Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

Over and above the privacy issues, you can never have the undivided attention of someone wearing Glass. That's deeply off-putting. Imagine trying to have a conversation with someone as they listened to headphones and stared at their phone the whole time.

View on HN

I think that's going a little too far. Already we've embedded ourselves in a world where many people break open their phone in the middle of a conversation. Yes, it's rude. But it's still a change that's happening in the world. However, Glass isn't always on, at least not right now. You have to manually turn it on, which means it'll be akin to taking out your phone.

But can you see if someone else's Glass is displaying them something or whispering them something? At least with a phone it's obvious.

Yes, actually. The screen lights up and it's pretty obvious. Most of the people I talk to while wearing glass notice it immediately when it comes on.

And I seem to remember something about Google requiring all apps to light up the screen, to avoid the whole "stealth" thing.

That was the reaction I had years ago (2004), when I was interviewing at Georgia Tech for PhD positions, and had a meeting with Thad Starner (http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~thad/).

He's a really smart guy, and friendly, but his heads-up display came across as very distracting to me, mostly because of how it interfered with "intuitive" reading of eye gaze. When he was looking vaguely in my direction it was difficult to tell when he was looking "through" the heads-up display and focusing on me, and when he was focusing instead on the HUD. It made the whole conversation feel quite surreal.

I'm not sure why this is a problem - do you feel conversation with you would be boring enough that people would want to escape to Glass? If a conversation is interesting, it has my undivided attention regardless of what loud music, landing airplanes, or waving shop attendants are doing. If a conversation isn't interesting, I'm already looking around for other more interesting ways to get away from the conversation.

Glass is hardly the problem there - if the conversation is interesting, people will turn off any music being played and ignore whatever is happening on Glass.

> Glass is hardly the problem there - if the conversation is interesting, people will turn off any music being played and ignore whatever is happening on Glass.

Not necessarily. People can be very distracted by cell phones which are normally kept in one's pocket or purse. Having glass on your face with visual pop-ups would be even more distracting, regardless of the conversation, because it would be a lot harder to ignore incoming alerts or other cues.

I'm guessing when it becomes commonplace it will be far easier to whip out my phone and IM people across the table.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com