Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

bits.blogs.nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 305 posts

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#221

Post by repsilat »

sks wrote: post #179
beatle wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Driverless cars. Google Glasses. The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money. NOT to fool around with worthless projects like driver less cars and glasses that are just complete waste of money and resources. Shouldn't they be spending time and money fixing Android and the Android market place?

You are correct that "The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money" and with driverless cars and google glasses the CEO is doing exactly that. Also people working on these projects are scientists at googleX they are completely different from the Android team ... Google has enough resources (people and money) to pursue these long term research project without hurting their sho…

> You are correct that "The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money"

Actually that's not strictly true. The CEO's job is to satisfy the shareholders/board of directors. Normally that coincides with making the company money, but not always - the idea of a legal duty to maximise share value is a widely held myth. In the case of Google, most of the shares are still held by the founders. If they just want the company to do cool and impractical things they have the right and the capacity to make it do so.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#222

Post by raphman »

jpontyface wrote: post #22

Seems like a cool product but glasses are a thing of the past. People moved to using contacts because of the annoyance of glasses, and wearing them all day can actually hurt my ears and nose. And once we start taking them off and putting them in our pockets while not using them, they become a phone with less features. I want something like this, maybe in a pair of contacts, but even contacts can be irritating. How ab…

You want the display to overlay the environment. Contact lenses move with your eyeball - glasses don't. This means that you would need to precisely track the lenses somehow - probably with an apparatus affixed to your head. => Glasses are preferrable.

Regarding genetically engineered eyeballs: what if they get a virus?

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#223

Post by zmmmmm »

nextparadigms wrote: post #116
Androsynth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google and Apple have fundamentally different business models. One sells hardware and one sells advertising. I would imagine Google's goal will be to put these glasses on as many people as they can, as cheaply as they can and then they have a direct advertising connection to a lot of eyeballs.

I believe Google has higher ambitions than selling advertising for the next 3 decades. They didn't buy Motorola just for patents, and to me they seem to be increasingly more interested in the physical world. I don't think it's a stretch to think that they want to make and sell physical products.

Yeah, the more I think about these glasses the more the Motorola acquisition makes sense. If you look at some of the products Motorola makes, eg:

http://www.motorola.com/Consumers/US-EN/Consumer-Product-and...

You can see it is a fairly short leap to producing all manner of interesting hardware, including AR glasses. I think Google is starting to realise that so many of their ventures are getting stymied by depending on 3rd parties for hardware that it's eventually going to be a threat to their core mission (organizing information, etc.) I bet they've had high level talks with OEMs about things like this and always get frustrated by the low margins they operate on and the need to reap immediate profits for anything to happen.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#224

Post by zmmmmm »

I'm pretty skeptical about people's ability to multitask like this. We all like to think we can do several things at once but many studies have shown we're basically interrupt driven single-tasking organisms. You simply cannot walk and watch where you're going while also watching something in your glasses. People think that having the screen overlaid onto reality solves the problem, but the problem isn't really visual in the first place, it's mental. Try even reading a (real) sign while walking along and you'll find you're bumping into people, dangerously strolling across roads without looking, etc.

I really want these to work, and I can see in limited situations (manually turn them on to look something up, etc.) they could. But I really deeply doubt they can work they way people are imagining.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#225

Post by raphman »

dpezely wrote: post #21
jeffpalmer wrote: post #8

This has the potential to be huge, especially since it's the brainchild of Google. One thing I noticed is that they didn't showcase object recognition of any type in the promo video. When I heard they were testing these glasses, Google Goggles is the first thing that came to mind. It would be really useful to auto-search objects by simply looking at them and issuing a command. I'm sure it's on their roadmap, if it's…

Although Google will make this more popular due to their marketing efforts and brand, it's hardly their brainchild. Tom Furness developed similar devices decades ago: Once out of the military lab, this was a key project of the Human Interface Technology Lab at UW in Seattle in the early 1990's. Updating for smaller chips and components contributes to the current form-factor which includes the front-facing camera not…

also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Mann#Anonequity_project_....

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#227

Post by vertex-four »

kaonashi wrote: post #206
jgrahamc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in the concept video he goes into a physical book store and selects a physical book and buys it. Surely, his Googgles would just scan the book tell him how much cheaper it was in the Google Store... Rather amused that when meeting a friend he spent time checking in to the location rather than talking to the dude. But these could be useful in situations where you don't have your hands free to hold a smartphone.…

The biggest wtf is why he is even going into a paper bookstore in the first place. He should be able to just navigate some sort of hierarchical list of all published works and have a copy sent to his e-paper reader. There are no technological barriers to this, only social.

There's always going to be a lot of people who prefer a paper book to an e-book; even with the death of paper books I could absolutely see "one-off" book printing companies licensing printing rights from the publishers and making a niche for themselves.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#228

Post by jberryman »

jasonlotito wrote: post #55

What this will provide for disabled and autistic people is amazing. It's too easy to get caught up in the "social sharing" part of this and forget that something like this can really help change people's lives. Edit: To expand a bit, take an autistic adult that wants to do something, like go to the movies. It's simple for us, we wash up, get dressed, go outside, go down the straight, hope on the 132 Bus for 3 stops,…

> God, what I wouldn't give to be apart of this.

No idea what the odds are, but you should try to contact google (whatever that means). Seems like they would be all about having their magic glasses helping autistic folks.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#229

Post by lsiebert »

2muchcoffeeman wrote: post #207
xxbondsxx wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've followed the DARPA Grand Challenge since 2004, you'll realize that it's _not_ just a school science project. The Google car is going to be ready for market far before the legal, insurance, and other non-technical issues are sorted out. In other words, they could ship "now" if they weren't doing such a revolutionary product. If you make a trivially incremental improvement on an already-existing product (iPad…

That still sounds silly. If you have the muscle of Google, wouldn't you get the legal ball rolling first, so that when your car is ready, you can sell immediately? Does a driverless car even count as basic research that they can spin off into a consumer product?

Which they did. Nevada now has laws governing autonomously piloted cars, and California is working on it, last I checked.

If they can get such vehicles legal and available to the general public in California, it will be legal everywhere else within a year or two at most. California sets or has had the ability to set a lot of standards for the country, from vehicle emissions, textbooks, to now, apparently, driverless cars.

Re: Google Begins Testing Its Augmented Reality Glasses

#230

Post by dsrguru »

beatle wrote: post #157
jrockway wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what has Google ever engineered, at least physically, that has set your expectations so high? Driverless cars.

Driverless cars. Google Glasses. The CEO's job is to allocate resources to initiatives that will make the company money. NOT to fool around with worthless projects like driver less cars and glasses that are just complete waste of money and resources. Shouldn't they be spending time and money fixing Android and the Android market place?

A lot of people would argue that a CEO's job is to innovate and that profit is just a means. Starting a company (and making yourself CEO) doesn't mean you have to change your priorities from improving the world to increasing your annual return. Lots of world-changing technology has financial gains that aren't realized for years. As long as you have enough money in the short term, which Google does, you can afford such R&D. I can't imagine the inventions at Bell Labs were profitable in the short term, but we wouldn't be typing posts on HN if they didn't exist. Do you think expensive technological innovation should be relegated to the government? Who do you trust to get us to Mars first, NASA or companies like SpaceX?
Post reply on HN