5 ms·

A future made of Glass

30 points by Madness64 13y ago

JonSkeptic 13y ago
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).
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- Shivetya 13y ago
  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 http://youtu.be/6Cf7IL_eZ38 which has far more every day examples we can all believe in
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  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.
alphakappa 13y ago
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.
- Madness64 13y ago
  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.
  - dougmccune 13y ago
    I'm certainly curious what metric you're using when considering the first iphone to be unsuccessful...
    - shurcooL 13y ago
      It wasn't as popular as today's iPhones. It was successful for a first gen device, but it pales in comparison to today's success of iPhone.
    - KristenJ 13y ago
      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.
- VikingCoder 13y ago
  Why don't you interact with computers in your native language?
  - alphakappa 13y ago
    Because English is essentially my primary language.You just wouldn't know that from my accent.
  - lucian1900 13y ago
    Because that is entirely infeasible for most languages that aren't English.
- deleted 13y ago
nsxwolf 13y ago
Yesterday I realized Google Glass could cause QR codes to finally take off.
- pseudometa 13y ago
  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.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    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.
nrivadeneira 13y ago
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.
- mjn 13y ago
  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).
  - gknoy 13y ago
    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".
pseudometa 13y ago
Nerd Alert. Google Glass is the calculator watch of the 90s. But instead of the a pallet of buttons on a writst, you now have a camera affixed to your face.
- tjr 13y ago
  I want Google Glass connected to the Leap Motion hand movement interface.
- r00fus 13y ago
  Can't wait till Slashdot wakes up and puts the borg icon on Sergey for Google stories instead of BillG for Microsoft stories. Google has finally become what Microsoft wanted to be.
darasen 13y ago
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?
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  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.
  - kmicklas 13y ago
    Tin foil much? Just wait until someone puts Linux on it (i.e. not Android).
    - WayneDB 13y ago
      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?
- kmicklas 13y ago
  Is that really any different than carrying around a cell phone all day?
  - michaelwww 13y ago
    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."
deleted_account 13y ago
"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. Is this really the future?
- leephillips 13y ago
  "Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance." Works for Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion
embolism 13y ago
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.
pohl 13y ago
"What about an RSS reader that you wear on your FACE?" - Anil Dash https://twitter.com/anildash/status/312048420720345088 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/312048420720345088
pseudometa 13y ago
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.
MaybiusStrip 13y ago
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.
- Madness64 13y ago
  Would love to see if your prose in French is better than mine in English ;)
ambiate 13y ago
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.
bluthru 13y ago
"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." This goal seems far less noble since unveiling Google Glass.
- Sven7 13y ago
  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.
  - embolism 13y ago
    The goal isn't so noble when you realize that they don't want anyone else doing it.
    - Sven7 13y ago
      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?
      - embolism 13y ago
        I quite agree, however Google appears to have no intention of allowing anyone else to be involved, and why would it?
        Sven7 13y ago
        Regulators. Its going to happen. And I hope they save everyone a whole lot of time and preempt it.
davmar 13y ago
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.
- WiseWeasel 13y ago
  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: http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/images/312162/312162_large.jpg http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/images/312162/312... [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/
sveme 13y ago
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.
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  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.
- r00fus 13y ago
  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.
molbioguy 13y ago
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...
mordae 13y ago
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. Yeah, mock me.
md224 13y ago
Champagne and sousveillance? Is this the egalitarian utopia we were promised?
aedocw 13y ago
"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.

30 points by Madness64 13y ago

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).

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
Shivetya 13y ago
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 http://youtu.be/6Cf7IL_eZ38 which has far more every day examples we can all believe in
VikingCoder 13y ago
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.

alphakappa 13y ago

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.

Madness64 13y ago
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.
- dougmccune 13y ago
  I'm certainly curious what metric you're using when considering the first iphone to be unsuccessful...
  - shurcooL 13y ago
    It wasn't as popular as today's iPhones. It was successful for a first gen device, but it pales in comparison to today's success of iPhone.
  - KristenJ 13y ago
    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.
VikingCoder 13y ago
Why don't you interact with computers in your native language?
- alphakappa 13y ago
  Because English is essentially my primary language.You just wouldn't know that from my accent.
- lucian1900 13y ago
  Because that is entirely infeasible for most languages that aren't English.
deleted 13y ago

nsxwolf 13y ago

Yesterday I realized Google Glass could cause QR codes to finally take off.

pseudometa 13y ago
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.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  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.

nrivadeneira 13y ago

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.

mjn 13y ago
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).
- gknoy 13y ago
  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".

pseudometa 13y ago

Nerd Alert. Google Glass is the calculator watch of the 90s. But instead of the a pallet of buttons on a writst, you now have a camera affixed to your face.

tjr 13y ago
I want Google Glass connected to the Leap Motion hand movement interface.
r00fus 13y ago
Can't wait till Slashdot wakes up and puts the borg icon on Sergey for Google stories instead of BillG for Microsoft stories. Google has finally become what Microsoft wanted to be.

darasen 13y ago

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?

Spearchucker 13y ago
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.
- kmicklas 13y ago
  Tin foil much? Just wait until someone puts Linux on it (i.e. not Android).
  - WayneDB 13y ago
    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?
kmicklas 13y ago
Is that really any different than carrying around a cell phone all day?
- michaelwww 13y ago
  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."

deleted_account 13y ago

"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. Is this really the future?

leephillips 13y ago
"Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance." Works for Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

embolism 13y ago

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.

pohl 13y ago

"What about an RSS reader that you wear on your FACE?" - Anil Dash https://twitter.com/anildash/status/312048420720345088 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/312048420720345088

pseudometa 13y ago

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.

MaybiusStrip 13y ago

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.

Madness64 13y ago
Would love to see if your prose in French is better than mine in English ;)

ambiate 13y ago

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.

bluthru 13y ago

"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." This goal seems far less noble since unveiling Google Glass.

Sven7 13y ago
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.
- embolism 13y ago
  The goal isn't so noble when you realize that they don't want anyone else doing it.
  - Sven7 13y ago
    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?
    - embolism 13y ago
      I quite agree, however Google appears to have no intention of allowing anyone else to be involved, and why would it?
      - Sven7 13y ago
        Regulators. Its going to happen. And I hope they save everyone a whole lot of time and preempt it.

davmar 13y ago

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.

WiseWeasel 13y ago
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: http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/images/312162/312162_large.jpg http://cineplex.media.baselineresearch.com/images/312162/312... [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/

sveme 13y ago

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.

nrivadeneira 13y ago
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.
r00fus 13y ago
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.

molbioguy 13y ago

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...

mordae 13y ago

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. Yeah, mock me.

md224 13y ago

Champagne and sousveillance? Is this the egalitarian utopia we were promised?

aedocw 13y ago

"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.