Google Glass developers: We're still flying half-blind

What's new? Console manufacturers have been doing this forever. As an example, when working on an [intended] Kinect launch game, my studio routinely liaised with other studios to discuss how best to implement X feature and Y feature because Microsoft simply refused to release any details. We strongly suspected it was because they themselves weren't even sure!

Anyway, is this even a bad thing? Presumably - hopefully - Google will take the natural groove that developers have found themselves in and use that to design the APIs that are missing/coming. It's not like the product is even close to being on the shelves.

From the article, a quote trying to justify facial recognition apps:

"What I'm most fundamentally interested in is this idea of maximizing human potential," she said. "We could do expression recognition, and use it to teach autistic children how to recognize expressions." Another helpful scenario she described for facial recognition would be to help Alzheimer's patients remember people that they know they ought to recognize, but have forgotten."

Yeah, sure, I'm all for helping autistic children, but it's pretty damned obvious that non-invasive non-troubling uses of facial recognition on Glass are going to be the edge case rather than the rule.

I feel like Google is missing its window of opportunity here, about one year ago there was a massive hype surrounding the Google Glass (from my perspective at least). And then nothing, a bunch of people got their hands on them and after the initial feedback, nothing.

The last time I heard about Glass was because someone got fined for driving while wearing them in California sometime last month.

I do have access to glass, but I'm not going to hack on it at the office and the price tag is just too steep for me to justify taking a pair home to hack on in my free time (especially with their lack of prescription support). That seems to be where they're falling flat, it's too early to base a business or startup after and it's too expensive to get the enthusiast/hacker support they seem to be expecting.

Also, I really wish they weren't so strict with their facial recognition ban. I'm useless in social situations because I'm terrible with faces (if I see someone out of the context I met them I will not recognize them). For someone like me, even if it was restricted to my own personal database and required approval of the person I was interacting with (NFC or BLE touch for instance), it would heavily level the social playing field.