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Google relaunches Glass for businesses

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Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#111
post #27

It's easy to armchair quarterback this stuff after the fact, but this is where Glass should have started. The price point, social stigma/issues, and use cases all screamed "business applications!". Consumer tech may be where the glamour and scale are, but it's not always the best market entry point.

And the glamor. If you started on the manufacturing side, it wouldn't have any caché when walking down the street. But if you started with a bunch of models on a runway wearing these, you would. They tried going lux consumer and failed. But if they went the manufacturing route first, they would've burned any chance of the other.

ITYM cachet, not caché.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#112
post #23

Has anyone here worked on a Glass app? How is the UI programmed? Does it require a special programming paradigm like VR, or are these instruction manual HUDs basically just PDF viewers?

Initially you could just write Android apps. Every OS release broke the standard features more and more, however, and you were pretty much forced into their special programming paradigms, yes. For example, originally swiping emulated the d-pad buttons, but that was removed. For a long time you could pair Bluetooth keyboards, mice, and trackpads, but then they broke that for a long time. It may have been added back recently.

Modern era there is a "Mirror API" that's a very limited web based API for serving "cards" to the device and there's a a native SDK with a few hooks for registering for pre-selected voice commands and showing activities with various amounts of liveliness or graphics capability vs. static cards.

So if you are just publishing cards with standard menu actions you can write server side only in Python and several other languages and just communicate with Google's servers. If you want a more native experience you write in Java using an SDK originally based on Android.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#113
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic in me thinks they did that on purpose, the further they put the manual from the task the greater the efficiency gain of their software.

Actually if it was next to him, the traditional way might be faster due to possible problems with voice recognition. I would imagine it would be especially bad in loud places.

If it was right next to him, it might be faster but they might have found that it was likely to cause people to merge steps, and that lead to an overall lesser quality and accuracy in a system where those are at a premium. It's possible that what looks like an inefficiency was a purposeful bit of process engineering to hack human nature for a better overall end result. With step level verification through photographs, it's possible they might get similar results with this system but without the forced inefficiency.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#114
post #10
post #5

No info on the HW, that's the interesting part. How did they solve battery life issues etc

In an industrial setting they don't really need to solve that problem. Battery low? Swap out the glasses for another pair.

Yep. There's also external battery packs, which probably not a problem for some jobs.

However, there were some other issues I encountered in previous (early) Google Glass development that I wonder if they have been resolved:

- Google Glass devices were prone to overheating to the point of shutting down, so it was not possible to do anything terribly computationally intensive.

- Support for more corporate oriented wifi protocols (eg LEAP) was marginal; the Glass even had trouble making an initial connection to a hidden SSIDs on a standard WPA2 network.

- Barcode scanner support is based on camera image capture; unfortunately small barcodes were difficult to impossible to scan with the Glass as a result (both due to the need to position the code close to the camera, and the nature of the camera that made closeups of small barcodes very blurry).

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#115
post #9

This is so !@%!@ cool. Check out the A/B test of a technician with / without the software referenced in the article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5gXuZp25f0 Then here's a video that gives a sense of the software's interface: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5HOHNECW20 Very workflow oriented with nice communication and lookup features. This is the kind of small optimization stuff that is going to be revolutionary…

This is really cool, but when this technology trickles down to burger shops, I would be worried.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#116
post #27

It's easy to armchair quarterback this stuff after the fact, but this is where Glass should have started. The price point, social stigma/issues, and use cases all screamed "business applications!". Consumer tech may be where the glamour and scale are, but it's not always the best market entry point.

Ha! I interviewed at google and told them glass was a horrible consumer product and that they should have started with a market that wouldn't mind looking stupid (or skiers who already wore goggles so they wouldn't look stupid at all). The point I made to them was that they engineered an incredible device but hadn't validated the market. I suggested it would have been better to start with something like skiers because they already wore goggles and helmets. So, you wouldn't need to get the product so small to see how people reacted to it.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job. It was really funny to watch Glass (which is a cool technology) totally fail because it's a stupid consumer product. And, I'm no Steve Jobs. It was absolutely predictable that Glass would never work as a consumer product.

And, if you want to make it work for manufacturing, I think you'll need to scale up the form factor. Why wouldn't you make it a safety goggle too? Think about all of the engineering effort that went into shrinking this into a small, completely impractical, package.

Anyway, I think that this was not only predictable but it also shows a company culture where people can't tell the emperor that he's naked. It's not like I was the only person that took one look at glass and knew you couldn't leave the house wearing one. But, that message was pretty actively suppressed at Google.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#117
Some of this stuff is so obviously cool but remember the cost of efficiency. 30% time saved means one person does more in their day. This has a personal toll because working less intensively gave you time to think and physically rest. You're at it non-stop now.

And that also means you need 30% fewer employees to manage the same workload. That's going to be the trade-off here. How many people will have to go just to offset the hardware and software costs?

I don't know what I'm arguing here... I'm finding it hard to avoid quoting Ian Malcolm in the context but I think we have to remember there are definite downsides to treating people like underutilised machinery.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#118
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the worker did the Glass test after he did the non-Glass test, his productivity/efficiency increase could be attributed to memory and not just Glass.

Yeah. Hopefully they would do it multiple times. To not have memory be much of a factor.

This is aviation work, you always always always check the work you are doing with the manual. One mistake could be someone's life. The entire aviation industry is checklist and procedure driven.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose if those technicians are meant to go step-by-step through a checklist, and not to just work from memory, then this video still makes sense as an A/B test.

You'll still anticipate the next step which will speed things up. Pilots must follow a checklist but they also memorize the steps have have their hands in the right spot when it's time to call off an item.

Fair enough. Though as 'skinnymuch points out, if they're doing this regularly, then memory shouldn't play any role in the speed.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#120
post #24
post #8

>>Glass is also helping healthcare professionals. Doctors at Dignity Health have been using Glass with an application our partner Augmedix calls “a remote scribe”. My primary care doctor has a human scribe. The scribe is a recent graduate (BS), planning on going to med school next year. Being physically in the room, watching the doctor work is a great benefit to her. I'm not sure she'd benefit as much from watching a…

Just disrobe while I record you with my cyborg glasses. Now, please describe your embarrassing medical problem. (However, it seems like a great idea for other situations.)

I wonder if there would be room for a public key / dual encryption for the video produced that both the doctor and the patient would need to sign off on to view the video, or something like that, to add some kind of viewing trail/authentication/authorization.

I mean, who's to say any given doctor's office doesn't have a hidden camera/microphone somewhere anyway.

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