Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses • Hacker News Board

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#191

Post by gzmask » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 9:52 PM UTC

Erwin wrote: post #137

daralthus wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the opposite side they could have made not another display, but a whole new tool. A new interface for manipulating dynamic content. Preferably with your hands. Eliminating objects, laptops, touch displays... However there are some clear points why did they choose this path: - they only needed to make the display tech. Everything other could come later. - the lifelogging aspect could get hyped, making the whole thi…

I don't know whether the technology is there, but I could see AR glasses being paired with a (RFID? Bluetooth?) ring you wear as a pointing device. The demo uses speech but I haven't found the Google voice search very impressive so I have my doubts. Put it on your finger (or if a cheap and small RFID chip, glue it onto your fingernail, or even paint each of your fingernails with invisible slightly radioactive nail po…

chorded keyboard for wearable computers aren't new.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#192

Post by marshallp » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 9:53 PM UTC

jokermatt999 wrote: post #176

marshallp wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the problem with the google boys, they're a one hit wonder. They lucked out with search, a research project, and now they think they know what they're doing. They need to take their bozo hat off and realize they need to partner with the rest of the world to get stuff done. Apple's success is not just due to Job's taste but also extensive ties with chinese manufacturers and real focused hard work. A "secret" X…

> That's the problem with the google boys, they're a one hit wonder. You don't consider GMail, their dominance in ads, Android's ubiquity, the YouTube acquisition, etc as successes? Because all of those seem to have improved vastly since Google took control of them.

Google has a competitive edge in search because of it's data. All their other so-called successes are based directly off that (either in user share or because they have the big bucks to bankroll it).

Take a look at other tech companies, they've created fortunes based on almost nothing

* apple, consumer electronics that anyone could do

* amazon, selling stuff online that anyone could do

* oracle, selling databases when their competition includes ibm and even free software

Youtube should have been itunes, amazon instant, netflix, hulu all rolled in one. But they're not, because they don't actually know how to do business - one hit wonder.

Another example, google, until recently, had no lobbyists - why on earth would you do that? (when you have enough piles of cash to buy ountries). Investors should be filing lawsuits for this reason alone.

Another example of business cluelessness, they're not flexing their patent muscles.

Android ubiquity - linux is ubiquitous too, far more so - hint, it's FREE. Not very hard to give away free stuff.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#193

Post by dredmorbius » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 9:54 PM UTC

tesseractive wrote: post #141

kami8845 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Google car is only driven in controlled conditions in sunny California. For example the car simply doesn't work when it snows, so they just turn it off for that duration. The project looks promising but it still has a long way to go.

But remember: a car that can drive for you perfectly well when the weather is fine but that requires you to take the wheel under adverse conditions is still an awesome product as long as the limitations are clear, consistent, and understood by purchasers.

It's also a product for which there's a considerable sampling bias in making safety assumptions.

The more so as it's adversely selecting hazardous conditions for the human driver.

My own stats, space travel excepted, are about a quarter million miles driven. Three parking scrapes (insufficient clearance / hitting unseen object), twice rear-ended (neither major damage) both times by a trailing car driving too close, too fast.

Touch wood.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#194

Post by moheeb » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 9:55 PM UTC

JanezStupar wrote: post #161

siavosh wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's a valid point especially for certain tasks, but it finally hit me what's slightly jarring about the glasses in the scenario the video portrayed. It creates a very clear seperation between you and the person you're facing, a complete loss of intimacy and focus which right now is the last refuge for non distracted human contact. It's analgous (roughly) to having someone talking to you while looking at th…

My god. I am really curious what is your opinion of sunglasses?

Take them off when speaking to someone. No eye contact no respect.

*Exceptions apply. At the beach is fine.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#195

Post by yew » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:02 PM UTC

saturdaysaint wrote: post #183

dpark wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is this actually any different than today? There's nothing stopping me from popping up my phone to take a picture or video in a public space. There's also nothing stopping me from wearing a pinhole camera all the time. If these became common, then obviously there would be more cameras on at all times, but the fundamentals wouldn't be any different. It seems like the biggest difference is that if a ton of people w…

I agree that in a way, this would only intensify effects of camera-equipped cellphones. I have a pet theory that ever-present camera-phones are responsible for at least some of the drop in crime in the last decade. And while the controversy has gone away, there were a lot of overblown concerns about "camera-phones in locker rooms" in the early 00's. The difference is speed. You'd always have a camera aimed at whateve…

You've not heard of lifelogging? It was mentioned up/down thread. It's hardly common at the moment but the privacy concerns are older than Google as a company.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#196

Post by hkmurakami » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:05 PM UTC

andreyf wrote: post #56

hswolff wrote: post #25

>“We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. “Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?” Why would you ask that? This type of product is so different from what's available on the market that I doubt the Project Glass team woul…

From a marketing perspective, it's a greater blunder still: asking people to think about what they'd want Glass to do it will quickly set expectations well beyond what's technologically feasible for an initial product. That and the wishful concept video almost guarantee the initial product will be a disappointment. And that's a damn shame, because given Google's talent, it'll nevertheless be a engineering feat of epi…

>If wearable computers catch on that make it easier to check-in to the places you go and +1 the stuff you like, they'll make tons more money from useful targeted ads than units of hardware shipped, just as they do now.

I expect that they have patented "location based XYZ implemented by wearable computing devices" up the wazoo before this announcement. Even if Google Glass doesn't become the market leader, they're set to reap its rewards in more ways than one.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#197

Post by yew » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:08 PM UTC

moheeb wrote: post #194

JanezStupar wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My god. I am really curious what is your opinion of sunglasses?

Take them off when speaking to someone. No eye contact no respect. *Exceptions apply. At the beach is fine.

I wear photochromic prescription lenses and have horrible vision without them. I'm certainly not going to take them off, and you have no way of knowing that they are not sunglasses just by looking at them.

That might explain my lack of aversion to the idea, though. Have to look into that...

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#198

Post by ianferrel » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:09 PM UTC

chadgeidel wrote: post #187

ramy_d wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denn%C5%8D_Coil make dennu coil happen.

Sounds a lot like Rainbow's End: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End I agree - make it happen.

Nitpick: There's no apostrophe in the title "Rainbows End". Relevant because of how much it changes the meaning.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#199

Post by cromwellian » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:11 PM UTC

fudged wrote: post #117

hswolff wrote: post #25

>“We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. “Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?” Why would you ask that? This type of product is so different from what's available on the market that I doubt the Project Glass team woul…

Why would you ask that? Did you hear about how Google dogfooded Google+ for months, and when it was released to the public, people used it entirely differently than they had used it internally? It seems to me that Google is so stuck in the mindset of "Release a Beta, assess the adoption, iteratively improve" that they don't know how to make a product that people will actually want from the start. Chrome took a while…

I don't see why everyone should seek to emulate Apple, it's the antithesis of the Valley mentality. Everyone else goes for openness, iteration, and lean mentality, not stealth and secrecy, it rarely works.

You can't always design products from the top down. Sometimes you have to run actual experiments and collect data. The Apple aura that they can sit in an ivory tower and perfectly craft things that everyone wants will fade away the first time they release a product that bombs.

Right now, they are successful, so everyone says go emulate them. That's a shortsighted MBA mentality, that there's this formula for success, and you just need to emulate the practices of others.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#200

Post by ianferrel » Wed, Apr 04, 2012, 10:12 PM UTC

Foy wrote: post #189

windsurfer wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm imagining a remix of the featured video to look something like this: * Guy wakes up, puts on glasses. They immediately tell him what brand of breakfast he should be eating today. * When he looks at the window to see the weather, buildings and places are censored, and advertisements are replaced with google ads, yet he doesn't care * During the text message with his friend, after he says "Strand books", Google sug…

This is why government regulation can be healthy. Ideally, ad replacement like what you described would be illegal. In a purely capitalist world it would be encouraged. Apologies for getting political. But you paint an all-too-possible picture that's worryingly dystopic.

>"Ideally, ad replacement like what you described would be illegal"

Why is that? No one's forcing anyone to wear these glasses.

Do you think Adblock plugins should be illegal? If not, should they be illegal if they display a different ad instead? What if they remove all ads, but put a banner at the bottom of each page?