Google Glass future clouded as some early believers lose faith
reuters.com
reuters.com
When I got Glass in November 2013 (XE11), I could run an ssh client on it and use it with a Bluetooth keyboard, along with lots of other Android software. A month later (XE12), they somehow managed to break the dialog box API. And XE11 was configured with the most aggressive auto-updater you'll ever see, so you couldn't stay back. Four months after that, they released the brick-half-the-fleet update (XE16). (That happened because Glass was configured with no swap, all their users had 1GB memory devices, but all their internal testers had 2GB memory devices. The updater would run out of memory mid-update and die, leaving an unbootable system.) As a side effect, that update also flashes a hidden firmware so XE11 won't boot anymore. Also, it strips out everything related to bluetooth keyboard support. Also, it disables touchpad gestures for Android apps.
Also, the terms of service for the Glass SDK are incompatible with the GPL, ban charging for Glass sofware, and ban advertising in Glass software, so there's basically no third-party software and none coming.
Oh, and it sends all your photos to Google (can't disable auto-backup even by rooting and messing with internals). And if you pair it with a phone, it copies any text messages stored on that phone, and sends those to Google.
This is very sad, because the hardware itself is excellent, and it (almost) does something that I really really wanted. XE11 worked well enough that I invested considerable time and energy into it, and I ended up walking away feeling like Google was constantly sabotaging my efforts.
Meanwhile the pace of actually-useful updates is utterly glacial; there clearly aren't enough developers working on it to have any hope of fixing the outstanding issues. So yeah, I've given up hope on Glass. I'll revisit it if they open the source code or announce new management with someone who understands software at the helm.
Now I want a terminal strapped to my face.
http://www.loper-os.org/vintage/paralleleye/eye.html
... I think it was in Hackers, so you know it's good.
not for convenience, simply to shut out the rest of the world. full screen mode on steroids.
I go bicycle touring, and a heads-up map while cycling would be convenient. Plus, it would require less room to use in a small tent/bivvy bag.
Unfortunately, this is impossible in versions of Glass since XE16 (April), and fraught with difficulty in the version before that (XE12, where dialog boxes don't work, so you need a modified SSH client and a modified Settings app to pair). I also had to modify the ssh client to fix some keybindings, and to add a left-margin because my device was missing 4 columns of pixels on the left edge. When it works, it's significantly better than ssh on a phone, because you can use a real keyboard without needing three hands or a surface to put things on. It's less nice than a computer, mainly because of the low screen resolution.
As others have pointed out, the cost of using Glass is high, and I'm not just talking about the monetary cost. There's a social cost as well, as lots of people will stop you in public to have a conversation about Glass. Most of them are just curious, but I've encountered my fair share of people who are judgement or even overtly hostile. (I live in SF, which is a fairly forward-thinking city, so I imagine it was worse for people in other areas.)
Based on my experiences, it seems that when you merely possess technology, people tend to acknowledge and refer to it distinctly. However, when you wear technology, people increasingly conflate you and your character with the technology itself. The difference between walking around with a phone in your hand and walking around wearing Glass is the difference between carrying a tube of paint and painting your face green.
In my opinion this was predictable and Google should have anticipated it. (This is why studying psychology is important.) They should've focused on giving early Explorers an "excuse" to wear Glass, but they did the opposite. Ideally, we could've presented ourselves by saying, "I'm wearing this because I'm a tester. Want to try them on?" Instead, more often than not, conversations would begin with the other party saying, "So you paid $1500 for these?" That's not a great starting point in any way, shape, or form.
I've heard that things were similar when headphones first started catching on for mainstream use. The difference is that headphones were worth the cost. By contrast, the incremental improvements that Glass makes over a smartphone aren't worth the social/physical costs of wearing something on your face.
This is because things you choose to wear are fashion choices, and the whole reason people choose one fashion over another is to make a statement about who they are.
In this respect, Glass is no different than regular glasses; all regular glasses serve the same functional purpose of correcting impaired vision, but a pair of (say) Warby Parkers also make a particular statement about the personality of the person wearing them.
The chasm Glass has fallen into is that the fashion meaning of a particular thing is decided collectively by the culture, not by the people who created it. And the culture has collectively decided that the fashion statement Glass makes is "I am a turbo nerd."
Glass (rightfully or not) has come to stand for both useless trinkets for the tech-wealthy and pervasive surveillance of the masses by a large corporation, so wearing it really comes off as saying "I have more money than you and I'm going to use it to let Google record videos of you too!"
A camera-less Google Glass at a lower pricepoint would simply say "I am a turbo nerd" and would probably be much more acceptable.
So my Glass goes unused, because I don't feel comfortable wearing it anywhere.
Moot now if you're not using it, but you know, even if your tape was as big as a golf ball, as a passerby I'm not going to know or think that your camera is covered, because I avoid looking anywhere near the things. And for all I know it could be a hardware hacked version with the camera hole elsewhere. So your goal was not being achieved. And it still might be recording audio. If you're wearing it, I have to take your word for it. If you're not, I don't.
It felt more like this odd space where I wasn't sure what the socially appropriate behavior was. More than anything else it was like talking to someone with an obvious disability, where there are delicate social conventions around when to acknowledge or not acknowledge it. Sort of like a glass eye. Except that here it was deliberately installed, and not related to an injury or disability. It particularly disoriented me with regards to eye contact. I constantly felt like I was supposed to make eye contact with him rather than staring at his facial device, which took conscious effort to do. But at the same time, I found myself frequently trying to discern whether he was making eye contact with me or rather was looking at the display in the glasses. The normal eye-to-eye gaze part of conversation was completely disrupted for me. I find smartphones much less disorienting simply because it's much more obvious when someone is looking at the screen vs. at you, which simplifies the social conventions. So to me as the "other party" in a conversation, the HUD form-factor is a downgrade in functionality from a handheld screen.
Yet... I personally think they launched without a killer app. Comparing against headphones, listening to music in a portable and private manner was novel and a "killer app." To your point, today's mobile devices cover off on a wide range of capabilities, and my sense is that Glass hasn't provided an app that was "killer" enough to overcome the stigma and eventually erode it.
Didn't help that a large % of the fashion-conscious out there felt it was ugly as sin. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes Apple to wearables sexy and acceptable. They are smart to start with a watch since the form factor is understood and not dramatically different.
The killer app, the one that will override peoples fears (by praying on them) is 24/7 recording to the cloud. The first mugging/assault that is foiled (or perpetrators caught) cause their faces and actions were streamed realtime to not personal storage will get every paranoid parent and frightened wealthy person wanting one.
It would be really good for dealing with police officers who go around destroying phones and other similar situations, so it wouldn't be completely useless either.
"Strange Days" explored that topic way ahead of its time, especially in the opening. (Cut away the "fry the brain"-stuff)
Am I crazy for finding the smartphone form ideal? I want something I can fit in my pocket easily, take it out quickly and casually as many times as needed, but mostly it should be put away.
Are these $1500 glasses fragile? Can they be put in a pocket or will they break without a case? How big is the case? Likely much larger than a smartphone. I always have to be responsible for those glasses when I'm not wearing them one way or another.
I'm not interested in increasing the amount of time I spend online, just the convenience. Glasses won't solve that. I won't even be willing to use contacts when they're available in that form.
I think they missed the market a bit - don't target the tech-fashion group with a device like that. Wait until you can get something actually slick. Something fashionable with some nice transition lenses for that market.
The spartan, minimalist headband-with-a-computer on it device? Market that thing at sporty types. Runners, hikers, cyclists. A lightweight hybrid of a GoPro and a smartwatch that's hands-free? People could look past battery, price, and fashion issues for that, and lots of extreme-sports-types already do wearable cameras.
But it's incorrect to assume that this thing being "weird" is the only reason to make people hostile. I myself would be hostile to someone wearing that stuff, not because I'm some swain who never saw a computer, but exactly because I know what it is, I know which company made it and what that company does, I know about their business model and remember all these stories about them grabbing WiFi traffic from years ago and all the other things that make them "evil" in some way. And I see you as this company's drone for filming and recording audio around you all over the world, and not some weirdo who spends $1.5K on useless things. The fact that it's you who pays $1500 to be the drone isn't the reason for someone like me to be hostile, it's just funny.
(My immediate impression of the wearer, for the record, was that he was likely a director of an oil-related company looking to show off his wealth.)
I think this tool has a lot of potential to make people's lives better.
But instead, people crap all over it and stigmatize it. And that's why I can't really wear it much anymore. I find it useful, but people call me a "glasshole" - especially other developers.
Fact: If you look different, people will make fun of you. Apparently that isn't something you outgrow as an adult.
If Glass evolves to the point that it's mostly providing visual assistance for people with impairments, I don't think that people are going to make fun of it. But people make fun of tourists with their heads buried in maps, of people recording inane videos constantly, of people texting without paying attention to where they're walking, etc.
To rephrase that: people make fun of the behaviors that Glass seems designed to facilitate.
You're pointing a video camera in people's faces without asking. That's very rude.
It is a small computer that's strapped to your head with a titanium band. I've worn one for extended periods, and I want to make fun of people I see wearing one; it is jarring and looks absurd. It is also socially acceptable to make fun of it, and how often is that true for something that looks absurd?
The "camera in my face" is just an excuse. You're actually being recorded by other things. Anyone who takes the time to learn about Glass would know that the battery would last about 10 seconds if I had the damn camera on :)
Now, I am not saying that this comes down to the sandbox "that's my toy" mentality. No, I am saying that the majority of people who are perpetuating the bad stigma associated with Glass have never used it themselves because it's simply inaccessible to them. Problems like "I can take a picture of you without knowing it" would be addressed much quicker if a larger slice of the population was using/misusing the device.
The secondary problem, the one that's much harder to fix, is that Glass provides no practical benefits. It's not giving you much extra information, it's not enhancing your life. If it showed me part numbers as I look under the hood of my car, or alerted me to lower prices at a different store as I look at a price tag, that'd be one thing. But its current tech is too limited. The "magic" is just not there. I don't care that I can capture an image of what I'm looking at currently, I can already do that. What I cannot do is quickly identify the type of timing belt in front of me, etc.
$100 is probably lower than they can go without using an Amazon Kindle style ad subsidy program but with relatively standard electronics margins they should be able to sell this for about $200.
Even with Appleesque margins they could sell it for less than $400. $1500 is just redonkulous.
This is not mature, commoditized, mass-produced tech. If Google chooses to start mass producing these some day, that cost will come crashing down, but at the moment, I'd be a bit surprised if $1500 even covers their costs.
As soon as it looks like normal glasses I'll consider trying it. Or even better, contact lenses.
Over-design it to look too futuristic, and then start scaling back the design into a far more modern-day look and feel to create more adoption of the actual technology.
Maybe I'm giving Google too much credit, but maybe not
Always be weary of things that are hyped to be the next big thing. The real next big thing won't need any hype. I can't trust the judgement of someone who got into Glass early anymore.
Honestly I think the true intentions of Google Glass were exactly what they claimed to be. It's really a testament to the problems of letting engineers make decisions on consumer technology. The social problems of Glass were obvious as soon as they were exposed to real users, so the question is, how on earth did they manage to spend so much money and time developing the product without doing the slightest bit of user research beforehand? I mean really. I know Google has money to burn, but this is just ridiculous.
The answer: you look and sound like an insufferable tool when you wear one.
You know what's a bad idea? Everything else they did with Glass.
Seriously, just kill the Glass project and hand the brand over to their wearables division to figure out how to get something actually to market.
Because it's all a matter of work, this also avoids most of the sticky issues of privacy, etc.
For example I think not everyone would like anyone in their lab (including vistors) being able to record their work without permission.
Not being able to adapt the code to ensure that these will be followed without people needing to think about it, is a weakness.
In a decade or two, Segways will probably form an important link of the autonomous transportation system.
The potential for segways or at least segway-like-transportation-vehicles are, it seems to me, in a rail-dominated world. The fundamental problem with rail infrastructure is that rail only takes you to stations, and that stations are expensive (along several axes) but since you can't take your car on the train, you're limited to a very small radius around the station. Segways would extend that radius dramatically, making a functional rail infrastructure de facto cheaper.
Most versions of "driverless cars" futures destroy rail-based infrastructure. They take all the advantages of rail and give them to the (already more popular) cars. At that point, your car can drop you off right next to your destination (and then go park itself elsewhere if necessary), so why do you need a segway?
The versions of "driverless cars" that don't destroy rail-based infrastructure, I think, make "driverless segways" unlikely as well.
It seems like you have a (pleasant!) vision in mind, but not like you've taken a lot of time with the practicalities of it or how we get from here to there.
So, first: the size of cars isn't principally about distance travel. Cars are built for speed (as soon as you're doing about 20mph, wind in your face becomes annoying for most people most of the time, and noise becomes high, and safety becomes an issue), for protection from the weather, and for cargo storage. Driverless cars may well become a little smaller, but there are plenty of reasons they'll stay fundamentally cars, not segways.
Second: you can't build your architecture from the building to the city around segways. We already have cities. We can change them incrementally, but redoing them from scratch is just too expensive (again, on a number of axes) to contemplate. And incremental changes aren't going to go your way. People will get the driverless cars that work with how the cities work TODAY, and then those people will become a constituency for incremental changes to the city that will make the city MORE car-oriented, not less.
Seriously, the full-featured, relatively cheap driverless car future is one in which public transit declines drastically in importance. It is absolutely not one in which people restructure their cities around transit.
Of course existing cities wouldn't be rebuilt from scratch. But cities change all the time.
Driverless cars certainly are better suited for the way cities are today. But as it becomes obvious that there are alternatives that don't require as much wasted real estate as cars use, and that crucially don't give up the personal freedom that cars provide, cities can and will adapt to that.
The city of 2035 will likely be moving down that kind of path, whatever the exact details look like. New development will be designed for it from the ground up.
This is just how transformation happens.
But let's take a step back. We're imagining the sort of default rosy driverless-vehicle future, right? Driverless cars can be made that are fully autonomous, at least as safe as human drivers in essentially all conditions, and not terrifyingly expensive.
We agree that in that case the driverless car is strictly more attractive to riders than the drivered-cars of today are, right? So if the value that a person today puts on having a car is A, and the value that future person puts on having a future car is B, then B > A? Indeed, B is much greater than A?
And we also agree that today, cities are pretty car-oriented? So A is large ENOUGH that cities pander to it to a large degree? And there's a positive feedback cycle here where when cities pander to cars, that makes cars actually more valuable compared to the competition.
Now what you're saying is that when we replace A with B, where B >>> A, cities will (eventually) pander to cars less. Why?
The thing that you suggest is that cars waste real estate. Which, certainly, they do. I do note in passing that driverless cars might waste less real estate (for example, they could be sent to more distant and more inconvenient parking structures, or the utilization of people / car could go up with a rides-for-hire model). But whatever, at the very least the real estate efficiency of driverless cars is no worse than the real estate efficiency of regular cars.
So meanwhile, today, the rail + maybe something like segway model has value X. We agree that X < A, right? That in America at least cars provide more value than transit, and so people get cars, and so cities pander to cars. Now you seem to be envisioning that in the driverless future, rail + segways have value Y, and Y is not only > X, it's also > A, and in fact > B. Why? What is it about driverless segways that is so great? Unlike driverless cars, they don't seem like they provide much value for their users (you aren't going to read a book while your driverless segway takes you to your destination, and though maybe they'd be a little better when drunk).
And, further, we're saying that driverless segways are that awesome even if they have to reverse some inertia of cities currently being designed kind of "against" them, and indeed, even if they have to reverse yet more inertia because the FIRST thing that happens in our driverless future is people buy driverless cars and become a constituency for even more city-pandering-to-cars.
I don't see it. Maybe if it takes a long time to get to driverless cars, because right now I think that the car domination of the world is getting a bit milder. Maybe if the current trend continues for a few decades, and then cities have become more hostile to cars, driverless or otherwise, the increased value of cars won't be enough that it will get over the inertia.
But if we get good driverless cars in the next decade or fifteen years? In-city rail is just going to die in almost all cities. And once it's dead, it will be dead for a long, long time.
You're comparing the real estate efficiency of cars to driverless cars, which is not what I'm doing. I'm comparing the RE efficiency of cars to segways, and segways win that hands-down, no comparison.
The other benefit is psychological. You transform a development from being centered around cars to being centered around people. Even a person on a segway is a person. A person in a car is a car. This, I would maintain, is the larger benefit to average citizen. It's a more desirable experience.
Developers win with more usable real estate, citizens win with a much more pleasant scale and experience.
The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area.
The bigger assumption you're making is that people will "have" cars, and I'm not sure that will be the case. For me, that's the biggest unknown about transportation in the next couple of decades. Will people own cars, or will they merely use cars from a large pool of cars (either civic or corporately owned)?
Uber, for example, is starting to promote the idea of not owning a car at all to young people. They've been doing a good job of hyping the convenience of that lifestyle, and a limited set of people have bought into it already. I also recently noticed they're starting to play a prestige angle with black SUVs and so on. They're actively playing that up, which fills the other need personal cars currently serve.
Uber's endgame is very clearly a fleet of autonomous cars, and some cities are making very early sounds about building their own fleets.
I don't know how that's going to shake out. There are powerful forces pushing both ways.
But, if personal car ownership does become a thing of the past, a lot of the pressure you imagine for city development to have an even greater universal (as opposed to limited areas) accommodation for cars goes away.
The other major unknown is if cities simply become less desirable in 20-30 years. Given increasing automation, the nature of work may change to a degree that some of the economic incentives for city living decrease. That trend, if it even builds at all, will be slower to develop, but potentially even more powerful.
I'm saying, "real segways are more space efficient than real cars. Despite that, people prefer cars to segways (by a gigantic margin)." So from there, I get to, "future segways will be more space efficient than future cars, but I don't see that turning people towards future segways -- because we can already tell that people don't value space highly enough to make them want segways, and it's going to be pretty much the same comparison in the future."
Here's another bit of pseudo math: real cars >>> real segways. Driverless cars >>> real cars. Driverless segways ~= real segways. Thus driverless cars >>>>> driverless segways.
I'm not taking a stance on the ownership model of cars, either. I don't know if in a driverless car world people would own them or rent them for hours or days at a time or rent them for the duration of a single ride. I'm just saying that people will USE them a lot. And regardless of who owns the car, if everyone USES the driverless cars a lot, then cities will be built around cars.
And cities that are built around cars are hostile to segways, driverless or otherwise.
You say this intriguing thing: "The segways would be for intra-area transportation, the driverless cars for inter-area."
I think that my fundamental point is that that doesn't seem true. If driverless cars are highly available to people, I think they'll just use the driverless cars end-to-end. Your driverless car trip will put you at the doorstep of wherever you're going. At that point you don't need a segway.
Segways are for when your inter-area transportation CAN'T get you the last mile of where you're going -- that is, they're for rail. And rail, I think, is dead if we get driverless cars soon.
Yeah, this is the root of our disagreement. As I see it, the reason this doesn't happen now is a matter of convenience. As things stand now, there's the friction of transitioning from car to segway. In a fully automated world, I see that friction largely disappearing. You get out of the car, it goes away. The segway is waiting for you. It delivers you and goes away itself. There's very little friction.
It's true this only makes sense in certain kinds of living situations. Suburbs seem unlikely to go this way (though there was a brief trend last decade to more pedestrian-y suburban town center development). But for urban areas, this kind of development increases what people like about urban living, and decreases what they don't like. I don't think people know they want it, but I also don't think it's something they've been given much to consider. When they have, like 3rd St. Promenade in Santa Monica, it's been hugely popular. Segways would allow you to scale that up considerably, and expand it beyond retail and entertainment, possibly to an entire city center.
We're in agreement about the future of passenger rail. It looks bleak decades down the line. Interestingly, Mayor Garcetti of Los Angeles said much the same just a few months ago. He wondered in public if it made much sense to keep building massive rail projects given that automated cars were coming.
http://laist.com/2014/09/30/mayor_garcetti_wants_to_turn_wes... "How do you spend billions of dollars on fixed rail when we might not own cars in this city in a decade or a decade and a half?"
That has always been a problem with the segway. Its never needed to be what it is.
Relevant Buffett quote:
Evaluating that company is within what I call 'my circle of competence.' I understand what they do, I understand the economics of it, I understand the competitive aspects of the business. There can be all kinds of companies that have wonderful futures but I don't know which ones they are. I've given talks in the past where I carry with me a 70-page tightly-printed list, and it shows 2000 auto companies. Now if at the start of the 20 th century you had seen what the auto was going to do to this country, the impact it would have on the lives of then your children and grandchildren and so on. It just, it transformed the American landscape. But of those 2000 companies, three basically survive. And they haven't done that well, many times.
Where Segways do make sense is places that have good cycle paths. But then you may as well use a bike. And for campuses / aircraft carriers / bases / etc, well, we're tryig to get people to do more exercise, not less.
Glass or similar displays could be useful in many places but Glass is currently fantastically expensive. A Haynes[1] manual is a few quid and Glass doesn't currently have much benefit. But it could.
You don't necessarily ride in a car door to door, unless that makes sense. If it doesn't make sense (for example, new construction hasn't emphasized roads, but instead 'segway-ways'), then you travel hub to hub and then finish that last quarter mile or so on segway. See something like Masdar City ( http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/12/features/rea... ), but with a segway-like system instead of bulky personal cars.
Entirely possible to imagine car-less towns, connected by public transport to the rest of the world, and segway like transportation inside the town.
- Protection from inclement weather
- Climate control
- Seating
- Storage
- Capacity to bring friends or loved ones
If you consider these preferences you get something closer to a Smart Car than a Segway.
this reminds me http://rynomotors.com/ it's expensive and slow, but super cool, which I won't buy.
That puts you in the vast minority of consumers. Almost all products sell on coolness. Even food.
I think there are a couple of big problems with glass:
1. It doesn't do AR substantively, which is the breakthrough feature, instead its basically just a semi-transparent floating screen
2. Its got a photo taking camera on it*
3. Interacting with it is cumbersome/clunky
To do 1 effectively, it needs to be full field of view or at least the bulk of the FOV, which is a major issue with lenses that close to the eye and why I think they acquired Magic Leap.
2 is a fairly simple fix but would need a whole new re-branding and google may have burned this bridge already.
3 is really a tough thing to figure out but I think could be done with CV gestures that aren't physical touch based, but rather view orientation based. So for example if you look down, you immediately get your apps displayed and you can use your hand to select/type in a similar form function as people do now with phones.
*I make the distinction about photo taking because if the camera was only used for CV/tracking on device and had no "photo taking" feature, people would be less worried about it. And yes I am aware that images are still taken, its the distinction in what is happening by default that the public in general cares about.
It's not that different from the first iPhone, which was really just a touch screen media player with a phone antenna.
In terms of social acceptance, that was probably mistake # 1.
Most of the negative stories have been about the potential abuse of the camera. If glass had been launched primarily as an AR device, then, once normalized, the camera could have ben introduced as an upgrade.
The issue is an always-on-esque digital camera permits you to make a permanent record with limitless distribution anything you saw with your eyes in a way that isn't potentially falliable like an anecdote is, and you can share it with everyone and anyone at any time.
Most people out in public do not want this to be the case at your personal discretion.
What do you think about it?
To me, yes, the storyline is dramatised, but the core concept is real. One of the key problems of technology like Glass is that it creates another barrier in direct human interactions. That is why, personally, I'd prefer for it to be limited in use rather than ubiquitous.
1) The 'viewport' is out of sight if you're not looking up and to the right. This gives it the non-intrusive aspect that allows someone to wear it while engaging in everyday activities.
2) The 'pairing' with another Android device I think allows the developer to leave heavy computation / work off of the small Glass device to conserve battery.
3) The form-factor. I think it's very lightweight, and again non-intrusive aspect that doesn't make it a burden to those who don't already wear glasses.
I haven't dug in deeply recently, but originally I had the sense that there's not enough integration with popular 3rd party apps. Engagement from Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. would probably help with adoption, though the pricepoint is definitely something I see most people struggling with. Perhaps tight integration with things like Google Apps might make it appealing to small or larger but agile businesses.
I think this could be both a consumer and business play in terms of adoption, though I think the path to business adoption may be more straightforward in terms of the kinds of apps that would need to be developed.
I can imagine alot of really interesting things might start happening once Google has made Tango available for mass adoption.
https://www.google.com/atap/projecttango/#project
Glass jumped stations to reach the head, a point still in premature interaction with a long distance of motion travel of the hands to control it. The head is like in another planet to be reached compared to a watch even a cellphone.
Google went all-in directly to the head when the way to go was wrist, arm, shoulder, neck and then head. In any of the cases the glass experience provided Google with rich information about wearable and its adoption.
I am not sure if Brin will compromise his figure that much in the future with early developed technologies. Even should have been discouraging as leader, but was not his fault since he believed.
Glass was and is a great lesson for the industry.
1) Taking pictures and video of my day. 2) Telling the time.
The notifications features were not useful to me and being seen in public with the device on was embarrassing. I ended up deciding to make my own version of Glass (called Lambda Hat) that was more discrete and solved the first problem above and left the second to my cellphone.
the only really accepted form of glasses is sunglasses, because hiding your eyes is a nice feeling. people can't read you. our brain aims for the eyes to read emotion.
genius idea to pick that spot of the body to interfere with tech.
Record traffic in an out of a retail business? Congratulations, your analyzing commercial activity. Better watch what you do with that footage, there are rules for that.
Record something that ends up being controversial and potentially costs someone business? Congratulations, you can count on being taken to court over that.
Record something innocent and then accuse or hint that someone is doing something criminal and posted it online? Well if you didn't specifically hand over the footage of the deed in question to the authorities, then you could very likely be hit with a defamation suit.
You're just one big market for bored lawyers as a spyglass luser.
The Magic Leap technology uses lightfields as the starting point to seamlessly blend virtual and augmented reality together. Those guys have a significantly larger scope of vision than the Google Glasses. Not surprised folks within Google are getting bored of it. The pivots from Glasses by third party developers are a red herring. Why keep developing Glasses when there is someone who is way further along?