uses and worked out the 1.0 bugs.