>Anyone can record you without you knowing it. Isn't this already the case with small cameras?
For the aver person a small camera is a smartphone, which needs to be obviously held up when filming. Google Glass would be omnipresent so you wouldn't notice when a camera is turned on.
There is a red light glowing when the camera is on. But what happens when you have 10 people with Glass?How will you stop everyone from recording?And 10 is a small number in a fast-paced environment like NYC.
What happens when someone zooms in on sensitive data in a company or home or anywhere you can think of.
The more Glasses you have, the less control you get.
If Google can avoid the "Segway curse" of extreme dorkiness, I can only then see Google Glass having a chance at being revolutionary.
Segways didn't "fail" because they were dorky, they didn't see wide adoption because they were [and are] extremely expensive.
They're also somewhat dangerous, having killed the guy who bought the Segway company, among others. That is not mitigated by the fact that the Segway was marketed as something like better walking, discouraging helmet use (even while claiming in safety manuals that helmets are required).
Segways didn't "fail" because they were dorky, they didn't see wide adoption because they were [and are] extremely expensive.
I can't imagine Google Glass will be exactly cheap either. Also, just like Segway has been facing regulatory issues [1], Glass deployment might be hampered by safety and privacy issues, at least initially and in some markets. Not too far-fetched of a comparison really. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_PT#Restrictions_on_use
I don't know why you were downvoted. You simply said that these machines are going to be getting smaller, cleaner, less obtrusive. And they will.
The inevitability of miniaturization notwithstanding, it's slightly challenging to imagine a less obtrusive version of something whose defining property is that it sits on your face. Maybe in five years we'll all be wearing smart-monocles. Who knows?
How about:
1. Circuit-printed contact lenses.
2. Soluble eye-drop based displays that spread out over the eyes.
3. The much much harder brain implants/nanobot injections that respond to your impulses etc?
I'm sure back in the 40s/50s smartphones and tablets probably would have seemed pretty out there too.
That's my take, too--it would be infinitely more useful in a work environment. I can imagine how having a HUD could be useful while programming, even though I have two screens in front of me already. I can also imagine how it would make certain elements of interacting with people working remotely--like seeing what someone's doing, whether it's programming in a terminal or sketching on a pad--so much easier. That said…
I love the idea of "shared views" when you're having meetings or collaborating with people. Whatever document or supplementary set of data you're talking about is on the entire groups HUD.
Would you be able to read a document on that little HUD though? The size seems more suited to Google Now cards and such.
The image shown in this article does a good job of highlighting the usefulness of Glass. It's not just a heads up display. It's the smarts of knowing where you are, what you are doing, what you plan to do in order to provide relevant information in an automatic and unobtrusive way. "Oh, I see you're at the airport and you have tickets on flight 644. Here's some useful departure info." Instead of finding a departure s…
I can see the contextual bit, but I'm not really sold—at least, not yet—on the HUD form-factor. Why can't I view the smartly-pulled-up, contextual information on a smartphone screen? There are a handful of situations where no-hands usage would be nice, but for the most part a screen works fine for me. There are lots of things I'd like improved about quick, non-frustrating access to information, but they're mostly the software/indexing/querying/"smarts", not the display technology.
I don't know why you were downvoted. You simply said that these machines are going to be getting smaller, cleaner, less obtrusive. And they will.
The inevitability of miniaturization notwithstanding, it's slightly challenging to imagine a less obtrusive version of something whose defining property is that it sits on your face. Maybe in five years we'll all be wearing smart-monocles. Who knows?
And in ten years smart contact-lenses. It's not hard at all to imagine.
To my mind, the Google Glass is far more like the Microsoft Tablet, the Tesla Roadster and the Palm Treo: the initial realization of a concept that, before now, didn't exist in the world at all. It seems incorrect to compare it to the iPhone and the iPad because both of those were taking technology that had existed in the tech community for years and reimagining them in a way that appealed to the general public. As a…
I agree but why is the tesla roadster in that list?
> Google Glass is [...] the initial realization of a concept that, before now, didn't exist in the world at all. I don't understand. Heads up displays have existed in various forms for years. We've had versions that cover one eye, or that use lasers onto the retina.
It's the first time it's being jacked into something like Google. The iPod wasn't as revolutionary as iPod + iTunes. The union of the heads up display with Google's software is similar to how the Apple II, while not the first microcomputer, is the first one that mattered.
> Macs, while not the first PCs, were the first PCs that mattered
The closest analogy I see is with the segway. Something that could be useful and even world-changing but overhyped and dumped on a market without justifying it's existence. Apple could have released the iPad first but they waited to teach the market what it was with the iPhone first. Thus each step (iPhone, tablet) was a new form of a familiar thing rather than a new thing altogether. If I were in Google's shoes, I w…
About six months ago there was a reddit post about a HDR welding mask (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM517kYS6kY). The thread had many interesting comments, including welders claiming that they didn't need such a mask, because they could already weld well with their sense of feeling and limited vision. To me, this is a really good example of what we will be seeing with a lot of these kinds of technology.