I guess I'm well on my way to being a cranky old man at the tender age of 34, but I find it extremely unlikely I'll ever use any device like glass on a regular basis. I love technology as much as the next geek, but I feel like I'm already a bit too much of a slave to my smart phone, and I don't think it's healthy to be plugged in 24/7. Having notifications popping up in my field of vision is just too high a price to pay for the convenience of not having to reach in my pocket.
There are things I'd want to use it for, but notifications are not it.
Map overlays, video chat (with a better camera), and of course outright augmented reality.
At some point, the display will be integrated in the actual glass and will be able to pick a different focus distance for every pixel. Add in sufficiently powerful mobile computers, and you have full AR. When that happens, Glass (or its successor) will become truly indispensable; this is just the birth pangs.
Might be a decade or two, though. It's a tall order; molecular nanotechnology could construct a device like that, but I'm not convinced we'll be clever enough to do it before that point.
The nuance is if one thinks deeply .. auditory interference is part of the human experience .. we even do not mind it since artifical and natural sources are always meshing in and out. This is why the Walkman took off since people were already listening to music from the time of live performances onward to the Edison era and then portables.
Glass if one thinks about it deeply is something unnatural.. microscopes, telescopes, vision impairment correction or shade from harmful sun.. or immersive , time disruptive experiences like a movie.
So the key barrier that glass concept is going to face is user rejection beyond the initial bubble crowd. Average people already have a certain context in which they find artificial inputs acceptable ( TV etc ).
Our distinction between natural and artificial sources of audio is different to visual.
I may be entirely wrong and Google may change the habits of a lot of young kids .. that is actually a rather strange and terrifying thought.
> I find it extremely unlikely I'll ever use any device like glass on a regular basis
Glass definitely not, because it's kinda crap (what I've seen so far are phone-style widgets — which I loathe in the first place — and telling your shades to record a video — underwhelming). An actual HUD/Augmented Reality system I can see myself using rather easily (as long as it remains fully under my control), but this'll need severe improvements of image processing and recognition (speed and flexibility).
I don't want notification popups, but virtual/augmented surface display could be very neat, e.g. have buses display "live" in wireframe even when they're outside field of vision (think "wallhack") to estimate how much time I have until it arrives, that kind of things.
Or the ability to "switch in" to an other user of the system (and get direct viewpoint) useful for virtual visits (potentially via "presence" robots, plug into the robot and see through it), helping people with stuff or (the other way around) getting help, imagine a tech of some sort doing an estimate of building/fixing something based on what he sees through your eyes. Also useful for things like surgeries (get colleagues in-viewpoints to assist/warn) or single-person dangerous works e.g. underwater stuff, multiple eyeballs on the same field of vision can pay attention to more things.
Or more "mundane" (but actually more difficult) applications such as ebooks with the physical feel of real books by having a "blank book" and AR inserting the ebook's content on the fly, or hologram/3D AR (easy to do when you've got a display per eye)
I've heard quite the contrary from initial feedback (Scoble, Verge reporters, etc.) based on the concept. The thing is, the currently released Explorer Edition is a prototype to see use cases. It's hard for there to be a "verdict" when the "to-market" product isn't even close to being ready.
Glass doesn't even have notifications right now, that's coming "soon."
The Google Glass devices serve both as a specific prototype consumer electronics device and a test-bed for a general user interaction concept, and I wish people writing reviews, or meta-reviews like this one, would pay more attention to the distinction. Many of these complaints could be fixed either with a software update (if, for example, the apps aren't sufficiently configurable), or with improved hardware in an actual production release (battery life, for example) without compromising the potential of the idea of Glass. These seem not to be such a big deal, since this initial iteration is just a prototype.
Some of these, though, are criticisms of the concept: if, for example, it really does cause lots of people disorientation or headaches to look at displays close to their faces, that seems to be an irreparable flaw in Glass-like devices as a product class, and is much more damning.
Unless people are getting disoriented because the object is in the middle of their field of vision on one side and not in their field at all on the other (testers apparently reported feeling "cross-eyed," which suggests that some people's eyes try to converge even though they can only see the display with one eye).
10 years ago, I was building WAP websites specifically for the large majority of people who felt uncomfortable strapping a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile phone holster to their belt, preferring to suffer through the painful experience on more stylish phones like the Motorola Razr instead. A smartphone wasn't necessary to access the data at that point, but made consumption and creation much more readily available, just like Google Glass does today. It's hard to remember that previous status quo in a post-iPhone world, but the people walking around with a BlackBerry in a belt holster then weren't unlike the people wearing Google Glass now.
I've been dying to hear the use cases ("killer apps") where Google Glass kicks ass. Scoble talked about how it speeds up photo so much, that I could it change the way we document our lives & experiences. That's big.
What else???
Any HNers use Google Glass yet and found killer uses?
The obvious use case is for military-type applications. Relay photos to an overhead drone to give commanders a situational awareness of what is happening. Designate targets. Provide video-game like HUD.
For consumers, I'd say the recording stuff is an uncanny valley. I'd love a HUD for navigation.
I'm sure there are, if anything it can be a substitute for the GoPro. But there just doesn't seem to be a use case with enough mass appeal to justify the price.
Nobody liked the Nintendo DS when it first came out either. Should it find a "killer app" at the right price it will be wildly popular, just like any other new hardware.
The killer app for eyewear like this is augmented reality, but the technology is not yet there. It will be, maybe in another ten years. Until then, devices like Glass will become progressively more useful.
A good take on it is the television series Dennou Coil, set in a future where augmented reality has become truly transparent. It shows the concept from the viewpoint of children, conveniently escaping a lot of the potential pitfalls of predictions.
Nobody liked the Nintendo DS when it first came out either
Who is nobody ? The gaming community ?
Because I would imagine the majority of the population would not know or care what Nintendo DS is. I fail to see how it is applicable to Google Glass which is designed from day one to be a mass-market device.
it could be very useful professional gadget for some but at this time it looks like the times when Microsoft was pushing the tablets without solving key problems. then one day the ipad came and did orders of magnitude better than all the tablets that microsoft endorsed for years.
one day a company may figure out how to solve all these things and then we can have a glass that is a mass market product.
While I'm glad that over the past 10 years high tech gadgets have become mainstream, I also lament it to some degree. Articles like this, written by people not used to using early prototypes of gadgets, are always completely off base. Most casual tech enthusiasts have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. Judging Glass based on its lack of wifi settings, email editing, or a bulky case is nonsense. We're getting a peak at a very early concept of something that we all know could be awesome if executed on properly, just like we knew tablets and smartphones would be awesome back in the 90s. There is absolutely no question that some sort of Google Glass-like device will become mainstream at some point. It's all a matter of execution.
The author admits those bullet points can be fixed. The core argument against Glass is it is trying to upheave social norms well before society is ready for them. Are people ready to have conversations with each other where there is a distracting screen in the corner of their eye at all times? Are you going to be annoyed when it's clear someone is only giving you half their attention, but doing so less overtly than if they were staring at their phone? I put my phone away at dinner, will people be continually turning Glass on and off as they enter and exit conversations?
The fact is phones and tablets had analogues going back hundreds of years in the form of books and wristwatches in terms of social norms. You check your watch, you check your phone. You sit down and read a book, you sit down and read your iPad. Society accepts local distractions where the user overtly makes it clear they are looking at something. There is no equivalent to Glass where the user has a distracting bit of information floating right within their view, but invisible to other people. This is a genuinely new disruption of social norms and it's wide open how people will react to it, and if they will ever accept it.
I don't agree that "it's all a matter of execution." Putting a cyborg-like eyepiece on people and an always-available HUD in front of them is not a foregone conclusion as something most people will ever want in their lives.
I've always said it's going to come down to how stupid you look to other people. And yes, I realize cell phones, etc, were viewed as douchey when they first came out. But the key difference between cell phones (and this is important) is that you could put the cell phone in your pocket, nullifying the douche-factor until you took it out again. If you take off your Glass because you look like a tool, you just completely eliminated the purpose of Glass.
I think the most likely path for Glass is that of the Segway: an uncool device that has amazing practical applications for professionals in certain domains. You'll see them on cops sooner than teenagers at the mall.
I don't understand why people think that Glass will only be effective if you're wearing it all the time. Sunglasses are not appropriate to wear all the time, and it's incredibly douchey to do so, and people adjust their habits accordingly. If you want to make sure you don't break any social norms, then just prop Glass up on the top of your head or hang them off your shirt colar when it's not appropriate to be wearing them.
And Glass isn't upheaving social norms any more than the iPhone did. It wasn't acceptable to be staring at a phone all the time but now everybody does it. I think people's reaction to Glass' is more a commentary on the current state of smartphone use and social etiquette than Glass being any more intrusive and conspicuous.
I don't know if I buy the sunglasses analogy. Sunglasses are inappropriate to wear when it's very obvious that they are unneeded due to there being no sunlight. If you are in sunlight, they are suddenly appropriate. Also, in the right context, sunglasses make you look really good.
In what contexts will Glass be appropriate? Will they be contexts that are generally accepted and clear? How often will you be taking them on and putting them off? Will you be keeping them off more than on? Will Glass always make you look doofier than without it, so the pressure is to only put it on when it's "worth it"?
At some point if you are not wearing Glass very often due to various other reasons two things are going to happen. First, Glass's overall utility is going to be limited to "on-demand" applications. This is clearly not what Google is going for since the dream of Glass is that you will be able to capture much more spontaneous moments since it's an always-available camera. Second, you are going to have to weigh the utility of (this now limited) device against your other devices and the annoyance of carrying it around on your head all the time. Eventually if the thing is not useful or you feel like a dork wearing it you are going to start leaving it at home.
Just because something is socially accepted, doesn't necessarily mean it is a good thing nor something we - as a society - can live with for eternity. Many things we would deem completely unacceptable today used to be socially accepted.
And numerous times, these acceptable items have been but mere phases in popular availability, until people realised, 'hey, why are we ruining human interaction?' and then it became unacceptable again.
People are already talking about - and have for a long time - the problem with smartphone use and social etiquette. Personally, I try to avoid my phone as much as possible whenever I am at a dinner party or visiting family. You know, be polite and show some goddamn respect.
What's nonsense is buying visions instead of products. Just because glass has what seems like easily fixed problems doesn't mean it will ever - or anything like it - will be a viable product. We do not know it will be awesome if executed properly. It might be useful in some contexts, like driving. But I question the entire premise.
Reminds me of 'virtual reality' from 20 years ago. It seemed great at the time and we were all waiting for a real-life 'cyberspace', but it never really happened.
Why is it so expensive? It's not using top of the line
processing, according to leaked specs. It's about as
powerful as the original Kindle, which cost $159 right
now. Is miniaturization and a metal headband a $1,341
cost?
What? It sits on your head, so it has to be small and light. It uses a new kind of display. It's made in low volumes. I suspect the hardware costs are actually more than $1500.
Hardware cost has nothing to do with the price at this point. It's expensive because it's simply NOT mass produced for a massive audience. This is a prototype and they don't want anyone's grandma to get their hands on it just yet.
Google may be able to improve on most of these problems, but they won't be able to eliminate the headaches unless they fundamentally alter the design. The problem is that this type of display requires the wearer to change focus when using it. Enough of that activity is going to become literally nauseating after a while.
For AR to really work the display needs to remain in focus no matter what the wearer is looking at, and that means an Eyetap-like design.
That article is much less researched consisting of one guy's short experience with the device. It also includes a list of negatives which mirrors some of the issues listed in the OP article.
Glass is the headset display analogue of Microsoft's early tablets. It's not likely to be a blockbuster consumer product this year or maybe not next year but moving displays next to our eyeballs is a natural next step and putting cameras on headsets is a natural next step. I'm hugely skeptical whether those steps need to happen together.
I'd guess the killer app for next gen mobile headsets is the ability to record your surroundings. Yes you can do that with a phone today. What you can't do is have your phone in your pocket constantly holding 5-15+ seconds of audio and video so that when you hit record you get the thing you actually wanted to record whether it's something adorable your kid/pet did, a great joke, an illegal act etc.
So that's the killer app imho and it's going to require an insane amount of battery life up front (and we're putting it right next to people's brains so it better not catch fire or blow up). Then we'll probably need an insane amount of mobile bandwidth and cloud storage for persistent streaming.
But wait we're jumping ahead, you don't need an eye display to do this, you get the functionality from just a camera on a bluetooth headset while the slab in your pocket handles the storage/radios. In fact powering a display is going to kill overall battery life which is the most important constraint. The display is also the most expensive part of Glass today.
So I think the first blockbuster consumer Glass-type product is going to be a bluetooth headset with a camera and no display.
54 comments
[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 109 ms ] threadMap overlays, video chat (with a better camera), and of course outright augmented reality.
At some point, the display will be integrated in the actual glass and will be able to pick a different focus distance for every pixel. Add in sufficiently powerful mobile computers, and you have full AR. When that happens, Glass (or its successor) will become truly indispensable; this is just the birth pangs.
Might be a decade or two, though. It's a tall order; molecular nanotechnology could construct a device like that, but I'm not convinced we'll be clever enough to do it before that point.
Glass if one thinks about it deeply is something unnatural.. microscopes, telescopes, vision impairment correction or shade from harmful sun.. or immersive , time disruptive experiences like a movie.
So the key barrier that glass concept is going to face is user rejection beyond the initial bubble crowd. Average people already have a certain context in which they find artificial inputs acceptable ( TV etc ).
Our distinction between natural and artificial sources of audio is different to visual.
I may be entirely wrong and Google may change the habits of a lot of young kids .. that is actually a rather strange and terrifying thought.
Glass definitely not, because it's kinda crap (what I've seen so far are phone-style widgets — which I loathe in the first place — and telling your shades to record a video — underwhelming). An actual HUD/Augmented Reality system I can see myself using rather easily (as long as it remains fully under my control), but this'll need severe improvements of image processing and recognition (speed and flexibility).
I don't want notification popups, but virtual/augmented surface display could be very neat, e.g. have buses display "live" in wireframe even when they're outside field of vision (think "wallhack") to estimate how much time I have until it arrives, that kind of things.
Or the ability to "switch in" to an other user of the system (and get direct viewpoint) useful for virtual visits (potentially via "presence" robots, plug into the robot and see through it), helping people with stuff or (the other way around) getting help, imagine a tech of some sort doing an estimate of building/fixing something based on what he sees through your eyes. Also useful for things like surgeries (get colleagues in-viewpoints to assist/warn) or single-person dangerous works e.g. underwater stuff, multiple eyeballs on the same field of vision can pay attention to more things.
Or more "mundane" (but actually more difficult) applications such as ebooks with the physical feel of real books by having a "blank book" and AR inserting the ebook's content on the fly, or hologram/3D AR (easy to do when you've got a display per eye)
Glass doesn't even have notifications right now, that's coming "soon."
Some of these, though, are criticisms of the concept: if, for example, it really does cause lots of people disorientation or headaches to look at displays close to their faces, that seems to be an irreparable flaw in Glass-like devices as a product class, and is much more damning.
I think a certain cyborg is likely to say "told you so", though.
Eventually, something like this will be very useful. :-)
google glasses = dorky
What else???
Any HNers use Google Glass yet and found killer uses?
For consumers, I'd say the recording stuff is an uncanny valley. I'd love a HUD for navigation.
Google Glass is pretty fragile and in those situations having a one inch glass/perspex cube in front of your eye is very dangerous.
A good take on it is the television series Dennou Coil, set in a future where augmented reality has become truly transparent. It shows the concept from the viewpoint of children, conveniently escaping a lot of the potential pitfalls of predictions.
Because I would imagine the majority of the population would not know or care what Nintendo DS is. I fail to see how it is applicable to Google Glass which is designed from day one to be a mass-market device.
one day a company may figure out how to solve all these things and then we can have a glass that is a mass market product.
The fact is phones and tablets had analogues going back hundreds of years in the form of books and wristwatches in terms of social norms. You check your watch, you check your phone. You sit down and read a book, you sit down and read your iPad. Society accepts local distractions where the user overtly makes it clear they are looking at something. There is no equivalent to Glass where the user has a distracting bit of information floating right within their view, but invisible to other people. This is a genuinely new disruption of social norms and it's wide open how people will react to it, and if they will ever accept it.
I don't agree that "it's all a matter of execution." Putting a cyborg-like eyepiece on people and an always-available HUD in front of them is not a foregone conclusion as something most people will ever want in their lives.
I've always said it's going to come down to how stupid you look to other people. And yes, I realize cell phones, etc, were viewed as douchey when they first came out. But the key difference between cell phones (and this is important) is that you could put the cell phone in your pocket, nullifying the douche-factor until you took it out again. If you take off your Glass because you look like a tool, you just completely eliminated the purpose of Glass.
I think the most likely path for Glass is that of the Segway: an uncool device that has amazing practical applications for professionals in certain domains. You'll see them on cops sooner than teenagers at the mall.
And Glass isn't upheaving social norms any more than the iPhone did. It wasn't acceptable to be staring at a phone all the time but now everybody does it. I think people's reaction to Glass' is more a commentary on the current state of smartphone use and social etiquette than Glass being any more intrusive and conspicuous.
In what contexts will Glass be appropriate? Will they be contexts that are generally accepted and clear? How often will you be taking them on and putting them off? Will you be keeping them off more than on? Will Glass always make you look doofier than without it, so the pressure is to only put it on when it's "worth it"?
At some point if you are not wearing Glass very often due to various other reasons two things are going to happen. First, Glass's overall utility is going to be limited to "on-demand" applications. This is clearly not what Google is going for since the dream of Glass is that you will be able to capture much more spontaneous moments since it's an always-available camera. Second, you are going to have to weigh the utility of (this now limited) device against your other devices and the annoyance of carrying it around on your head all the time. Eventually if the thing is not useful or you feel like a dork wearing it you are going to start leaving it at home.
This would give fascinating insight into a topic most people ignore: cieling fixtures.
Also, would provide great longitudina personalized weather data, to determine if rainclouds really do follow some people around.
And numerous times, these acceptable items have been but mere phases in popular availability, until people realised, 'hey, why are we ruining human interaction?' and then it became unacceptable again.
People are already talking about - and have for a long time - the problem with smartphone use and social etiquette. Personally, I try to avoid my phone as much as possible whenever I am at a dinner party or visiting family. You know, be polite and show some goddamn respect.
> haven't worn Glass.
There is a good reason why you almost never see BusinessInsider articles on HN. This is a good reminder why.
Who the hell reads this garbage and why are we posting it on HN? Flag this.
The fact that i now own (and LOVE) an iPad is why i will never again make early judgements and conclusions like this one.
http://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-ip...
Wonder how that turned out.
For AR to really work the display needs to remain in focus no matter what the wearer is looking at, and that means an Eyetap-like design.
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-glass-experience-2013-...
Seems to me that they're just writing anything and everything about Glass because it makes for outstanding linkbait.
I'd guess the killer app for next gen mobile headsets is the ability to record your surroundings. Yes you can do that with a phone today. What you can't do is have your phone in your pocket constantly holding 5-15+ seconds of audio and video so that when you hit record you get the thing you actually wanted to record whether it's something adorable your kid/pet did, a great joke, an illegal act etc.
So that's the killer app imho and it's going to require an insane amount of battery life up front (and we're putting it right next to people's brains so it better not catch fire or blow up). Then we'll probably need an insane amount of mobile bandwidth and cloud storage for persistent streaming.
But wait we're jumping ahead, you don't need an eye display to do this, you get the functionality from just a camera on a bluetooth headset while the slab in your pocket handles the storage/radios. In fact powering a display is going to kill overall battery life which is the most important constraint. The display is also the most expensive part of Glass today.
So I think the first blockbuster consumer Glass-type product is going to be a bluetooth headset with a camera and no display.