Hacker News Reader

Comment by indiefan | Hacker News Reader

Typical Google. Treating what should be platforms like products and treating what should be products like platforms.

This is a great point. In the Project Glass video all of the products are Google's. Imagine if, instead of a product, the Google glasses were an open platform for AR like Android is for smartphones. If this were so, Google could create a new app store for AR applications, a new distribution platform for web searches, AR open web apps, and (maybe) a first-person version of YouTube (reality TV 3.0). This platform would mobilize the development community and deter some companies from building apps for the iPhone (if delivery on the Google Glass platform would be more convenient).

As a developer who is working on a product that's very well suited to take advantage of this product I'm very ashamed of Google's lack of third-party developer involvement and business vision. Sure the product looks great, but is not solely about products; it's about people, about delivering value for customers the world over. And the full value of this product would only be realized if Google takes a platform approach, opens up the ecosystem and lets everybody in (including, and, especially Facebook).

Summary of the good things I saw in the demo:

- Very clean user interface

- Nice hardware design

- Interesting functionalities

- Nice integration with Google products

- Slick animations

- Seems to be pretty fast

Initial concerns:

- Video calls in version one? What about battery life? Sometimes is better to keep some things out on first iterations

- No hints to integrations with other platforms

- Too much use of voice (we all know the state of the art in voice recognition and how long voice processing currently takes)

- I didn't see a single Web search in the video... how come?

All and all this is a VERY promising product and a very important one for the whole industry. I hope Google opens up this platform so that it can reach all the momentum and followers it deserves.

Does webpage searching really have much relevance to AR? A lot of useful services for this application are on different platforms like twitter, facebook, chat, video, maps. I don't think this AR will/should be text-heavy.

Who said anything about searching text?

The bulk of information that resides in social networks is "conversational". Publicly accessible human knowledge about places (such as historic facts, meetups, etc) still resides, for the most part, in the open Web.

Connect to the open Web (with a powerful summarization technology) would be a killer on this platform. Otherwise we would we reinventing the wheel.

Agree with most of the above, but as regards an open platform, don't forget that the iPhone didn't initially have an app store at all.

I think it might take a while of having people walking around with an initial, closed version for the truly novel and exciting obvious to really become obvious.

It will probably be a 'dumb' accessory - using bluetooth to offload most of the processing to an android device - at least, in the first version.

Is there any indication that there won't be Apps available for these glasses? I don't think so.

At any rate, the counter argument is that opening it up to 3rd party developers means letting people shit up your field of vision with ads, which might not be so cool.

Are you saying they should license this technology to Samsung and others? If that's the case, I disagree. This is Google's chance to increase their profits and market cap three fold and within a few years, if this product turns out as exciting as it seems to be right now.

Considering the number of failed Google services, I think it's plausible to consider more "open" products to have a bigger opportunity for growth and popularity. Allowing third party developers to do their own thing with the product would remove Google's sluggishness as a factor for avoiding the device.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com