Why 2014 is the 'year of smart glasses'
computerworld.com
computerworld.com
There isn't a scenario under which a company can convince me to frequently wear glasses. You couldn't pay me to do it, I hate the physical annoyance.
I have an alternative prediction: while the tech people predicting smart glasses or smart watches are the future, the smart phone will simply roll on dominating the 'smart' category, overwhelmingly. Five years from now, smart phones will still dominate, to such a degree it'll be viewed as a joke in hindsight that anybody thought smart watches or smart glasses would replace or even meaningfully compete with smart phones. This will befuddle all the experts, because they don't actually understand the larger consumer market.
I'm not a big Apple fan, but I believe the reason why the best consumer electronics company hasn't been in a rush to dive into smart watches or smart glasses, is because both are borderline irrelevant side markets and will remain so. It would have been like Apple feeling the need to dominate the LCD picture viewing device segment that was temporarily the 'thing' seven or eight years ago.
Another prediction: smart glasses will be useful enough beyond what smart phones offer, in about another decade, to justify some independent category success. In the meantime the failure of the category to catch sustainable consumer traction, is, again, going to astound the 'experts.'
I can certainly see myself asking people to take them off if they want to talk to me (unless they're the same people that currently browse/text/play on their cell phones during conversations, as that's a conversation you might as well not have anyway).
More cameras, microphones, and sensors all over people, and mostly connected to the internet. What could go wrong? This is obviously a good direction.
Given the reality of the situation, it's short-sighted to poke fun at "Glassholes" and complain about smartphone users, as if these technologies are merely obnoxious fashion trends that will disappear in time. Hundreds of years ago there I'm sure there were swordsmen who complained that gunpowder-based warfare was dishonorable. Is that who we want to be?
Yes, things can go wrong.
Yes, technology can empower evil just as well as it can facilitate good.
Yes, 2050 will be different than 2000.
So what? This has been true since the dawn of time. When did it become fashionable for techies to despair at the inevitable advance of technology? When did it become popular to whine incessantly about change? To look at every new development with an attitude of pessimism? To pretend that the world of yesterday was so perfect and pristine? What happened to putting our heads down and working on creative solutions to the problems that face us?
Some of the criticism is probably knee-jerk discomfort and something new and nostalgia for the simplicity of the past, sure, but pessimism when properly applied is just part of the process of trying to look past the cloud of marketing spin and fannish enthusiasm surrounding an emerging technology and discern its actual relevance.
It's going to happen. It already is happening. And it's been happening. Trying to stop it is impossible, and merely complaining about it gets us nowhere. I have no problem with a bit of pessimism, but if it's going to be so pervasive, I'd at least like it to be constructive or useful in some way. Less "omg this is happening" and more "this is happening, how can we adapt?"
Even if Glass' victory is inevitable, it may not be wrong to oppose it. Opposition need not take its value from its chance of success -- delaying the inevitable has value, as does the simple fact of having acted morally.
When asked to choose between the moral highground and the literal highground, many people take the former. I'm not convinced the two don't coincide here, but I don't see a problem with that position in theory.
On the contrary. I fully expect that in many places, overtly creepy technology like Google Glass will shift a long-overdue privacy debate that seems to be gathering momentum. If technology like Google Glass becomes socially unacceptable and illegal, it will not become pervasive in the manner you described.
It if becomes socially unacceptable, then it's just a matter of time. People don't like Glass because it looks clunky, nerdy, and distracting. What happens when technology improves to the point where it looks like a normal pair of glasses? What happens when we can put a chip in a contact lens? A phone in your brain? Your brain in a robot?
Yes but they don't point that camera directly at everyone they talk to, all the time.
>People don't like Glass because it looks clunky, nerdy, and distracting.
I think it looks kind of nice for what it is. It's still creepy though.
>What happens when we can put a chip in a contact lens? A phone in your brain? Your brain in a robot?
OK... those last two are just bad ideas all around. In any case though I personally am less concerned with the form factor or the technology as I am the premise that concerns about privacy are irrelevant because the surveillance gear is ever advancing in complexity.
Reminds me of the guy who got kicked out of the Seattle restaurant a few weeks ago for refusing to remove Glass. The restaurant said it didn't want to open its customers up to the possibility of being recorded without their consent. Of course, on the restaurant's very own Facebook page were numerous shots of customers dining, many of which were obtained without any knowledge or consent. The hypocrisy was lost on them, unfortunately.
People underemphasize form and overemphasize function.
When it comes down to it, most of us are being photographed all the time. Exponentially more-so today than anyone was 100 years ago. And with the rise of smartphones, substantially more-so today than anyone was even 10 years ago. Smart glasses are merely another rung on the ladder. Every argument you make could have been made for smartphones as well.
Particularly with the relative hardship many have faced over the past few years, they are quite understandably more concerned about things like keeping a roof over their head and putting food on their children's plates. But every now and then you see people up in arms over things like how much it costs for a new driver to get the (legally required) insurance in the UK today, and you get a glimpse of where we're heading if we continue on our current course.
A disproportionate number of the people I know personally who already share similar cautious views to my own are involved with technology. I suspect this is because of the awareness we share of how technology and in particular all this data could be used, even if the data is merely being collected today and not yet exploited. Most people don't realise the full implications of what is already happening yet, so they aren't concerned enough to act today, but that doesn't necessarily mean they would still be OK with something if they were fully informed or knew that it would eventually affect them or their loved ones and not just other people.
I just hope such a transition to toleration happens quickly.
Of course, but just because we can do something, it does not mean that we should.
I could commit numerous offences in the next half hour, causing substantial harm to many of my neighbours, whether that be damage to their property, injury to their person, harm to their reputation, subjecting them to something that distresses them, or otherwise.
I don't do those things, because I'm not a jerk and I have no interest in upsetting my neighbours. Hopefully most of my fellow human beings would take the same view. Maybe a few people don't do those things, even though they'd like to, because they know it would be illegal and they don't want to accept the punishment they would expect.
Those who really do bad things anyway, we can only try to catch and punish. You can't realistically stop someone from committing most types of crime if they truly don't care about the consequences, and I doubt any of us would enjoy living in a world that did try to physically prevent crime from ever happening.
New technologies will create new potential benefits and potential abuses, but technology is always ethically neutral. What matters is how we use it, and respecting the reasonable wishes of others is the cornerstone of good manners and always has been.
What's reasonable in one decade may be unreasonable the next. The bad manners of the last generation are common place acts today. That's the nature of change. And it doesn't happen by itself: it happens because there are people actively pushing against the boundaries set by the status quo.
Of course not everyone will agree with this. For every boundary-pusher, I'd expect there to be at least 10 or 20 people who have to be dragged along kicking and screaming about how in their day, it was considered rude to [wage war with guns|fornicate|use phones in public|wear a recording device].
At what point do we dismiss these people as mere curmudgeons, holding onto the past for the sake of the past, and at what point do we take them seriously and put on the brakes? I'm sure a thoroughly enlightened answer would have many complexities... but I'd say it's generally safe to let society itself decide. Just because the boundaries are being pushed doesn't mean society has to follow. If tiny wearable computers and recording devices aren't useful enough to be worth the affronts to privacy and intimacy (and fashion, in the case of Glass), then none of this stuff will last.
The thing is, the answer to how all of this will end is blindingly obvious. Assuming technology continues to improve, then CLEARLY people will find it useful to turn themselves into walking computers/phones/cameras. Yes, society as we know it will change as a result, but it's been doing that since the dawn of time.
Sorry, but I still don't buy the inevitability argument here. You are considering only the potential upsides of new technology. If there weren't potential downsides with serious adverse consequences as well, there wouldn't be so many of us who are concerned about things like the erosion of privacy.
The difficulty with this particular issue is that it is hard to predict exactly what the adverse effects might be, because we've never had the technology to surveil and record the general population on this scale before, but by the time we know, it may be too late to do anything about it if the answer is a very bad one.
Sure, society might eventually evolve to forgive youthful indiscretions while conducting job interviews, and to avoid insurance-based systems where the insurers have a clear interest in not dealing with anyone who is actually likely to make a claim, and to understand that the former pop star who's been on the BBC News home page in recent days because he has the same legal name as another musician who just got sent down for decades for committing some very nasty crimes is not the same person even if his picture was shown alongside the relevant headline by Google.
However, right now, none of those things is even close to true, and having privacy that allows people to segment their lives and share different parts with different other people is how we deal with that problem. Even if we do eventually reach that level of maturity as a society, which is far from certain in itself, it will surely take several generations to get there.
So no, I don't think the outcome here is blindingly obvious at all. People might find it useful to have permanent recordings of their own lives and anything they encounter in it, but this cuts both ways, and they might find the disadvantages of having anyone else being able to just look them up far outweighed the benefits of being able to (legally and socially acceptably) use always-on, covert recording devices themselves.
How about people that have a laptop in front of them as they talk to you? Like interviewers, or stenographers?
I bet that ten years ago, you would ask people to turn their phones off before agreeing to talk with them.
If I held my phone up and pointed the camera wherever I went, people would be annoyed at it, and not irrationally so.
So you'd better believe I would ask someone to turn off recording devices if they're not being used for a sensible reason. I'd be polite about it, of course, the first time. After that, well, anyone who would need asking twice isn't likely to be someone whose opinion of me I care about very much anyway. And I'm willing to bet that any resulting footage of me educating the offending party about privacy and manners right to their Google Glassed face is not going to cause anyone I care about to think less of me either.
It's a half assed product, introduced years before it's any good for use, and it's main real utility is that of a smaller Go Pro-style live action camera.
Plus, it didn't even make any dent in the market.
It's not like Google search in 1996 or the iPhone in 2007, products that immediately changed whole markets.
So, no, 2014 would not be the year of "smart glasses".
With the display technology used and the battery life they have, those things are useless, except for showing off.
Except for the "eye level live action camera" part, you can do the same things with your smartphone, better and faster.
Well, something half baked is not always an MVP. Sometimes it's just half baked and should not have been presented in the first place.
Not to mention, software startups products don't cost hundrends of dollars to buy and test. In fact, usually they are free. So, pushing a half-arsed hardware to buyers? Not so wise.
The original iPod was a MVP launch ("no wireless, less space than a nomad, etc"). It took it several years to get large disks, video, wi-fi sync, etc.
Google Glasses? An ill-thought, hastily implemented product, merely combining non-optimally a few pieces of stuff you already have (voice recognition, eye displays, small video cameras etc) as "innovation theatre".
Smart watches, however, don't look particularly different than normal watches, they aren't obtrusive to other people, etc. like glasses are.
EDIT: Using words better.
I don't know how useful they are in the general case though. But they do lower the friction of keeping up with a textual conversation without being in front of a computer.
(fwp acknowledged)
While google glass does look stupid, it's not hard to make cool-looking sunglasses.
Privacy concerns will delay adoption, but unfortunately we've already lost privacy. It will just take a while for us to accept it - though I doubt we will by 2014.
An ophthalmic frame has to endure a fair amount of physical stress during the glazing procedure, especially curved frames. Also my dominant eye is oculus sinister, am I supposed to wear these damn things upside down?
There's got to be some better alternatives. Ideas?
The article makes a point of mentioning concerns about privacy then sort of dismissing them. Later it mentions an app (take a picture every time you wink) that I think would send people up the wall. Coupling a device's use with the implicit social issues regarding eye contact and personal space is going to create a bigger problem for adoption than the article implies.
Disclaimer: But no, I haven't ever actually used Google Glass. It costs more than my car did.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but smart glasses are hugely different than any other smart device in how intrusive they are and how visible. If people want them soon everyone will, if not, they will die quickly.
(Whatever it is)