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Glass

dcurt.is

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Re: Glass

#131

Post by lambda »

ry0ohki wrote: post #106
zacharycohn wrote: post #49

As someone who just got their Glass last night, I have a FEW conflicting points, although a lot of it is spot on. -I don't think the screen is not bright enough, and I haven't had the issue where you have to look at something dark to see it. -I also disagree about "dangerous while driving." In fact, I would argue quite the opposite. It's SO much safer than looking at your phone for directions. The fact that any infor…

I just got my invite to order and his comment about it being dangerous while driving is a non-starter...that's the main reason I'd find this useful (while cycling)

Hmm. I can't see how it would be much more dangerous than using a mirror. I ride with a mirror mounted on my glasses, and I glance up at it briefly then back at the road again. The same would be true of the glass. Sure, when you're first getting used to it you will probably linger on it for longer due to the novelty and getting used to the exact focus point. But once you get the hang of it, I can't imagine it would be much different than glancing at a mirror, which is perfectly safe.

Re: Glass

#132

Post by nmcfarl »

tomasien wrote: post #6

Anyone want an unsolicited opinion? waits for everyone to leave I hope Google Glass is an experiment, because voice reco isn't particularly important outside of when you're driving. When I get tired of texting and consider voice reco, 2 things hit me (and others, I've done solid research on this) 1. Voice reco would be slightly better now that I'm tired of texting, but not much. 2. It is nowhere near socially accepta…

As you note the problem with voice is social.

And I find that I am frequently alone - and there you don't have to worry about the taboo. I think that voice interfaces have a lot of potential in non-social settings. Personally I dictate much of my morning emails when out taking the dog on a walk.

Re: Glass

#133

Post by smackmybishop »

wtracy wrote: post #76

Oddly enough, the thing that's disappointed me the most about Glass so far is that there's no real SDK for it that I can find. There's something called "Glassware" that lets you build views in HTML and throw them up on the screen, but that's it. Am I just missing something? I suppose Google could be mirroring what Apple did with the first iPhone and letting the tech stack settle down before opening things up to third…

At I/O they said the SDK is on the way.

Re: Glass

#134

Post by canthonytucci »

potatolicious wrote: post #121
canthonytucci wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All of us failed to do anything useful with it. We had to be told how to activate it. We had to be told what we could do with it. If I'm going to wear something on my head like a nutcase, I would hope that it has been designed for _usability_ not _Discoverability_. Making everything idiot-proof or at least "didn't bother to read the manual proof" leaves us with only devices suited for idiots and people too lazy to r…

> "leaves us with only devices suited for idiots and people too lazy to read the manual." Devices "suited for idiots and people too lazy to read the manual" have, in the past decade, driven massive growths in computing, made it more accessible to more people, changed the landscape of the entire world, and even fueled a few revolutions. But by all means, when people need to read a book just to use a device, we'll cons…

> Devices "suited for idiots and people too lazy to read the manual" have, in the past decade, driven massive growths in computing, made it more accessible to more people, changed the landscape of the entire world, and even fueled a few revolutions

The touch devices I assume you're referring to are intuitive because as a human you're naturally good at using your hands to make things move around.

Push a button and it acts like a button, push a thing that looks like a sheet of paper and it moves in a way that you would expect a paper on your "real" desk in front of you to move.

They're "idiot proof" because we've been trained to use them most of our lives.

>But by all means, when people need to read a book just to use a device, we'll consider it a badge of honor instead of a failure of design.

Glass is something we interact with through an entirely alien interface and potentially an extremely powerful tool. I'm not talking about a podcast app, but a head mounted computer you might potentially be using for hours at a time.

Unless you eat a lot of acid, you're probably not familiar with how to interact with imaginary things that float in space before you.

To me, "they had to tell me how to use it" is a much weaker complaint than "it was easy but tedious to use" for something that sits on the side of your head.

This blog post, and the ones it links to, do a much better job of exploring this than I could here:

http://haacked.com/archive/2008/11/06/usability-vs-discovera...

(somewhat relevant and fun top gear segment on the evolution of car interfaces) http://www.streetfire.net/video/125-top-gear-first-modern-ca...

Re: Glass

#135

Post by roc »

Shenglong wrote: post #38

The industrial design is solid, and though it is being manufactured in small batches, it has the build quality you might expect from something being mass-produced. Not sure what to make of this statement. The design is beautiful, but I don't see why that would be an artifact of mass-production. The early prototypes for Glass were much sexier in terms of build integrity (optics, for example) than the current mass-prod…

> "I really feel this is a non-issue."

For geeks, probably not. For normals? It's a pretty big deal. Normals weren't entirely convinced by the mouse. They learned it. Sort of. But many never even grokked the whole 'click vs double-click vs right-click' thing.

And the mouse was at least a fairly consistently-behaved indirect pointing device. Tapping and swiping an inconsistent, indirect touch surface, particularly after having learned direct-manipulation touch-screens, is not going to go over well.

Keep in mind that to make a Glass-style wearable make sense to a casual user, it has to be more efficient than simply taking out their cell phone. And for people whom HUDs are a natural advantage, it needs to be efficiently usable without requiring that person's hands being used.

So seemingly minor annoyances can add up quickly to a determination of "not worth it". You've probably got about a half-second of grace before people go back to their phone.

> "Once Thalmic's MYO is fully operational, I don't think navigation will be much of a problem."

Hand navigation might be easier, but the social problems will get massively amplified. Nodding/tapping/talking is 'weird' enough. Throw in some finger/hand/arm movements and this thing's never leaving the den of specialized technologists.

And requiring hand gestures can kill usefulness for those (hands-full) people that most naturally benefit from a HUD.

To me, Glass is looking more and more like Microsoft's stab at tablets. It's an early attempt that's going to make a class of specialized users very happy. But it's not going to be in casual use on trains, in coffee shops, etc. It's supposed efficiency gains are largely hamstrung by interactivity problems that are just annoying enough to send most users back to the alternative tools.

The real test for Google, is whether they address these problems or pretend they don't exist -- as Microsoft did -- until someone else comes along and eats their lunch with a far more modest solution.

Re: Glass

#136

Post by Thrymr »

lambda wrote: post #131
ry0ohki wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just got my invite to order and his comment about it being dangerous while driving is a non-starter...that's the main reason I'd find this useful (while cycling)

Hmm. I can't see how it would be much more dangerous than using a mirror. I ride with a mirror mounted on my glasses, and I glance up at it briefly then back at the road again. The same would be true of the glass. Sure, when you're first getting used to it you will probably linger on it for longer due to the novelty and getting used to the exact focus point. But once you get the hang of it, I can't imagine it would b…

The mirror is there to increase your situational awareness while cycling. Glass has a strong potential to do the opposite. If its use is limited to HUD for information useful to you for cycling, fine, but if you're getting text messages or anything else you have to think about, it's distracting.

Re: Glass

#137

Post by falcolas »

cstejerean wrote: post #36
falcolas wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the potential of starting a flame war, I would categorize the Oculus Rift as the meh, and the glass is the future. I was able to use a head mounted (and tracking) 3d display with a computer back when ROTT was popular (circa 1994). It's a novelty at best, and a headache inducing nightmare at worst. I didn't see the magic then, and I certainly don't see the magic now. A seamless hud, on the other hand, has the poten…

Seems a bit unfair to dismiss the Oculus Rift based on the state of head mounted displays from ~20 years ago. Yes, they used to suck. That's exactly what the Oculus Rift is trying to solve. Have you tried one?

> Yes, they used to suck.

Actually, no, this one didn't. It was fantastic technology. The resolution was the same as the monitors on the other computers, and the tracking was very fast. The only downside to the technology itself was that it was heavy.

The problem was that it was only a window, and a relatively small window at that. It's a glorified 3d monitor that denies you vision of your surroundings (and works very poorly with anyone with glasses).

Worse? You still need some other sort of controller (which you can't see when you're wearing them), and unless you're standing up, you can only look a limited amount around you. In any environment other than wandering around a virtual world, it's a curiosity at best.

FPS games - the head moves too slowly to make an accurate method of aiming (and think of your neck muscles afterwards), so you still need to use a mouse as your primary aiming device, and a keyboard to move.

MMO games (perhaps the ideal target for these) require extensive use of the keyboard and mouse (neither of which you can see with the device on), and are rarely played in first person view.

I just can't really see a market outside of VR, and then not without a whole new class of controllers and tactile feedback methods. It's the first (and arguably the easiest) part of a new class of technology, which when combined could be interesting. Until then... meh.

Re: Glass

#138

Post by workbench »

panacea wrote: post #54
pooriaazimi wrote: post #48

> 15. If Glass is “on” and anyone near you says “OK Glass,” they can control what you see, take a picture, etc. That's what I thought, though oddly, I haven't seen this obvious fact mentioned anywhere else. It can be fixed in future I'm sure - but in the short term it might cause some problems: "OK Glass. Tweet 'I'm an idiot'." - someone shouting in the subway

"OK Glass. Google goatse."

R.I.P Goatse

Re: Glass

#139

Post by Joeri »

roc wrote: post #135
Shenglong wrote: post #38

The industrial design is solid, and though it is being manufactured in small batches, it has the build quality you might expect from something being mass-produced. Not sure what to make of this statement. The design is beautiful, but I don't see why that would be an artifact of mass-production. The early prototypes for Glass were much sexier in terms of build integrity (optics, for example) than the current mass-prod…

> "I really feel this is a non-issue." For geeks, probably not. For normals? It's a pretty big deal. Normals weren't entirely convinced by the mouse. They learned it. Sort of. But many never even grokked the whole 'click vs double-click vs right-click' thing. And the mouse was at least a fairly consistently-behaved indirect pointing device. Tapping and swiping an inconsistent, indirect touch surface, particularly aft…

Glass needs to be an overlay for your entire vision, so that active UI could be shown overlaid on any surface. Tapping out a private message on your sleeve wouldn't be that weird once people are used to it. It wouldn't even need to drive up the hardware much.

Re: Glass

#140

Post by r0s »

pooriaazimi wrote: post #48

> 15. If Glass is “on” and anyone near you says “OK Glass,” they can control what you see, take a picture, etc. That's what I thought, though oddly, I haven't seen this obvious fact mentioned anywhere else. It can be fixed in future I'm sure - but in the short term it might cause some problems: "OK Glass. Tweet 'I'm an idiot'." - someone shouting in the subway

A bigger problem with that, two people using glass in the same voice range area will step on each others commands.
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