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A future made of Glass

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Re: A future made of Glass

#21

Post by ambiate »

alphakappa wrote: post #3

I have to respectfully disagree that this is the future. Is the future comprised of devices that you have to consciously wear on you all the time (I can barely stand to wear the prescription glasses I'm supposed to wear, let alone glasses that will occasionally provide me with some utility) On top of it, is the future of HCI in devices that you have to talk to? (Siri, Glass) Not only do I have a very hard time gettin…

I just picked up my Glass on June 27th. The first thing that bothered me was the voice recognition. The woman at the front desk asked if I was Irish, another French, and a person at the bar asked about my accent. I'm from Mississippi and partially raised by a father with a northern accent.

Sadly, Glass understands me 1/2 of the time. In fact, sometimes it even misinterprets "OK Glass". This has left me at an impasse, because this is mostly a voice recognition device while only having access to GlassWare.

Another interesting side effect: do you know the ghost vibrations from using a cellphone? After wearing Glass for 15-25 minutes, I have this ghost-like feeling that I am still wearing them. It can be disorienting once I remove them.

Re: A future made of Glass

#22

Post by deleted_account »

"Glass has a packaging so slick and gorgeous it makes you feel like you’re unboxing an Apple product"

Ha! So much for Google setting their own precedent on quality.

Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance. Concierge service and complementary Champagne?

And these reviews! They're so painfully rote: wifi-bluetooth-battery-life-sucks-now-you-can-check-your-email-in-the-middle-of-a-conversation-needs-more-iterations-here-are-some-shitty-pictures-of-a-buffet.

Is this really the future?

Re: A future made of Glass

#23

Post by gknoy »

mjn wrote: post #10
nrivadeneira wrote: post #9

I'm always amazed at how much anti-Glass sentiment I see in the tech community. I personally think it's going to be amazing. The best analogy I can think of is the heads-up display (HUD) in video games. The current use cases shown (texting, weather, pictures, etc.) are insignificant in comparison to the potential for combining with other wearable computing devices such as Fitbits, Fuelbands, Thalmic MYO's, etc. Of co…

Maybe that's the fundamental disagreement, because that's a future I don't really want to live in. I don't like HUDs in videogames for the most part. And I don't want a bunch of shallow behaviorism everywhere, whether it's called gamification or quantified-self or life-as-an-A/B-test. The actual device itself I don't have any particular aversion to. However so far all that does seem pretty easy to avoid, at least in…

I find your perspective to be refreshingly different than my own. I love the idea of a HUD - even it it's something I don't use often.

What I had not thought about was the privacy implications, and the more I think about it, the less happy I feel about people with it on all the time.

Part of me feels this fear is irrational, as I don't have a problem with people taking video with their cell phones. However, this deep-seated aversion to it seems more due to the it-might-always-be-on aspect -- similar to how most of us are OK with the idea of wiretaps when warranted, yet flip out about the recent intelligence news.

Penny Arcade and some other articles I've read have really reinforced the perspective that people will want to punch me in the face for using Glass. I think Glass's biggest hurdle will not be the prospect of looking silly, but of all of your friends saying "Turn that damn thing off before I break it".

Re: A future made of Glass

#24

Post by Spearchucker »

darasen wrote: post #20

What I don't get: In a time when we are very aware of government tracking programs we are being asked to strap a GPS and camera to our heads so that Google can track us constantly?

Agreed. I was ambivalent about Glass before Snowden's leaks. Now there's absolutely no way. Glass is little more to me now than a white-labeled data front-loader for the NSA.

Which is a shame in a way. If Glass turns out to be compelling it might have been the reason for me to sign up for a Google account. Now, no way.

Re: A future made of Glass

#25

Post by leephillips »

deleted_account wrote: post #22

"Glass has a packaging so slick and gorgeous it makes you feel like you’re unboxing an Apple product" Ha! So much for Google setting their own precedent on quality. Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance. Concierge service and complementary Champagne? And these reviews! They're so painfully rote: wifi-bluetooth-battery-life-sucks-now-you-can-check-your-email-i…

"Google is shooting themselves in the foot appealing to reviewer's worst sense of self-importance."

Works for Apple: http://daringfireball.net/2012/02/mountain_lion

Re: A future made of Glass

#26

Post by embolism »

A future where google gets to control what's in your visual field all day long.

A future controlled by one company.

I recall that being something people were terrified of when it was Apple in the driving seat, but I guess Google is Open and is only focused on what's best for the end user, so it's all fine.

Re: A future made of Glass

#27

Post by lnanek2 »

ambiate wrote: post #21
alphakappa wrote: post #3

I have to respectfully disagree that this is the future. Is the future comprised of devices that you have to consciously wear on you all the time (I can barely stand to wear the prescription glasses I'm supposed to wear, let alone glasses that will occasionally provide me with some utility) On top of it, is the future of HCI in devices that you have to talk to? (Siri, Glass) Not only do I have a very hard time gettin…

I just picked up my Glass on June 27th. The first thing that bothered me was the voice recognition. The woman at the front desk asked if I was Irish, another French, and a person at the bar asked about my accent. I'm from Mississippi and partially raised by a father with a northern accent. Sadly, Glass understands me 1/2 of the time. In fact, sometimes it even misinterprets "OK Glass". This has left me at an impasse,…

You remove them besides bed?

One tip that might help you is that you never have to say OK Glass anyway. Just tap the thing once to wake it up, then tap again to go to the voice commands instead of saying OK Glass. Or tap and hold for Google direct.

People claim I don't have an accent, but I still have to make each word clearly separate for the device as well. So make sure you are doing that. I've worked with voice recognition that blows this stuff away, hopefully Google will license better technology like Dragon or Nuance, theirs is pretty much the worst I've ever used and I don't think it has any sense of context or the complete sentences I'm saying at all.

Re: A future made of Glass

#29

Post by pseudometa »

The future is not made of Google Glass, but will be better because of lessons learned from it.

Computers will get smaller and smaller and fade into the backgrounds of our lives. Human Computer Interaction will become be highly centered on touch, gestures, and speach. Not because they have some amazing technical advantage, but because that is how we interact with other humans.

Google glass is a step in that direction, but ultimately just a prototye device that tests a few ideas out. This is not the winning idea that people want it to be and that Google wishes it was. You can cout out wide adoption and you can count out revolutionizing anything, because at the end of the day, it does not fade into the background. What it will do is provide some good feedback (as any beta product will) to all of us for honing the future of wearable devices and computing in general.

Re: A future made of Glass

#30

Post by MaybiusStrip »

Wordy prose, rampant grammatical mistakes, a poorly constructed argument... my classmates in junior-high wrote more convincingly.

I can almost hear the author patting himself on the back for writing that last sentence. If the future is making existing solutions to first world problems slightly more convenient, I'm not interested in being a part of it.

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