The Verdict Is In: Nobody Likes Google Glass

Map overlays, video chat (with a better camera), and of course outright augmented reality.

At some point, the display will be integrated in the actual glass and will be able to pick a different focus distance for every pixel. Add in sufficiently powerful mobile computers, and you have full AR. When that happens, Glass (or its successor) will become truly indispensable; this is just the birth pangs.

Might be a decade or two, though. It's a tall order; molecular nanotechnology could construct a device like that, but I'm not convinced we'll be clever enough to do it before that point.

Glass if one thinks about it deeply is something unnatural.. microscopes, telescopes, vision impairment correction or shade from harmful sun.. or immersive , time disruptive experiences like a movie.

So the key barrier that glass concept is going to face is user rejection beyond the initial bubble crowd. Average people already have a certain context in which they find artificial inputs acceptable ( TV etc ).

Our distinction between natural and artificial sources of audio is different to visual.

I may be entirely wrong and Google may change the habits of a lot of young kids .. that is actually a rather strange and terrifying thought.

Glass definitely not, because it's kinda crap (what I've seen so far are phone-style widgets — which I loathe in the first place — and telling your shades to record a video — underwhelming). An actual HUD/Augmented Reality system I can see myself using rather easily (as long as it remains fully under my control), but this'll need severe improvements of image processing and recognition (speed and flexibility).

I don't want notification popups, but virtual/augmented surface display could be very neat, e.g. have buses display "live" in wireframe even when they're outside field of vision (think "wallhack") to estimate how much time I have until it arrives, that kind of things.

Or the ability to "switch in" to an other user of the system (and get direct viewpoint) useful for virtual visits (potentially via "presence" robots, plug into the robot and see through it), helping people with stuff or (the other way around) getting help, imagine a tech of some sort doing an estimate of building/fixing something based on what he sees through your eyes. Also useful for things like surgeries (get colleagues in-viewpoints to assist/warn) or single-person dangerous works e.g. underwater stuff, multiple eyeballs on the same field of vision can pay attention to more things.

Or more "mundane" (but actually more difficult) applications such as ebooks with the physical feel of real books by having a "blank book" and AR inserting the ebook's content on the fly, or hologram/3D AR (easy to do when you've got a display per eye)

The fact is phones and tablets had analogues going back hundreds of years in the form of books and wristwatches in terms of social norms. You check your watch, you check your phone. You sit down and read a book, you sit down and read your iPad. Society accepts local distractions where the user overtly makes it clear they are looking at something. There is no equivalent to Glass where the user has a distracting bit of information floating right within their view, but invisible to other people. This is a genuinely new disruption of social norms and it's wide open how people will react to it, and if they will ever accept it.

I don't agree that "it's all a matter of execution." Putting a cyborg-like eyepiece on people and an always-available HUD in front of them is not a foregone conclusion as something most people will ever want in their lives.

I've always said it's going to come down to how stupid you look to other people. And yes, I realize cell phones, etc, were viewed as douchey when they first came out. But the key difference between cell phones (and this is important) is that you could put the cell phone in your pocket, nullifying the douche-factor until you took it out again. If you take off your Glass because you look like a tool, you just completely eliminated the purpose of Glass.

I think the most likely path for Glass is that of the Segway: an uncool device that has amazing practical applications for professionals in certain domains. You'll see them on cops sooner than teenagers at the mall.

I think a certain cyborg is likely to say "told you so", though.

What else???

Any HNers use Google Glass yet and found killer uses?

Who the hell reads this garbage and why are we posting it on HN? Flag this.

A good take on it is the television series Dennou Coil, set in a future where augmented reality has become truly transparent. It shows the concept from the viewpoint of children, conveniently escaping a lot of the potential pitfalls of predictions.

    Nobody liked the Nintendo DS when it first came out either

Because I would imagine the majority of the population would not know or care what Nintendo DS is. I fail to see how it is applicable to Google Glass which is designed from day one to be a mass-market device.