The Glass Bicycle

To my mind, the Google Glass is far more like the Microsoft Tablet, the Tesla Roadster and the Palm Treo: the initial realization of a concept that, before now, didn't exist in the world at all. It seems incorrect to compare it to the iPhone and the iPad because both of those were taking technology that had existed in the tech community for years and reimagining them in a way that appealed to the general public.

As a member of the tech community, I'm excited and looking forward to getting Glass for myself, but I don't see widespread adoption to the scale that the non-tech community can handle until we've innovated at least some of the uses and worked out the 1.0 bugs.

I personally don't know many people who are dismissing it off as "ugly, useless, and un-productizable."

Almost everyone understands this is the room-sized ENIAC equivalent of our times.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC

I wish Google would focus on using Google Glass within the workplace before trying to take it to the streets for casual use.

I can imagine using them within the office, because anything that makes me more productive is totally acceptable "socially". Outside of the office however I have serious doubts to if I'd wear these around daily. My colleague will know why I'm essentially talking to myself to use Google Glass, where as people in public will think I'm batshit (much like people talking on bluetooth headsets).

Once I become very comfortable with them inside the office it's much more likely I'll start forgetting I should even remove them when I leave to go get lunch, coffee, etc.

Plus I'm much more interested in enhanced productivity than I am checking the weather.

What I will give them is the "record" feature could be incredibly useful within the office from day one. I can't count the number of meetings or brainstorming sessions I wish I had on video.

The closest analogy I see is with the segway. Something that could be useful and even world-changing but overhyped and dumped on a market without justifying it's existence. Apple could have released the iPad first but they waited to teach the market what it was with the iPhone first. Thus each step (iPhone, tablet) was a new form of a familiar thing rather than a new thing altogether.

If I were in Google's shoes, I would start by introducing the glass into existing items such as workplace safety goggles. Imagine a pair of carpenter's safety goggles that could measure a piece of wood, or track a list of supplies, or show a work plan as you go. It's not the big play, but you can try it in a bunch of contexts until it catches on. It will generate press and awareness, and then once the novelty wears off you can make a "smart goggles for everyone".

Google's mistake continues to be that the believe value is in novelty, when really it is in taking something people are already familiar with and reinventing it, better.

If anybody wants to get a good idea where something like glass could go, read the Phaethon series starting with "The Golden Age". It's a bit of a tough read, but the author spent some serious time considering the implications of a civilization built around always wearing these kind of devices at all times.

Glass acts like a layer on top of the real world, consider then that as the technology improves and the number of people using it increases, you can get rid of things like street signs as the glass will simply show you the pertinent signage for wherever you are looking, going shopping and the device will recognize the product you are looking at and tell you if it's a good deal, people can "project" their idealized image of what they want you to see to your glass, simply looking at somebody will pull up relevant information you need to know like their name and occupation and so on and so forth.

Now project this forward and add more similar layers on top of this. Imagine you can select from several layers according to your philosophy or needs. A Libertarian layer might allow one business to buy the virtual signage of another business and broadcast their brand instead. Or a Maslow Hierarchy layer may strip all branding from your view and simply distill down what they're selling to its bear essentials "food" "clothes" "shoes".

You could select filters in your layers to simply block out things that you don't want to see. "New Derelicte-Block omits undesirables from your world!"

Why build fancy metamaterials when all you have to do is hack the local View Layer broadcast frequency and hide yourself from everybody around.

Why hack it when you can simply unjack completely and rely on everybody's standard install of Derelicte-Block v3.2 to keep you suppressed from their notice?

It's interesting that in HN comments, most people are very excited for the arrival of glass. They think of it as something that will enhance their lifestyle, their productivity, etc.

If you read comments about glass in other forums such as at the bottom of NYTimes articles or other more general public media, most comments seem to be just the opposite: fear and paranoia about the arrival of glass in terms of privacy, or "naturalists" who abhor the thought of technology being a ubiquitous layer in front of real world experiences.

This makes me think it will be awhile before glass will be universally accepted. Just like certain restaurants and cafes are declaring themselves as cell phone free zones, will they also make you take off your glasses before being seated?

It only solves one side of man machine interaction: the machine-to-man part. For many interactions, its solution for man-to-machine is voice, which is anything but unobtrusive in public.

It's unclear from the article whether or not the author has actually used Google Glass. It's pretty vague, so I assume not. It's easy to wax on about the greatness of a device if, having never used one, you're free to project all of your hopes and fantasies onto it.

I would like my next car Google Glass enabled. It could display turn by turn directions, warn of upcoming traffic, and let me know what services are available at the next exit.

I can also foresee Google Glass being very useful for complex, domain specific tasks that require your hands: surgery, automobile repair, home construction, cooking, learning to play an instrument, dealing cards, sowing, tying flies etc.

If Google can avoid the "Segway curse" of extreme dorkiness, I can only then see Google Glass having a chance at being revolutionary.

There's a company that's been making HUD technology for ski goggles for a few years. http://www.reconinstruments.com/

Something like this is far more accessible to consumers since you won't look weird in the goggles. Unfortunately it's VERY expensive (4 or 5 times the price of a regular pair of goggles).

The biggest problem with Google Glass is privacy.Anyone can record you without you knowing it. And it's not just walking down the street. There are so many bad scenarios. Usually we embrace new tech here but this device would bring privacy to a whole new level. Not to mention that Google is starting to be too powerful for our own good.

The image shown in this article does a good job of highlighting the usefulness of Glass. It's not just a heads up display. It's the smarts of knowing where you are, what you are doing, what you plan to do in order to provide relevant information in an automatic and unobtrusive way.

"Oh, I see you're at the airport and you have tickets on flight 644. Here's some useful departure info." Instead of finding a departure screen or tap-tap-tapping on your phone - it's just there.

http://img.svbtle.com/dcurtis_24516029389500_raw.jpg

Maybe I am an idiot for not understanding this sentiment expressed below:

"Google glass will make everyone smarter"

Is it in the same way that a car makes an obese un-athletic person faster?

The hn crowd are of course a very tech minded group and more tolerant technology in their lives. My friends who watch the google glass video seem to come away thinking "what does it do?" - this is normal people, not geeks. They all laugh when I say you wear them and talk to them. Do we really want to start talking to our clothing. I immediately switched off Siri for much the same reason (other than it doesn't work at all except for canned demos) - People use their smartphones in the elevators, on buses, etc, they don't want to look like dorks saying "ok, glass, show me my schedule for tomorrow", instead they silently and discretely click on the app.

A walking still camera and video camera will immediately put people into a defensive frame, knowing that anything they say or do can end up on twitter/facebook etc within moments. Especially when google enable retroactive videoing, by keeping the camera looping until told to record, then it keeps the last X seconds of the video loop. The obvious use case for google is to collect more data about you to sell more ads, and guess where those ads will end up.

Of course this is ignoring the legal issues of recording in courtrooms, corporations, photography on private property, what happens when someone's reading their email while driving and crashes into the self-driving car in front of them.

I applaud google for trying to invent the future, and maybe in 100 years society will be a different place with new zero-privacy expectations and laws have caught up with the world, but until then, my prediction is this is the new segway.

Can't offer any predictions about Google glass, yet I think the Surface analogy just falls flat. It's not about Microsoft's 10k surface it's about failing to get the critical momentum going in the mass market.

There was such a thing called the Tablet PC[1] introduced by Microsoft in 2001, you could get one for below 1500 USD in 2003†. They were marketed as a niche product if at all. For about a decade they were the only available portable devices that offered decent screen resolutions/pixel densities. The software was partly premature yet mostly usable. Some things just take time to mature to be seen as marketable to the consumer market.

In case if screen resolutions just too much time, its just kind of sad that you always seem to have to wait for Apple to push those technologies into bigger markets (touch interfaces/ high resolution displays) it's good to see that there finally is some competition is this area (Google Pixel, Retina Screens) and operation systems with with resolution flexible UI's are finally the norm.

† got a one back then which is still doing its fanless & meanwhile stylusless work as a trusty small home server.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC

The voice interface and the forced fashion statement will probably greatly contribute to the death of this product as it stands, but I think it's the next necessary step to something truly revolutionary.

I would like the next step to solve these two issues using something like subvocalization to replace voice commands, and having more say in the fashion statement, so you can custom order your Glass to make it look (more) like you're wearing normal reading glasses, or sunglasses, or whatever. The latter is just a brute force matter of getting hardware sizes down even more over the coming years.

Then eventually we'll just splice the display into our optic nerves, and drive the interaction with our thoughts, and the borg takeover will be complete.

Personally I am offended by Google glass! and I refuse to talk to anyone filming and recording my voice me on Google glass. It's offensive on many levels. Google should work on a social etiquette for their product. Showing you a small screen on your end is your business, pointing a camera toward me, recording me and my voice is my business, and it can only be done with my permission, and it is "no". The only scenario that makes sense is that I am wearing Google glass and I can set a permission on my glass that others can film me with their glass or not.

The key problem with Google Now is that you have to remember to look at it, and so, most people don't get the benefit as much as they should. The act of having to physically remove the phone, unlock it, to see contextual Now card notifications IMHO is a transaction cost that makes it less likely you'll use it effectively.

You need to be able to see and dismiss a contextual notification within a second, like a warning light in a cockpit. It should be effortless and almost second nature.

That's one reason why the glass, or going further, direct-mind-machine interface, would be better - speed. Latency matters. I am often deterred by the time it takes to unlock a phone to perform an action. For example, I once witnessed a car accident and wanted to snap a picture, but it took too long to get my phone out, and I missed the moment. Other times, I want to translate something I'm looking at, but bringing up an app to do it is just too annoying. Look at the way the characters in Star Trek the Next Generation call on the computer to answer questions as if it is always just there for the asking. That's the kind of responsiveness you want.

I think a lot of people assume that a device that sits on your face would be "always on", constantly distracting you, but I'd argue that the ideal device is one that is out of your way, but activates extremely quickly on demand, or contextually as appropriate, like a subconscious subroutine or personal assistant.

Too much effort I think is focused on immediate mass mainstream adoption. It's as if, you can't have an iPhone level sales volume, it's not even worth doing. But there are lots of things worth doing that the masses don't necessarily adopt out of the gate. Someone needs to lay the foundation that the future is built on, that other people can build on. Google Glass doesn't need to "kill" the iPhone to succeed.

The true genius and revolution of Glass is the interaction system. It's the first large scale, consumer product which will really provide a much faster interface with our phones / computers. We have small computers that can do anything in our pockets, but the bottleneck for the past years has been passing commands onto it, typing them, taking it out etc.

Glass will provide a much more embedded experience, where you have constant access, where you never have to ask yourself is it worth taking my phone out of my pocket etc.

The scary part is what that will do to our memory, we'll slowly move towards a shared memory that sits on the net. When every question's answer is a ms away, will we still use our own memory? Maybe we'll use it as RAM :)

Anyway I'm very excited, I'm sure the interactions and seeing people with glass will be fairly odd, but the intrusive part of it will be resolved in time.

I think I agree with the Torrez/Gruber take that "If you see the computer, they blew it"

http://notes.torrez.org/2013/02/if-you-see-the-computer-they...

That doesn't mean that a wearable device embedded in your glasses cannot eventually become a 'bicycle for the mind' but I think the fact that the computer is so noticeable and strange looking means that this version 1.0 will not be too successful. Google is positioning itself well to be the one who figures it out first, but I don't think Glass will take off as a mass-consumer device on a smartphone scale for a while. First, the computer will need to become 'invisible'. Until then, Glass will be highly useful to a few professions (and a toy for nerds), while Google will gain invaluable data and continue to iterate.

Glass is such a personal experience that is not able to be shared with the world and can really only be explained by "you just have to try it". I am rooting for glass, but I have no idea how it will overcome the d-bag who always has their bluetooth in their ear.

I use bluetooth as a social analogy, not as a technical one.

Wearable computing, in general, is unlikely to be as successful as a tablet with a great capacitive, finger-friendly touchscreen and a UI designed for fingers.

The modern tablet is a true breakthrough. Wearables are potential new market, and there is some excitement around the fact that both Google and Apple will enter that market soon. But wearables are far from a sure thing.

For one thing, Google Glass has a voice user interface. Google's speech recognition is the best there is, but on alternate days it still veers from astounding to laughable.

The most compelling application, face recognition, has a high creepiness factor, and Google probably won't touch it even though I would be first in line to buy if I could pick everyone in my contact list out of a crowd.

Personally i'm cautious with my expectations as I approach glass. It's clear that instant accessibility of information changes literally everything. For example as I drive to work, i like to listen to lectures from Itunes U. Today during the lecture the professor mentioned a concept I wasn't familiar with. Unfortunately there was no way for me to stop, and find out what that was. Which means there was some clear missed value on my part.

Google glass is an attempt to bring additional context related information into your life. That's a game changer, but until I see it, I have a really hard time believing glass can deliver this quite yet. But it might get us started in the right direction, and that alone is significant.

In the same way that most people now associate Apple with the iPhone, in the future Google Glass may become Google's piece de resistance ... the product for which they are most well known for. Google search will just be a service embedded in everything.

I'm still guessing how Glass would stand up to the performance shown in the demo video. For Glass to work like as shown it would need to have Internet connection everywhere (including ski slops and dessert roads) and batteries need to last for a significant portion of the day. One way it can do is to offload processing + connection to cellular via Bluetooth to phone in your pocket. In which case Glass becomes just interface device for phone like Bluetooth headsets but with camera and tiny projector. The projector could be LED based low powered device with a lens. I think whole thing can be made very cheaply, probably under $199. It would be a very cool thing for sure.

Google Glass solves output. But voice input is still problematic, it's generally only usable when the set of expected words is heavily circumscribed. Though, most people can talk faster than they can type, around 150–160 WPM, so in principle, it's better than a keyboard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Speech_and_lis...

The first-to-market with new category of device doesn't always dominate the category. Consider the PC (Apple was first). Given an ugly version and a cool version of wearable computing, which will people prefer to wear?

Google Glass is the next step in the evolution of technology. It is the next generation of mobile technology, a stepping stone from cell phones. There was a time when the idea of carrying around a phone seemed ludicrous, now we all have one. In fact now these devices are more powerful than previous generations of desktop computers. So yes, give it 5 years and we'll all have something of the sort. I'll even go as far as to say devices like Glass could out sell mobile phones in the future.

I am a very cynical man. The current phones are toys, not tools, and I see no reason for google glass to be any different. Toy's make more money than tools.

Some nice thoughts but dcurtis missed the point: people do not criticise the concept or idea of Google Glass -- they sneer at the implementation. Once we have mores subtle devices or even contact lenses with embedded screens we'll see a breakthrough of this new medium but until then it's more kind of a R&D thing with a use case for just few niches.

dcurt.is is overrated. Didn't he tell us about 2 years ago how 3.5" is the perfect size for smartphones and how brilliant Apple was for making it like that? (never mind that people have different hand sizes, and they are willing to compromise on "thumb perfection" to get a larger screen). And then Apple introduces the 4", taller, iPhone.

I think a first big step is going to be conquering usability of Glass with respect to NLP. It's truly going to embody the vision that Dustin is talking about once I can get things don with my voice with no error and minimal overhead. Ideally we wouldn't even have to talk to the device, that would be the Holy Grail.

Yeah, it could be that, or it could just be the Xybernaut Poma:

http://www.complex.com/tech/2011/04/the-50-worst-fails-in-te...

OT: I just kudos'd with my hand over a foot away from the mouse by hitting the spacebar and scrolling into the button.

I don't like to wear glasses. Please explain how this will be more useful than an "absurd" table or a iPad to me.

I can't wait for the contact lens version of Google Glass.

Yes, technology is certainly advanced nowadays. We're so clever of a species. Google Glass and Google driverless cars prove it.

Too bad we're destroying the planet and every living thing therein to prove it.

So if the glass is a bicycle then a desktop is what, a bus?