North, Thalmic's Secret Smart Glasses Play
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I really liked google glass - but I wasn't going to pay >1k.
If anything, I think there is a rising sea change in that more and more people are realizing they DON'T always want to have a life full of digital distractions, and that having that beeping thing in your pocket is bad enough, but having something smack dab in front of your eyeballs is even worse.
Otherwise, I’d like a reading app so I don’t have to look down at my phone.
If it just mirrors the phone and the phone screen becomes a touchpad, I’d consider it.
AR translation of text is already awesome but cumbersome using a smartphone. This would improve it a lot.
Speech-to-text for hearing impaired folks would be really nice, as well as visual indicators of loud or dangerous sounds, with directional indicators. You could imprint someone's vocal signatures or a keyword so your friends could get your attention at distance.
In professional or enthusiast settings it's also quite useful to have a heads-up display for many "live" tasks. Cooking, construction, surgery, driving, sports, policing, you can even tether to a battery pack in some instances.
In short, any setting when your hands are occupied but you can benefit from some sort of data feed.
Navigation - yes - with the right user experience that isn't so focused on the map, but the turn-by-turn.
A watch does notifications as well as glasses, but no better.
When I think of smart glasses, I imagine the best possible version of them as an exercise in thought. It starts off with them being in a form factor that's effectively indistinguishable from "normal" glasses. After that, I imagine them having the processing power to provide full AR capabilities, as well as a battery that's able to sustain that technology for at least a day if not longer.
I suppose that in turn might make you ask, "What is 'full AR'?" For the sake of this I'm going to imagine a world where there are no nefarious actors or ill-intentions. This is a fantasy world where I can just geek out over cool tech.
To me, it's the ability to recognize any and all people you interact with, at a moment's notice. Think all social media networks combined, but in realtime, as soon as you lock eyes with a person. The ability to "remember" a person you met ten years ago at that one networking event is now possible. Extrapolating this into other social spheres, you could get rid of all of the traditional dating apps that exist on your cell. If you walk into a bar or [$genericSocialSetting], you can immediately see who is single, and who isn't (assuming they have this information broadcast). Dating just got significantly easier, and maybe a bit more organic since you can tell right off the bat who is looking (and maybe even see if you have something in common).
Looking into other areas of use, imagine having Wikipedia at your finger tips, overlain in your field of vision. I'm not talking paragraphs of text here, but rather some sort of intuitive UI that cleverly displays the most significant bits of information about a given object, place, person, etc, within your field of vision. "That plant is poisonous."
Smart glasses represent taking all of the data and information that's available on the internet, and overlaying it in the real world. The "killer app" for smart glasses is several years out, and it will take many iterations before it's perfected. They're going to augment how we function, just how smart phones have augmented us. You'll be able to record, snapshot, and replay scenes from your past just like you can do with your phone, but far more effortlessly. I can imagine a world where your smart glasses are constantly recording, but only choosing to "save" given your input (since a lot of moments we wish we could have saved happen without us having our phones out.) Again this is pretending we live in world with zero nefarious actors (Black Mirror does a good job of covering some potential negatives of tech like this).
I think we're a long, long ways off from this tech. It's going to be a big culture shift in many ways, and is going to happen slowly at first. In my mind this is the sort of thing that Thalmic, Magic Leap and others are pursuing. I see companies like that as the early Ford Motor Company. These early Smart Glasses/AR companies are producing the Model T. Our smart phones are the "faster horses" in this analogy.
The potential applications you describe around dating or knowledge display literally make the wearer see the world as a set of data points, which—while quite 2018—I believe is incredibly dangerous even without bad actors. It does not leave room for anything that doesn't fit into some arbitrary set of database columns or set of graph nodes or ML model; no room for nuance; no allowance for change or for the unknown or for the unexpected. Eventually, the data overlays stop augmenting reality and come to defined reality itself.
My ideal smart glasses would let me see and experience differently; see new spectrums of light or watch music dance through the air. In a world with no bad actors, AR adventures would take me new places and introduce me to new people. Visual augmentations would let me try on new personas or express myself in new ways. Reality itself becomes hackable.
If history is any guide, the future that I dream of will never come to pass and in 20 years these words will seem as quaint as those of early internet utopians. And yet I still have to believe in it—and I will still keep trying to explore it—because the bland, data dystopia that you unwittingly offered a sneak peak of is just too horrible.
Why not, though? Obviusly that sets limits on what kind of output the device itself can produce from each source of data, but that's not your entire experience of life as its user. To me it seems akin to saying that carrying a scrapbook would make you live in the past.
Temporary dashcam, recording a lecture, ar applications to provide information (e.g. price deltas for food in a supermarket), notifications, etc.
- Night/Day View - If nighttime see what it looks like in daytime
- Historical view - If im at X building or wherever how did it look years ago
- Facebook/Linkedin AR - See the name of stranger your talking to
I think AR glasses is the next big innovation!
While I think AR for applications such as in-venue / in-store navigation might be cool, smart glasses still seem like a sub-par smartphone experience.
Any maintenance or repair of complex systems
Education and training
Warehouse inventory picking
First person perspective photos and video are, IMHO, much better than the phone - but its somewhat of a lateral move from existing head mounted action cameras.
Hint: something to do with form factor.
The IPhone is the now the most popular camera on Flickr and other photo sites. What would you think if that mantle in the future is held by a pair of smartglasses?