I don't understand why Google hasn't hired Steve Mann yet, at least as a consultant on the project. Seems like hubris to me: this guy has been testing wearable systems for 20 years or so and knows more about the experience than anyone on the planet.
[1] http://www.wearcam.org/computing.html/ [2] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/
Also - does he really have so much experience with that tech? There seems to be some controversy around how much self-promotion he's doing via Wikipedia.
He's both self-promotional and has legitimately done all of the stuff he's promoting.
Incidentally, for those who haven't read it, pg's analysis of the incredible technology of the Segway being completely trumped by human fashion is great: http://www.paulgraham.com/segway.html
Surprisingly many professors I know seem to be genuinely motivated by what they see as a service to society. Typically, more through teaching than research.
Yes, there are a few big jerks who are clearly driven by wanting to show off.
Implying an educated person.
> ... I can tell you, what your [sic] saying is just plain untrue.
Did that education include English literacy? s/your/you're/
I'm actually far more literate than most of my colleagues. Making this mistake honestly makes me want to harm myself.
I do know of one or two in my area who seem this way, and I think they're very shallow people. And I know of some profs who are just kind of slackers. Maybe they though academia was something different than what it turned out to be.
But most profs are smart enough to know what kind of life it is going in. (A modicum of intelligence and societal savvy are required to get the job.)
then what the heck do you think think they're in it for?
It's not always easy to distinguish between status motivations and the more socially desirable motivations. In fact, one measure of how well our institutions are constructed is how well aligned these motivations are; ideally, they would be indistinguishable. But there are ways to tease this out.
For example, when some exogenous input (e.g. federal funding cut) knock these people out of a high-status career, do they still work long hours in their spare time on the subject? Very rarely, especially as it becomes clear they won't regain former respect.
The incredible power of fads in academics, even among those with tenure, is more evidence. The best group strategies for maximizing impact call for diversifying research routes, but academic researchers clump very strongly because this is often in the best interest of an individual's status.
Human motivations are complicated and this makes it very difficult to compile indisputable evidence of anything. This is compounded by the fact that we want to appear to have other motivations than our actual ones. However, I think if you take a careful look and try to model academics as robots you'll find the "tries to maximize status" is a better first order approximation than "tries to maximize academic contribution".
For the record, I've been strongly influenced by the views of economist Robin Hanson on this subject.
Well, I, for one, was fascinated with wearable computers for a time after reading an article about Steve Mann (in MIT Technology Review, IIRC). That was about fifteen years ago. Based on my memory of that article, I'd say that 20 years is a bit of an understatement.
Steve Mann has been working on head mounted displays, true, but he's been focusing on local horsepower wearable computers.
Ultimately, I don't think google glass is anything more than a PR project to remove the stigma of google as ripoff artists and to make it look like they're innovative.
Given current technology, glass on wifi should have about 20 minutes of battery life, maybe an hour. Which makes them pretty useless.
There's really quite a difference between a wearable computer (what Mann works on) and a bluetooth headset with integrated display (what glass is.)
I still feel that is very poor though, for Glass to really be useful it should last a long working day, and ideally all of your average waking hours.
It remains a bluetooth headset with integrated display and camera. The phone and some remote servers do the real work.
I don't see why you think there's such a large difference between local horsepower and cloud computing. They compliment each other, and the ultimate technology will be a mixture of both. User interaction is the much more interesting and difficult problem.
(And your battery life comment is misplaced.)
For me it's something that execute instructions and have their own instruction sets. It can be even built in a breadboard and you could eventually invent your own instruction set.
Even low powered microcontrollers have a CPU (microcontrollers are small, low powered computers), and microcontrollers can come in many sizes[1]
Your point could be that it's just a head mounted display on top of an ASIC, which I doubt it would be.
Right now I think Glass is just a display for smartphones and a way to use Google services, which I think is quite limited (you said it's useless without the net, I agree). Right now we don't even have the tech to run sophisticated speech recognition in a smartphone without a couple of servers crunching statistical formulas why would you think it would be different with a low powered device?
EDIT: Basically my last paragraph is saying that I agree with you but without being too harsh in the comments. This could be the beginning of the wearable computers revolution along with a iWatch.
[1]: http://www.wired.com/design/2013/02/freescales-tiny-arm-chip...
It works insanely fast, transcribing what I say in near real time which feels like black magic compared to Siri on my iPhone that has to record an audio clip in its entirety, send it up to their servers, process it, then send a response back.
Regardless of whether the computation is done locally or not, he has been working on "augmented reality" using glasses, a great asset for google he may even prove to be.
Incorrect.
I guess this CPU-less device talks to a Wifi connection via... magic.
I disagree with everything about your comment, but especially this part. What on earth are you talking about? Labeling Google as non-innovative and Glass a mere "PR project" is shortsighted (oops, forgot about self-driving cars) and quite frankly, something I'd expect from an Engadget comment thread, not someone who managed to snag "nirvana" on HN.
I'm willing to bet that you haven't used Glass, but don't let that stop you from desperately trying to portray it as vaporware, a PR stunt, or some kind of scheme masterminded by Satan himself on EVERY HN thread you can plausibly cram that nonsense into.
Between your recent posts about Glass and taligent's constant downplaying of Google's maps and autonomous cars, I have to wonder what makes you two work so hard at spewing blind hate for them here.