There was a lot of hype about a year ago, when the beta version was being released.
We had a few threads here discussing how people would use Glass, and what the social impact might be.
But over the past 6 months or so, I don’t think I’ve heard anything at all.
That’s a lot of silence for a device which may change the world profoundly.
Now, me, personally—I doubt if I’ll ever wear a camera on my face. But other people might want to, or need to. For example, policemen on duty. Think of the recent contoversy in Ferguson (the shooting of the black guy by a white cop.) Google Glass could have eliminated the whole issue, and proven whether the shooting was justified.
It also would have been a fine opportunity for Google to publicize their new product as more than just a tech toy for geeks, but rather something with practical use .
But nobody seems to be talking much about it. Is Google Glass likely to be mass-marketed soon? Or is it still llike the google car----a nice gadget, but still many years away from being practical and common?
I’ve seen people on the streets of Manhattan wearing one. Not common, though.
I don’t think Google Glass was ever intended to be something that everyone would be wearing. More like a “see what we can do with this” kind of technology exploration.
The bottom line is that the “creepiness” factor is going to limit it to people who either don’t care if people think they’re creepy or are too clueless to realize that everybody thinks they’re creepy.
I think this is something that will change with time as more people use them. I remember people being concerned about the ‘creep’ factor when cell phones got cameras 10 years ago. Now people won’t even look at a phone if it doesn’t have a camera (luddites excluded :))
As glass gets more apps, more use in industry, and the price point drops, I can see it replacing cell phones and people will wonder 20 years from now “what did we do without this?” the same way we wonder that about cell phones and computers now.
Glass was only on sale to developers for a while there, and it was only recently (May 2014) that they became available to “the public.”
So it’s not like they released it and everyone rushed out to buy it and it did all sorts of things already, like the iPhone. They released it to developers in April 2013 and said “ok go develop stuff for these!” and the media was like “WOW COMPUTERS IN YOUR GLASSES!” and forgot the “they don’t really do anything yet and not too many people own them” part because “WOW COMPUTERS IN YOUR GLASSES!”
I’m guessing the developers are still developing and nobody’s come up with that thing that’s going to make Joe Tech go buy a $1500 toy (version .1) just yet.
So Google Glass is out there, just there’s a disconnect between who is purchasing it (developers) and what they are doing with it (developing stuff to run on it) and “the hype” that everyone is purchasing them and doing all sorts of great things with it.
I tried Google Glass out recently when attending a meeting at a high-tech company…it was kinda cool to have a screen in your field of vision, but they’re going to have to make them look MUCH more “normal” for the average person to have any interest in wearing them around town.
It seemed like more of an engineering exercise than an actual product that they hoped would take off like the iPod or something. There are some really cool advantages to having a camera that looks where you look combined with a head-up display for certain activities/occupations, though…police included, as mentioned above.
The widespread hostility toward Google Glass is not helping, either. When iPods and pocket-sized cellphones first came out they were popular and perceived as obviously useful. Glass isn’t.
I’ve long believed that the miniaturization of technology will make some form of “wearable” intelligent technology inevitable, and eventually even implanted technologies – but we’re not there yet. The runaway success in personal miniature technology has been the smartphone. The quest for the Next Big Thing has so far been a bust – at this point the Apple Watch and Google Glass seem to be just silly – solutions looking for a problem.
More of a curiosity rather than any kind of useful data but there’s this:
I found a video recently from a porn site called …“Fuck Glasses”? or maybe “Porn Glasses”?
The site I was at was a site that collects videos from other sites. This particular video was from a site that (I assume based on the name of the site and the one video that I watched) features point-of-view porn videos that are shot through Google Glasses worn by one of the performers. It was similar but noticeably different from other point-of-view porn videos- being shot by the glasses worn by the performer made the point-of-view perspective much more natural than point-of-view videos with hand-held cameras.
Ha, I’m reminded of how in the novel Snow Crash there was a slang name for people who went around in public hooked into the Net like that; “Gargoyles”.
I though the whole Glass thing was a joke until I visited the Silicon Valley last year. I saw no less than 4-5 people wearing the thing during my one-week stay there. They primarily hung around cafes looking smug and trying to show off their glasses while appearing nonchalant. It was immediately obvious, on every occasion, why they are known as Glassholes.
…and I’m no technophobe, either! I owned calculator watches, the first MP3 player, whatever. Even got one of the early Glass invites. Still wouldn’t be caught dead wearing one of those damned cyborg creepcorders, even if I worked for Google.
But I think the key thing about Glass is not that I’m hostile to the idea of having one myself. I’m hostile to other people around me having it thereby enabling Google HQ to record my movements without my permission.
Whether somebody else has a dumb phone, a smart phone, or not is mostly their concern. I really don’t care one way or the other. Yes, many of those devices have cameras, but people aren’t continuously using them for continuous recording. But with GG those people are acting as data gathering platforms targeting me, that’s when I take notice.
And I think idea will be the central objection to GG and similar systems.
