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Google relaunches Glass for businesses

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Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#161

Post by jessriedel »

> The mechanics moved carefully, putting down tools and climbing up and down ladders to consult paper instructions in between steps... Fast forward to today, and GE’s mechanics now use Glass running software from our partner Upskill, which shows them instructions with videos, animations and images right in their line of sight so they don’t have to stop work to check their binders or computer to know what to do next.

The article makes it sound like Google glass is the first to do anything like this, and it was all paper manuals before that. In fact, aircraft manufacturers have been using smart glasses for years to augment workers.

http://www.engineering.com/AdvancedManufacturing/ArticleID/1...

Maybe Glass is a significant improvement, but it's not unprecedented.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#162

Post by lwlml »

aresant wrote: 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…

Am I the only person who immediately thought: WHY ISN'T YOUR BOOK NEXT TO YOU INSTEAD OF ON THE CART ONE LEVEL BENEATH THE SCAFFOLD? Was this seriously the A/B test?

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#163

Post by TeMPOraL »

eterm wrote: post #142
TeMPOraL wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is - most of the cool and useful personal applications of glass fly in the face of various social expectations. The very idea you could be recording someone caused a backlash the last time, and that's nowhere near doing facial recognition...

Is facial recognition creepier than recording? If it's done in real-time, i.e. the scanned images aren't saved then surely a "This is person you've met and tagged as X" is less creepy than actually videoing someone? You wouldn't get any information you haven't yourself added to the device (although it would probably need to lean on external data-sets for the training). I wouldn't suggest facial recognition should rec…

I think it is creepier by definition, through the very fact that the other person can't verify you aren't recording. A camera is a camera. Even if the product officially doesn't record anything, who's to say I didn't mod my glasses' firmware to dump the video buffer? Not to mention that once video stream goes into cloud, you lose control over what happens to it.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#165

Post by omot »

imgabe wrote: post #70
omot wrote: post #37

I don't know what it is about it, but the design is so cringey. Even on a professional, it just looks... bad.

Would you cringe about wearing safety goggles, a climbing harness, or a hazmat suit? It's supposed to be a tool, not a fashion statement.

I don't know if google glasses is comparable to safety goggles / climbing harness or a hazmat suit. I think it's more comparable to my laptop. There are a lot of companies that provides macs to all their employees, because employees think they're more stylish than their windows counterpart.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#168

Post by dragonwriter »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #101
objclxt wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what they did after it was clear it was done as a piece of consumer hardware. It's easy to forget how hard Google pushed Glass to consumers. They parachuted people out of a helicopter onto the roof of the Moscone Center wearing them. They invested a vast amount of money building out massive floating barges to use as showrooms, which they quietly mothballed and sold. They allowed Robert Scoble to take a picture…

Promoting it to a room full of developers is not a "big push to consumers". Robert Scoble is not really a consumer tech reporter either. He's more like a futurist. Most of the things he likes to talk about are things you can't buy. Maybe because you got marketed to you are thinking it was consumer marketing, but consider that you were being marketed to as a developer not a consumer.

They were marketing to developers, but they were marketing it as something that would be useful for consumer applications. They've admitted that that was a mistake, at least in the state Glass was in when it was introduced.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#169

Post by kbenson »

frahs wrote: post #138
kbenson wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely because the platform he is on is not static, and is likely a standard part for multiple technicians, and possible with more than one on it at a time. It looks like the engine is stationary, and the station moves to where he is needed. If that's the case, they could use some semi-specialized platforms for different uses, some with tables for manuals and parts, some without to accommodate more people at once. Th…

You're totally overcomplicating this -- all they need is literally a music stand that they keep with their binders -- when you take a binder out, bring the stand with you to the platform and mount the binder on the stand on the platform, so that you don't have to go back and forth.

Even if I immediately accepted that a music stand would be sufficient for what might be a 20 lb technical manual, when placed on a platform that jostles and moves (as is visible in the video), that completely ignores the second half of what I noted.

I don't think it's overcomplicating an issue to look at a situation that appears to be sub-optimal and search for reasons why what appear to be simple solutions might not actually yield the benefits you would assume, because in real life, often they've been tried, and they don't. It could be Google is purposefully presenting an unrealistic scenario, or it could be that this large multi-billion dollar company hasn't bothered to optimize this integral process in this simple way, but when I see what appears to be an easily fixed problem in an unfamiliar area of expertise I prefer not to immediately assume everyone else that looked at the same scene wasn't capable of seeing what appears obvious to me.

Re: Google relaunches Glass for businesses

#170

Post by pavel_lishin »

aresant wrote: 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…

Is there a particular reason the manual and the tools have to be a flight of stairs away from the technician? I'd wager that the comparison would lose some steam if the tech could just turn his head to the right.

And as far as the software goes, there's a lot more there on display than just Glass. For instance, there are at least two cameras in this screenshot that are just magically implied to exist - one taking high quality video of the supervisor, and one taking high-quality video of the employee: http://i.imgur.com/qLjCoou.png

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