Bad News: Google Is Doing The Corporate Future-Vision Video Thing
techland.time.com
techland.time.com
Self-drivable cars hade been around for years. What's different about the Google Prius versions is that they look almost practical, if you squint just a little bit, just minimized the sensors a little bit more it could even fit within a car's stylish exterior. In contrast, some of the past versions were very slow driving and had a truck's worth of equipment in them.
I really think this is a false comparison (to other corporate future videos). Google may release a product that fails to gain adoption, but they will release something.
BTW, go search youtube for AT&T's "You Will" campaign with Tom Selleck. They got a lot of stuff right.
Google tested self-driving cars for quite a while; it was only when the NYTimes was about to write a story about it anyway that they publicly released information.
I would assume these glasses are going to be pretty difficult to hide from the general public when the team is out testing them. If I were them I'd rather release information they want to the public instead of a random blogger getting a photo and kicking up a firestorm of interest.
The "firestorm of interest" can wait until they actually have a product.
There were rumours of these glasses in the NYT last December: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/18/wearing-your-comput...
They did their best to conceal it then. It's not in Google's DNA to hide disruptive products for a long period of time.
No, you would announce the product 6 months before launching it and you would show it. Otherwise, it means that you don't have a prototype good enough to demo --> waporware. It might exist in the future but today it doesn't exists.
This is why the original iPhone launch was such a great event. They showed the damn working thing, no videos like Nokia used to do at the time (iirc about bendable phones that could produce scents?!?!).
How exactly do you demonstrate eyeglass computer output in a video? Already it's disconcerting to look a video of someone's POV; for one, there's no peripheral vision at all. It seems to me that a concept video's the best way to get the general idea into people's heads. Then, they can see for themselves in 6-8 months.
This is the reason why these futuristic videos are so important. To get everyone an inspiring glimpse into the future be it AT&T or Google. Of course AT&T didn't deliver all of these products. They did spur up the debate and got folks working towards that direction.
Technology is great that way. We are a global community and open source is a godsend. I'm sure the first iteration of the glasses will not be that great but it does get better. That's the great thing about building things, you can always learn from your mistakes (or in a lot of cases, lack of knowledge).
it is all about expectations, this is still about a product that google wants to make money of. this video now tickles the fancy of nerds all around. read the comments and you see things like 'all it needs is a direct to brain interface' or 'i will buy all iterations of it'. the problem being that google will not be able to deliver on this concept video, not for the first iterations at least. just look at how long it took for the iphone to reach its current state, with apps, etc.
the iphone launch is the perfect counter-example to concept videos. do not build expectations by releasing concept videos, do not build up false expectations full stop. release and proclaim this. is. it. then see how you build upon that. even apple stumbles, siri being a case in point of reality not matching the aspirations.
nothing worse than releasing a great product that just sucks in comparison to the grand concept videos that didn't have to take into account things like battery life, difficult background/lighting situations, safety rules, etc.
concept videos take up energy you should spend on the actual product, the one people will actually need to pay money for.
On the other hand, if Google knows they can achieve what they show, then it's a good strategy. But if they don't have the tech in hand and just "think" they can achieve it, things won't go well. At best, they'll release a product everybody thinks is subpar. At worst, they'll never release as they keep trying to reach the goal they set for themselves.
What is wrong with getting the conversation started? Is it wrong to write science fiction novels, for example? I for one enjoy reading science fiction.
The one thing that bothers me about the video is that it seems rather unoriginal. The thing you'll do with these glasses is check in at your coffee dealer?
Therefore I think MVP might have merit even for large corporations.
Also, studies seem to show again and again that nobody can predict the future success of a product, which would speak in favor of MVPs even for big corps.
1. larger companies may be nervous of iterating in public because failures/quality problems could look embarrassing / damage the brand
2. early releases or beta tests can signal to competitors that the company has intentions in an area.
I think that was the case with a project like Wave, which IMHO could certainly have done with a little love from Google Marketing/PR as the concept needed to be sold to organisations.
I think the main problem with Wave was a crappy product. The tech was amazing and the interface was cool, but the product was buggy and unresponsive at times. It was a geek's dream though.
They tried to release a full product with the full power of the Google brand behind it when they should've spun it off into a side project and introduced each feature in an iterative way until it gained enough traction. That's the whole point of treating each department as a startup: develop your product alongside your customers one MVP at a time.
Even Apple does this, they could just take bigger leaps because whatever people say about him, Jobs was a fucking genius when it came to designing technology.
There is brand risk - if a startup makes a bad product, then petfud.ly looks bad. If MS Startup Division does, MS looks bad.
If a startup makes a bad product that kills people (or they take on risky contracts with a big downside), they get sued out of existence. If some small division of MS does, MS gets sued out of existence.
Big companies are less agile for a good reason. They have a lot more to lose.
One company I think is really good at this is Amazon. IMDB, dpreview, Audible, Zappos, Woot, and Endless all have maintained their brand fidelity while also benefitting tremendously from Amazon's technology and assets.
Even negative press for Amazon's Web Services doesn't really impact the Amazon brand in most consumers eyes, which is pretty amazing in my opinion.
OTOH buying a successful startup in the same field may be the simpler way to go?
I was in a company that tried this. Sometimes, you get a group with all the disadvantages of being in a small company combined with the disadvantages of being in a big one.
Something the VC community knows pretty well, and have burned their hands any time they forget.
A conversation is not a product. Conversations aren't tied to practical concerns or engineering constraints. Conversations result in interfaces like the one in the demo: there isn't even recognizable input triggering most of the actions.
I mean, do we really think Google will be able to pull off a context-aware "hmmm" as a vocal trigger signifying desired interaction with a pop-up alert?
Microsoft has more processing power available to the Kinect and I can't even hold a conversation in the same room as a Kinect-aware game without accidentally triggering commands. [1] Becoming notably more accurate would require far more local processing, or shipping vocal commands off to the cloud for processing,introducing a lag that's wholly unacceptable for UI navigation. [2] Particularly for UI navigation in a product that's usefulness is predicted on it being quicker and easier than just pulling out your smartphone.
And if you don't know how people interact with the product, how can you usefully investigate what they can or will want to do with it?
If it turns out that the only dependable ways to interact with such devices involve socially dubious practices [3], they may only find popular use passively displaying various augmented reality data layers over identifiable objects.
That truly may be enough. But the result will look nothing like that concept video and no-one will have profited from Google having produced that video.
Don't get me wrong: fiction and futurist musing is great. But it matters who's having the conversation. When a corporation speaks about a product or technology, expectations are inevitably set. And Google's first pass at Glasses is bound to fail the concept video. Successful heads-up devices are bound to be nothing like that video. [4]
But instead of weighing the product on its merits and driving the product in the directions that work, people are going to be discussing the ways in which it fell short of the video and quite possibly trying to force those interactions onto the product, even where they're not working.
Consider Microsoft's Tablet excursion. (If nothing else, Google's Glasses project strikes me as a direct parallel to that.) Microsoft tried to force a full version of Windows onto the Tablet, despite it being unsuited to the form factor, despite the interaction method being wrong, despite the technical strain it put on the already-limited resources available to a mobile device. And they tried to force that to work for a decade -- long after it was obviously not going to work -- because they'd built up expectations based on a flawed conversation at the outset. [5] Expectations from management, developers, users and even shareholders had been set and the result was ten years spinning their wheels.
[1] Mass Effect 3 sure thought I asked it to throw a grenade, even though the conversation I was having didn't even include the word grenade. I can only imagine how annoying always-on voice control would make a head's up device in public.
[2] Local processing that seems increasingly unlikely for mobile projects, given that everything is shipping voice commands off to the cloud these days. And Apple's Siri is only borderline-tolerable for higher-level requests; it would be a bag of fail if it were asked to process 'open email' sorts of commands.
[3] Speaking to yourself, or donning a finger-sock and waving your arm about like a mad-man will naturally lead to people trying to do that as little as possible. (said finger-sock simplifying a digit-tracking mechanism)
[4] The only plausible features from that video are simplified camera access, hands' free calling and turn-by-turn navigation. And two of those are doable with existing bluetooth devices, while the third is only useful if Google can deliver a massive service upgrade to Maps, to include up-to-date coverage of building interiors.
The rest of that video are things people are increasingly dubious of now (always-on alerts and check-in based applications) or simply don't include a plausible interaction method.
[5] A conversation wherein "Windows everywhere" became the goal, despite any (in)applicability to the product.
We have no idea what they have currently built, but from an article a few weeks ago it seems that they integrate with gestures, not audio cues. It's entirely reasponable that the head nodding you saw when he said "hmmm" was what caused the popup.
Maybe I can see it calmly because I am not much of an early adopter. We are surrounded by bullshit claims 99% of the time in this day and age. So I tend to just wait what materializes.
A video like that merely provides some amusement to lighten the day. I am not holding back my order for iGlasses now, because I am fixated on Google glasses being better and I believe because of the video that they are just around the corner. I just lean back and muse about the possibilities.
Our musing here is fine; healthy even. It's a remarkably useful form of downtime, compared to others. But if my employer wrapped up my daydreams and marketed them as "our next product", that would be a different thing entirely.
That "analysis" is flawed because I made it with hindsight, having seen a lot of complaints about Google on HN lately. So I am not unbiased (and I don't even know if the HN attitude towards Google is correlated with the common attitude towards Google).
What are examples of companies that failed once they started making such videos? Just because Steve Jobs didn't make such videos doesn't imply that nobody should.
I still think speculating about it is a little silly, though. We know next to nothing about the technology, next to nothing about which engineers are working on the technology, and next to nothing about Google's intentions. The only things we do know are that Glass is associated with Google X (which seems to be dedicated to long-term projects - space elevators, anyone?) and that Google intends to release something soon. That is very sparse data.
but goolge just released that video into the public space, into the realm of consumers. which is a very rarely a good idea. people still bitch about ms courier as if it had been an actual product rather than just a video.
Cars get away with the concept approach because the average person won't go out and just drop the cash required for a Type 981 Porsche Boxster ($50K+) or even a Subaru BRZ ($26-30K). However, if the hole in a hungry market is large enough, sales will blow well past sales projections regardless (see Subaru BRZ). Yes, you'll always have enthusiasts that always will throw money at manufacturers regardless of pricepoint, but that's largely unsustainable except for very low volume vehicles (special edition sports cars) or immediately following availability unless you have something truly novel (see Toyota Prius upon initial availability).
When you start dropping to more around a $1000 price point for something you're not yet planning to produce as depicted until years from now, there's a term for that: vaporware. Even concept cars tend to get punished harshly when they stray too far from a design language, performance figures, or their original intended market.
Sure there is the famous "don't ask users what they want", but Google might not even be asking users what they want, they might be asking engineers and scientists. They might be in it because they want to create a cool product, not because they want to appease the highest possible amount of people.
Video: I agree that it should have been anchored to current reality, like the Google Plus and self-driving car videos were. But I don't think the video itself was a bad play. RIM/Blackberry released a future-world video back in October (seems to be unavailable now) that had many far away ideas. Gruber criticized it, of course, but I feel like he was right – because in RIM's budget there was no allocation for these imaginary products. Google is actually creating these devices.
Glass: As for the hokeyness of having an extra band over your face – technology tends to bend to the habits of our lifestyle. This is what makes being an inventor/entrepreneur frustrating – watching others create applications or devices that people just won't rewrite their whole way of life to use. Seeing people passionately build devices you know have no chance – because they ask the user to change their habits – is cringe inducing. So I get why people might get a bit of that feeling from this device, because I feel it too. On the other hand, humans love incentives and if this device ramps up productivity by doing many of the operations shown in the video (albeit, less fluid) it might be a sell. If you can get people to wear a Bluetooth device in their ear all day, this might be a slight extension of that.
But no one has yet to solve the two problems plaguing SR: First, putting a whole SR engine on a machine let alone on a pair of embedded chips on a piece of eyewear for instant SR. Even with miniaturization and speed/power improvements I just don't see it happening mainly because chip makers have decided to just add more cores. I may be wrong but it seems difficult to parallelize this with a large corpus.
Obviously the solution is to go the other way and have super fast guaranteed wireless connection at all times. This will still produce lag but probably acceptable levels for most people.
The second problem is one that most people encounter with SR which is when the bloody thing doesn't translate what you said. Either because of an accent or because you're saying something unique or difficult to parse. I tried asking directions to a Mexican place in OC and the results were: Q Cortes, cute protcullis, cute Portos, Q Portales. Can you figure out what I was trying to say? That is the inherent difficulty of the "last mile" problems that SR has and I haven't read or heard anything about anyone solving this anytime soon. SR tech will always be just "good enough" where they can show it off at a meeting/conference but never good enough to be like Star Trek (which unfortunately has set a incredibly huge bar for people's expectations).
Even though the Nokia video is less ambitious they seem to have decided to not include any talking in their future tech videos which seems like a smart idea to me.
I think one could take the form factor and have an awesome product without speech recognition. The potential for AR games alone is compelling. Real time translation of foreign language signs would be useful. Tourist guidebooks would be great. HUD for maps/gps alone could be a viable market.
Maybe it's just because I've seen the actual effort and the basic research being done by those tinkerers at Google, that it seems real to me. I know a phd student who has spent the past 1.5 years without his professor because he was away at Google working on this (Babak).
This writer just seems like he is stirring the pot though. Unless he has supreme insight into Google's go-to-market plans, or even basic research for that matter, I don't get why he feels entitled to shoot down another person's vision. While others daydream, semi-journo's abound whose only existence is pointless contrariety.
Google has a prototype for a concrete product and tries to show us what the idea behind this is. Like Microsoft they also have the money for an expensive video.
Look at the difference between Google Cars, with a prototype and a clear value proposition and this Toyota video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4k0i0c2LWw where nothing makes sense at all.
Indy bookstore? Check.
Ukulele reference? Check.
Food truck? Check.
Brooklyn location? Check.
Late 20-something SWPL protagonists in man-boy phase of life? Check.
Ugh.
10:1 the apartment was in Park Slope.
Someone forgot that true hip happens partly when you make it new because you don't care about tired memes. They're copying the surface but not the essence.
The Project Natal concept/intro video similarly overpromised when you look at the first wave of Kinect but the product itself is still crazy revolutionary and the intro did build the hype and attached the tech unmistakably to MS.
Hm. The concept video was released a year and a half before release. Microsoft obviously had to announce it, so third party devs could support it. But if you watch the video so much stuff is bullshit! ^^ Also it gave the competition a chance to react to it (Playstation Move? I don't own either and don't know which wave-your-hand-stuff is working better or has better games.)
Natal Project: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAFbWE_5GvA
Comparison by CNet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DeJkPN2smB8
It certainly built hype (but also derision. I remember many wouldn't take it serious and as hyperbole). I think Kinect would have been successful in a more truthful presentation. Like if Microsoft had done an Apple-like reveal and only shown the real product two months before release.
I'm not saying this technology wouldn't be cool or awesome to use, I just don't see it benefitting the majority of humanity in the future.
What do you mean by "benefit"?
There's a lot of stuff which has very little benefit if you define benefit in certain ways.
With luck the trickle down (people becoming rich from creating these gadgets; concentrations of very smart people in California; etc) could be used not only to explore deep oceans but also to create smart innovative tech for developing world problems.
It'd be great if Google (for example) had a developing world think-tank.
Don't wear em if you know where you're going. I don't think anybody uses Google Maps to get to their own house or anything they're familiar with. I only watched the video without sound but my guess is the use case is to help you interact and get things done when you have no starting point or fishing for something unfamiliar.
Basically its just a HCI transformation from phone to glasses which I personally wouldn't use either. I'm still waiting for the contacts version ;)
That's more of a philosophical issue with the whole human civilization. In our journey to become independent of the nature we made ourselves dependent on the infrastructure. And companies like Google take it one step further.
For example, given my preference in clothing and my body measurements, when shopping in the city I would like to "block out" somehow all those shops than probably don't have anything for me.
Or while cycling, I would like to seen an indication how fast to drive the next section to not have to stop for the next traffic light. I often have to stop for a red light to immediately start up again because the light turns green. I hate that.
Or when I am working in my garden I would like to see some helping lines and measures to dig straight lines, or to cut my trees at the best spots for it to grow out nicely next summer. Or to be able to sow seeds at the optimal distances from each other.
And so on. What kind of augmented reality do you want?
It would also be much more practical. I would love to have my existing glasses enhanced with a screen powered by my phone.
I could go on, but my point here is that improvements are incremental. Having a desktop has been more convenient than a terminal remoting into a mainframe. A laptop is that much more convenient over a desktop, and likewise with a smartphone.
Also I doubt the vision will work that good like in the video. Just a detail: Imagine the battery constraint of an always-on and always-connected device! The glasses would be heavy!
And second I find the Google googles vision more scary than awesome. Like someone quipped on a former thread "why would an advertising company would want to put a filter between your eyeballs and reality?" And while I understand that many would love a more cyberpunk-like future it frightens me. Imagine the amount of pointless distraction to always have a newsfeed in your visual field! Imagine the procrastination of people always lurking reddit or facebook or hackernews! You know how incredible rude it is when you are talking to people but they are checking their phone? And last not least: Imagine getting used to the glasses and not functioning without it anymore!!
I take it you don't wear glasses. Many millions of us do. All day, every day, our entire lives. It's in no way inconvenient.
Also I think (have opined this before) could be huge for local social network - suppose you walk into a tech conference and you can see what everyone is currently interested in talking about floating in bubbles over their head. Or flirting using only show indicator if both parties show they're interested. Or a waiter can see who's ready to order/pay etc..
But beyond filtering of people, there's many other social-augmentation things you could do - I'd quite like a face-recognition remind me of their name thing. Or people to annotate people with notes so I can say last time I bumped into them we were talking about X.
What will be the effect of knowing people's name only through your augmentation? Of a small number of people you see very often you'll learn their names (and you would have also without augmentation). But what about the large number of people in between acquaintance/friend and "have seen before"? Will we try less to get to know people as we have all the information about them we need for our purposes via augmentation? Don't we care less about people unless we see them very often? Will people become symbols of their information in our database only to activate the augmentation to recall that information?
I probably am too pessimistic (I call that realistic :-), but in the end, I wonder, do we control where our future is going with technology like this or do we wake up someday to a world we don't fit in anymore?
"3 people are looking for a fourth for tennis, 1.2 miles away".
As to the rest, there were identical dire warnings with the rise of cell phones. We seem to have managed.
Glasses are too close to the eye and multitasking will require constant focus racking, which will tire the eyes and produce headaches. Elements displayed in stereo will require very precise calibration to the user's face geometry to prevent ghosting or eye strain. Elements displayed in one lens only will appear transparent.
Even if the tech issues are solved perfectly, humans do not multitask visually when moving; this is why heads-up displays are not common in cars despite the technology being easy. It distracts more than it helps. HUD works in planes because there is no immediate danger of collision when flying, so pilots can focus just on the HUD for extended periods of time.
Humans in motion multitask across senses, not within senses. Most people can walk and talk no problem--but walking and reading is a lot harder. So, the future of wearable computing is probably a wearable computer that listens and speaks.
And it's here now: a smartphone with an earbud is a wearable computer, and it's proven successful in the marketplace. To be truly useful, it will need to volunteer interactions the way the Google glasses do--but to do that well, it will need to be listening at all times, and understand when information is welcome and/or needed. Right now that is not possible with current levels of battery and speech recognition technology.
In the far, far future I could see visual communication multi-tasked into everyday life. It will take a lot of societal changes for that to happen though. I like the portrayal of "picting" in Greg Bear's EON series.
I agree with this point, but I think Google is moving away from this, which I think will be healthy in the short term and unhealthy in the longterm. Focused companies need focused leaders. I think Larry Page is filling the Steve Jobs role nicely right now, but if he falters the whole company will falter with him.
Page has certainly done a good job focusing the company more but I think it's premature to suggest he's in the Steve Jobs mould. He's been in position for 12 months, Google simply isn't as built in his image as Apple was in Jobs. I'm not talking about quality of thinking, leadership, intelligence or anything like that, just the sheer extent to which Jobs had asserted his will over Apple and it's culture.
http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/companies_that_publish_con...
I think it'd be cool if contributors were encouraged to remove blatant opinions from flame bait headlines. I think this would show more respect to our intelligence and openness as a community. I value the discussions on hacker news more than the articles themselves and I think it's too bad that this discussion started out with a biased tilt.
I think something more like "Google made a future vision video" would have been a more appropriate headline. Then, if the community actually thinks it's bad news, they can comment on the story and say so. I'd rather discuss plain facts than the opinion of a time magazine article.
Do you have have links to any of them handy? It would be interesting to compare the concept video to the real product.
First world makes me sick sometimes
Google has very many computers. Google has many smart people. Google knows how to wrangle large data sets.
Google also has a bajiliion customers, and those customers are used to jumping through various hoops. Google could get many people to speak words from a dictionary; and then wrangle that data to improve speech recognition. (I'd be interested in differences between languages and quality of recognition.)
Since the glasses are attached to the head, maybe some brainwave measuring thing could work?