I have to respectfully disagree that this is the future. Is the future comprised of devices that you have to consciously wear on you all the time (I can barely stand to wear the prescription glasses I'm supposed to wear, let alone glasses that will occasionally provide me with some utility)
On top of it, is the future of HCI in devices that you have to talk to? (Siri, Glass) Not only do I have a very hard time getting any voice recognition to understand my non native accent (beyond common phrases), having to talk to your devices is an extremely unnatural thing for me to do, unless I'm in private.
These devices may be futuristic, but this is not the revolutionary future.
I just picked up my Glass on June 27th. The first thing that bothered me was the voice recognition. The woman at the front desk asked if I was Irish, another French, and a person at the bar asked about my accent. I'm from Mississippi and partially raised by a father with a northern accent.
Sadly, Glass understands me 1/2 of the time. In fact, sometimes it even misinterprets "OK Glass". This has left me at an impasse, because this is mostly a voice recognition device while only having access to GlassWare.
Another interesting side effect: do you know the ghost vibrations from using a cellphone? After wearing Glass for 15-25 minutes, I have this ghost-like feeling that I am still wearing them. It can be disorienting once I remove them.
One tip that might help you is that you never have to say OK Glass anyway. Just tap the thing once to wake it up, then tap again to go to the voice commands instead of saying OK Glass. Or tap and hold for Google direct.
People claim I don't have an accent, but I still have to make each word clearly separate for the device as well. So make sure you are doing that. I've worked with voice recognition that blows this stuff away, hopefully Google will license better technology like Dragon or Nuance, theirs is pretty much the worst I've ever used and I don't think it has any sense of context or the complete sentences I'm saying at all.
I suspect that eventually (~15 years) this sort of technology will be worked into contact lenses (which communicates to a small device that fits in your pocket, like a phone) assuming prolonged RF that close to the cornea has no long term physiological effects.
That's what I try to say in the article. This is "A" possible future, and it is a first iteration of a totally new product. The first iPhone wasn't a success, and many people were convinced a phone without a keyboard couldn't be the future.
The iPhone 3G was the blockbuster hit. The first iPhone was at best modestly successful. The most obvious indicators were that Apple gave it a significant price drop after 3 months and then introduced another model with more storage after 7 months to bolster sales.
I'm always amazed at how much anti-Glass sentiment I see in the tech community. I personally think it's going to be amazing. The best analogy I can think of is the heads-up display (HUD) in video games. The current use cases shown (texting, weather, pictures, etc.) are insignificant in comparison to the potential for combining with other wearable computing devices such as Fitbits, Fuelbands, Thalmic MYO's, etc.
Of course, this is an early iteration of the concept, but I see it as a game changer. Imagine removing the HUD from all of your video games. That experience sucks.
Now imagine a world where we can combine quantified-self computing, augmented reality, and new interface devices such as Thalmic MYO with the Glass...that future is a future I very much want to live in.
Maybe that's the fundamental disagreement, because that's a future I don't really want to live in. I don't like HUDs in videogames for the most part. And I don't want a bunch of shallow behaviorism everywhere, whether it's called gamification or quantified-self or life-as-an-A/B-test. The actual device itself I don't have any particular aversion to.
However so far all that does seem pretty easy to avoid, at least in your personal life, so I'm not extremely worried about it (gamification in the workplace may be harder to avoid, depending on your job and job options).
I find your perspective to be refreshingly different than my own. I love the idea of a HUD - even it it's something I don't use often.
What I had not thought about was the privacy implications, and the more I think about it, the less happy I feel about people with it on all the time.
Part of me feels this fear is irrational, as I don't have a problem with people taking video with their cell phones. However, this deep-seated aversion to it seems more due to the it-might-always-be-on aspect -- similar to how most of us are OK with the idea of wiretaps when warranted, yet flip out about the recent intelligence news.
Penny Arcade and some other articles I've read have really reinforced the perspective that people will want to punch me in the face for using Glass. I think Glass's biggest hurdle will not be the prospect of looking silly, but of all of your friends saying "Turn that damn thing off before I break it".
I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I don't really care if people have Glass on around me. People have cameras with them at all times these days due to smartphones. The fact that it's not attached to their head is not what's stopping them from taking photos and video at inappropriate times. I don't see myself beginning to take unsolicited photos any more than I would have with my phone (aka never) just because I have Glass on. I imagine the same goes for most people you have any sort of meaningful interaction with.
Here, let's go the other way (maybe they even go together!):
Let's imagine a world where you sign up for discounts on certain goods in exchange for allowing your Glass to randomly take pictures throughout the day. This data is mined and tagged and sorted, until one day the .gov or .mil or some hacker decides to pull it and use it for nefarious purposes.
The fact is that the nerd fantasy of getting a HUD (to track what, exactly? Ammo? Health? Some numbers in a database you've been trained to equate with self-worth?) is not worth the societal cost of losing privacy.
"But we've already got smartphones with cameras!" doesn't work--the camera is there, and likely just a change of app policy away from being always on.
What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it."
There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.
The telephone example is near exactly Google Voice, right? Massive voice database for the cost of some subsidized VoIP and storage?
"...cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data..."
You do realize that this is exactly the Google and Facebook business model, right? Targeted advertising using user-generated content?
"The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant"
Over a billion people have signed up for Facebook, giving up their own social graph data and (as we've seen recently) address books, and that's just for a free shitty profile page whose design changes on a whim. Add a burger to that, and you've got a deal.
There's no slippery-slope here--at this point, the dataset is large and obvious enough that if you aren't blinded by the magical nerd future you'll see very reasonable concerns over what might happen.
Do you have any evidence that Google Voice records phone calls without a user's explicit permission? I was never referring to voicemails (which are rarely used these days anyway).
I also don't see how you can make the argument that passive recording of everyone around you is the same as Facebook only receiving data that a user proactively sends it (ie. status updates, photo uploads, etc.).
Finally, even if we were to accept your slippery-slope arguments as true, why not go further down the slope and claim that the internet shouldn't exist either because massive data sets about your lives are already being mined and are at risk of nefarious use?
Always, always with the absurd "hurr durr slippery slope what about this nonsensical extreme" stuff. If you cannot fathom the difference between the Internet as a loose federation of servers and services on an open protocol and network, and the sharecropping and fencing-in of modern walled gardens, I have nothing to say to you. If you can't figure out how the latter position is more easily abused than the former, I can't help you.
As for the voice stuff--look, given that much data, why wouldn't you mine it to improve things like transcription and whatnot?
(If a Googlebro wants to correct me on this, by all means go ahead.)
As a developer, writing for an expensive accessory like Glass is already a crap shoot. Writing for people who have two expensive accessories? There's almost no point.
There seem to be two major topics governing the front page of hackernews lately - the NSA leaks and Google Glass (though Glass was obviously much earlier). And reading through the comments about these two topics feels like being on two completely different web sites, with completely different audiences: a device tracking minute details of your life, that is sold by an advertising company, intended to use all the information available to sell you even more stuff you don't really need, is hailed nearly uncritically as the next big thing. A secret service that tries to track all physical and virtual movements of every living human is rightly criticized as detrimental to democratic societies.
Glass is a wet dream for intelligence services. I would have expected these two topics to influence each other much more. Is it because there are indeed two disjoint HN populations (or rather n disjoint populations), or because some of a nerd's aggravation is easily soothed by the latest cool gadget?
Disclaimer: I find Glass fascinating and creepy at the same time, so I could fully understand the latter possibility.
I comment on Glass articles because I'm very excited about it. I don't comment on NSA articles because I personally don't find it to be an issue and I know I'll be burned at the stake and deemed an idiot for even considering having a differing view on privacy than the majority here.
In the first instance, I'm excited and can expect rational discussion. In the second, I'm more or less indifferent and certainly not masochistic.
You're not the only one who's amazed by the overlap between Glass, the NSA leaks.
I'll add another datapoint: the new MS XB One is also another intelligence services wet dream, and is yet another fascinating but creepy product.
Why are all the new hot products giant spying devices? For my part I'd be much more thrilled with the concept of Glass if it did NOT have a camera. I want an assistant, not an overseer.
The future is not made of Google Glass, but will be better because of lessons learned from it.
Computers will get smaller and smaller and fade into the backgrounds of our lives. Human Computer Interaction will become be highly centered on touch, gestures, and speach. Not because they have some amazing technical advantage, but because that is how we interact with other humans.
Google glass is a step in that direction, but ultimately just a prototye device that tests a few ideas out. This is not the winning idea that people want it to be and that Google wishes it was. You can cout out wide adoption and you can count out revolutionizing anything, because at the end of the day, it does not fade into the background. What it will do is provide some good feedback (as any beta product will) to all of us for honing the future of wearable devices and computing in general.
What I don't get: In a time when we are very aware of government tracking programs we are being asked to strap a GPS and camera to our heads so that Google can track us constantly?
Agreed. I was ambivalent about Glass before Snowden's leaks. Now there's absolutely no way. Glass is little more to me now than a white-labeled data front-loader for the NSA.
Which is a shame in a way. If Glass turns out to be compelling it might have been the reason for me to sign up for a Google account. Now, no way.
Seriously? The one thing that all the "tin foil" people were talking about for decades is finally proven beyond a shadow of a doubt - and you're still going to refer to them in a derisive tone?
I don't have my cellphone camera pointed at everything I'm looking at. As an experiment, you could hold your cellphone up and point the camera at people you talk to and see how many like it. Sneaking a peak a woman's bosom could have more serious consequences than her saying "my eyes are up here."
One word: pretentious. The article. Google Glass. All of it. I'll be interested when that is no longer true (at least for glass, it's too late for the article).
When I think of a World of Glass I always go back to Corning's A Day Made of Glass http://youtu.be/6Cf7IL_eZ38 which has far more every day examples we can all believe in
When early adopters try to get other people to understand why they like some new product and think it will catch on, it will, by definition, always be pretentious.
Maybe you shouldn't read articles about new products, if they anger you so much.
"Glass has a packaging so slick and gorgeous it makes you feel like you’re unboxing an Apple product"
Ha! So much for Google setting their own precedent on quality.
Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance. Concierge service and complementary Champagne?
And these reviews! They're so painfully rote: wifi-bluetooth-battery-life-sucks-now-you-can-check-your-email-in-the-middle-of-a-conversation-needs-more-iterations-here-are-some-shitty-pictures-of-a-buffet.
The 'Glass experience' is nothing more than a scripted over-courteous event. As a developer with social anxiety, my Glass experience was spending quality time with my wife as we ventured throughout LA.
Unboxing is not interesting to me. Overly-cheery reps are not an experience. Touring a near-empty facility rivals staring at pictures online. My wife's comment summed it up: "You just looked disappointed the whole time."
Yet, don't discredit the device. There are amazing chances to improve people's lifestyles. There will be niches to help navigate people through life in otherwise impossible-to-assist situations. The to be educated/educators, handicapped, autistic, businesses and many others may find new approaches to life through a device like this.
QR codes are sold by marking folks to other marketing folks. If it is relying on Google Glass to finally take off, you can put the nails in the coffin right now.
It's the friction that makes it useless. I saw a QR code on the window of a Chevy Volt that said scan for Volt info. It would have taken a lot longer to find and use a QR scanner than to just enter Chevy Volt into search on a mobile browser.
If QR scanning was a first class citizen and I could just look at it and instantly get the information, I can see QR being used by real people.
"How many times have you been in a conversation, and picked up your phone to Google something you’re talking about. And after reading the result, you check your homescreen, and a few seconds later, you’re reading your tweets or your Facebook newsfeed, and no longer contributing to the conversation? Being able to ask Google anything and instantly get the answer without having to use your phone is magical."
This is a problem of focus and attention, not an interface problem. If you play with your phone when you're supposedly spending time with friends, glass is just going to make this significantly worse (because now you're looking towards me but still scrolling through your FB feed).
"And with Google Now, you know how bad the traffic is and how long your ride home is going to be without having to ask for it."
I use a better solution today. Waze has routed me around traffic jams with amazing success, and it didn't cost me anything (since I already invested in my smartphone).
Everything I've read on glass so far seems to be taking some big leaps to justify the device. As others have said, it will lead us towards some interesting solutions eventually, but it is definitely not the best solution to ANYTHING.
Google Glass is an innovative product that will surely cause some problems. I admit I'd love to have one, but given what cellphones have done to life, I fear that we are rushing into radical changes without due thought.
Privacy issues when Glass users record every interaction they have (and potentially post to their social networks). Capturing my daugther's first words is sweet. Capturing my naked partner could be different. No need to hold up a phone -- very convenient. And it will surely all be there on the web.
Glass also could further the trend towards self-indulgent isolation and distraction. Are looking at me or reading mail? Texting while driving is bad, reading tweets and viewing images while driving (all hands free) will be worse.
People already spend too much time photographing/capturing experiences instead of actually experiencing them. Glass will accentuate this. The goal in life should be to live in the present, not record for posterity. And frankly, I have my own life; I don't want to share every bit of yours...
I few years back, I welcomed these gadgets as awesome ways to improve one's life, to make it much more interesting, efficient. Nowadays, when I start to grasp actual capabilities of myself and people around me, after seeing what power bad people have over the rest, not so much.
In fact, I am scared to death every time technology like this appears. I know it will be misused, it will become another instrument for hurting people. Or at least as long as we will tolerate it. And we will. It's what we (smart people) are good at. Tolerating. Coping. Working around. Fixing things for ourselves, mocking others who don't understand how.
What do I see in Google Glass? More behavioural programming via advertisements and/or information manipulation. Further corrosion of privacy (of others, wearers can turn them off). New symbol of higher social class, even more prominent than a smartphone.
i think glass will find more adoption with commercial uses than with consumers. military, construction workers, police, racecar drivers, pilots, etc. those people actually can use a HUD for more than just checking twitter comments and they won't look weird wearing it.
for consumer uses, i hope the future is not glass. people should interact with people. today our phones can go in our pockets and we can talk face to face. with glass, we'll talk in this order: face -> glass -> glass -> face.
i do want important info to be surfaced when i need it, but i don't need it as a HUD. a voice in my ear, or perhaps even something as futuristic as just "knowing" that i need to make a left at the next light since the computer has informed the right part of my brain of that.
but please, i don't want to have to compete with glass for your attention.
It's sad there's not more awareness of the optimal form factor for wearable computing revealed all the way back in 1981 [1], if maybe a bit oversized and rudimentary by modern technical standards:
A future where google gets to control what's in your visual field all day long.
A future controlled by one company.
I recall that being something people were terrified of when it was Apple in the driving seat, but I guess Google is Open and is only focused on what's best for the end user, so it's all fine.
Wordy prose, rampant grammatical mistakes, a poorly constructed argument... my classmates in junior-high wrote more convincingly.
I can almost hear the author patting himself on the back for writing that last sentence. If the future is making existing solutions to first world problems slightly more convenient, I'm not interested in being a part of it.
The best way to achieve that noble goal would be to open up their search index (unlimited API access) and build a marketplace around search, just as they have around Android, Youtube and Chrome.
Search has a very long way to go and they can be moving much faster than they currently are.
I think we have passed the point where anyone else can actually build an engine that returns results just matching, forget about surpassing, Google quality.
Since we are where we are, might as well move on to phase two and allow people to build on top of it. Just look at the random bunch(flights, recipes, patents...) of 10 or so tabs above the search box. Is that the extent to which the worlds information can be classified? Is that it?
On top of it, is the future of HCI in devices that you have to talk to? (Siri, Glass) Not only do I have a very hard time getting any voice recognition to understand my non native accent (beyond common phrases), having to talk to your devices is an extremely unnatural thing for me to do, unless I'm in private.
These devices may be futuristic, but this is not the revolutionary future.