The nice thing is, that they are completely "invisible" for other people around me.
My main problem is what does it give me over wearing a smart watch? The only thing I can think of is being slightly more discreet and the "gesture" not being rude to activate when you are in company. That is something I found out quickly when I started wearing an Apple Watch - even if you are just checking a text message it appears you are checking the time and want to leave. Since then I have greatly cut down on notifications going to my watch, and have even fewer that even ping on my phone.
To me, having a camera on it is what would make it compelling, but at the same time make it creepy. Say being able show driving directions overlaid on the actual road, versus some floating text. Or you sit down at a desk with just a keyboard and mouse and your "displays" are only shown in your field of view - and you can customize, move and resize them as you wish.
This. I don't wear glasses and don't like the idea of walking around with notifications floating around my eyes.
But a set of monitors that fill my field of vision and fit in my pocket sounds awesome.
Which is a damn shame, because I'd sell my kidney for the ability to work with two decently sized (virtual) displays from my couch or in the garden...
It's a problem of being able to pack that many pixels onto the tiny screen area of a glasses based AR solution and then being able to process and render that in a mobile form factor. It's a hard problem to solve to say the least.
Smart watches are not for everyone either. I hate having things weighting down my hands or hitting tables so this would be a device I’d choose over any smartwatch.
Also I think it’s nice to have a device that is instantanous to put on and take off. You want to focus on something for 15 seconds ? just take them off. Finished focusing ? they’re back on.
I often wonder whether I'm alone in thinking that checking messages in company is rude too? I'm quite sure that it would be considered rude 10 years ago, but I feel like general opinion has changed on that.
Turn by turn directions when riding a bike. Easy to track countdown timers that don't require swiping/navigating through a smartwatch UI.
Limited purpose devices are useful because the UI can be optimized to just a handful of use cases. Just like the original Palm Pilots were (IMHO) better for organization than modern smartphones. (The original Palm Pilots also had a more responsive UI and never decided to, at random, take 10 seconds to load my home screen after unlock.)
Combine this with Amazon's smart store that knows when you've put an item in your basket, and a shopping list. Have your shopping list appear one item at a time, and automatically progress to the next item as you fill up your basket!
No need to flip through the UI on a smartwatch to get to the shopping list, it just appears when you walk into the store.
FWIW, the Apple Watch offers this. It buzzes or audibly signals one way for turning left and another for turning right. I use it when walking around a new city sometimes.
I love the idea of the shopping list, though not integration with Amazon or having it automatically progress. It doesn't know where things are in my store (and they change), so that doesn't make sense to me. But having it there and being able to see it without taking out my phone would be nice.
What does it do at 5 way intersections? :-D
When I was trying to propose this feature for Microsoft Band , I realized that it worked great in West Coast cities with their nice grid layouts, and also while strolling around Manhattan. Falls apart in a lot of other situations though. :(
From the article:
>> It projects a rectangle of red text and icons down in the lower right of your visual field. But when I wasn’t glancing down in that direction, the display wasn’t there. My first thought was that the frames were misaligned.
The HUD in Google Glass was also outside of your normal field of view and for certain things this was a poor experience. For example, using Google maps integration I felt like I was taking my eyes off the road and felt safer simply using my smartphone mounted to my windshield.
In fine mode, it would give you a fairly detailed readout of the bearing and distance to your target (marked with GPS). It required doing that thing where you're looking up-and-to-the-right in order to see what was going on.
In coarse mode, the entire Glass display was changed to a single color. I found that it showed up well even in someone's peripheral vision and the colors were distinct enough that you could navigate pretty well without having to watch the display.
I tried using symbols (giant triangles to indicate direction and such) but none of them worked as well as the color blocks.