Google Glass sales halted
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
AR doesn't significantly augment your experience of riding the bus to work, ordering dinner at a restaurant, taking a walk around the block, or even most forms of labor (manual or otherwise). So not only did Google Glass not have much of a benefit, but it had the drawback of annoying countless people who had to be around the glasshole who never stopped yapping at their glasses.
Edit: Well I guess some people think I'm mistaken. Then I request images/video showing the full field of view of someone wearing glass. (Not the simulation marketing videos.)
That has been hugely helpful in making the understanding of how AR works accessible to a much wider range of people.
There are plenty of applications for mobile phones that do a much better job of that.
Examples: the Layar offering and automatic translation of text by moving the phone over the text and reading 'through' the phone.
Walking through a museum, seeing something you were interested in, and having more information about it read to you be someone knowledgeable almost instantly is a great User Experience.
http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_27234868/museum-2-0-g...
The de Young Museum's partnership with Google, and the exhibit-tour app created specifically for Glass, is one of the most thrilling experiments yet. Billed by French app-maker GuidiGO as the first-ever tour of a complete exhibition on Glass, the augmented-reality effects unfolding within my wearable device made me feel less like a detached spectator and more like a privileged guest at an intimate salon. With one eye on the actual painting before me, I could tap and slide my finger along the Glass stem and call up text or images or an audio interpretation of the piece by Haring's sister, Kristen, who teaches history of science and technology at Stanford University.
The killer apps for glass type device are life casting and personal security and glass can't do either of those due to battery life.
One issue deaf people have, not knowing a spoken tongue, is that language is confusing--seriously. Vocabulary doesn't have as much exposure when written as when spoken.
I found out about this when I talked with a professor before graduating. [1]
The hope is that we can eventually build enough of a visual library that can represent a word when a deaf individual confronts an unfamiliar word, then they can learn about it independently and consistently.
To the dreamers, the ideal situation would be where the individual spots a word, performs some 'hey, pay attention' action and they highlight or circle the word with their fingers on the written text. OCR magic, perhaps additional context gathering around the instance of the word, and then some form of conveying the meaning visually.
I foresee augmented reality being more beneficial to those that are in some form disabled, before we have practical or convenient features like 'where are my friends in this cafeteria?' HUD pointers.
[1]: http://www.scienceworldreport.com/articles/15005/20140527/si...
As a deaf/hearing-impaired person, the ideal situation is near-instant subtitles for speech/sounds.
For Deaf persons, I imagine the ASL (or JSL or what have you) equivalent of subtitles would be a godsend if they were more comfortable with that than reading.
It could. Riding the bus? It could automatically pull up the bio of a person sitting next to you. Ordering dinner? It could approximate calorie counts of the food on your plate. Taking a walk? It could pull up information about the flora and fauna around you, and the history of the buildings.
AR could be amazing, but the tech isn't there yet. Google Glass reminds me of Apple Newton -- an amazing piece of technology that's a decade or two too early.
Jesus Christ please no. Does anyone really think this is a good idea?
Addendum: of all the people replying to my post, saying how great it could be, I'd be willing to guess that none are in positions where they get harassed on the bus on an almost daily basis (eg being a woman).
It's a bus/train/supermarket/DMV line, not a mixer. If it were a mixer I'd also be more interested in talking to the person than reading their profile and recent tweets.
I get how such technology would be impressive from a "oooooh cyberspace!" perspective, but that only reinforce's the point made earlier: Google Glass was very impressive tech that had a lot of technically interesting applications that were nonetheless mostly pointless.
For example, you're at a party/mixer, so you set your locality privacy settings to show your name to those in proximity, or to those in proximity that you have a direct or once removed connection to through Facebook or G+.
Another example, you are at a conference, so you set the locality privacy filter to show your name, location, and workplace to anyone in your work address book that happens to be close by.
Finally, imagine you are on the bus, going to your good friend's house, who you've set to always see you when within a mile or so. You see a marker for her/him show up in the distance, rapidly approach, and pass you going in the other direction. You realize they misunderstood your prior conversation about meeting, and are on their way to your house, or at least, were, until they realized you were on the bus they just passed and turned around to pick you up at the next stop, which you've quickly agreed to get off at.
I think there are cases where capabilities like this could be extremely useful and desired, it's just a matter of working out the issues.
This, and a thousand other uses, are what people mean when they say "It could" with respect to AR enhancing our everyday life.
When the government does facial recognition, they're not asking you to opt-in to being facially recognized... why do you think that is? When the police deploy license plate scanners, they don't ask you to opt-in and provide data, why do you think that is?
Literally the first app developed on a system like this would be something to "look up and stalk hot girls you see everyday".
Or maybe it's any one of a thousand other possible solutions, or capabilities. I'm really just trying to illuminate that when we are talking about something as far reaching as enhancing one of our senses with network information, and the unknown unknowns are enormous, I'm really just espousing a bit more caution before it's written off as useless, or a toy, or not worth the hype we've seen. I don't think we've seen a fraction of what's possible yet in this space.
No, there aren't. It is not possible for a system which is opt-in to get off the ground.
Do you want to purchase Google Glasses, which are opt-in (and which therefore identify 0.000001% of the people you see every day), or China Blackmarket Glasses, which are opt-out, and which not only cost 1/10th as much, they also identify 99.735% of the people you see every day, along with their birthdate, home address, cell phone, relationship status, sexual orientation and SSN? Which product will be successful?
No one is calling such things "useless". They have plenty of "uses". I'm calling them disastrous, and abusive, and privacy-invasive.
Nor is anyone saying they won't happen. They will, undoubtedly. And it will be ugly.
Opt-in was your assumption. Even so, that statement is trivially proven false. Facebook is opt-in by nature of needing an account. There's plenty of adoption.
> No one is calling such things "useless". They have plenty of "uses". I'm calling them disastrous, and abusive, and privacy-invasive.
Well, a statement close to calling AR useless (for these situations) farther up-thread is what started this.
I think the world will just adapt as needed to the new reality. Too easy to identify someone when in public? The public will adapt norms that make that harder. Right now we have assumed implicit anonymity, which isn't really anonymity at all in many circumstances. I'm not sure moving to a situation where people think about anonymity and how much of it they want when going about their lives, and then taking steps to try to achieve that level is entirely all bad. To be sure, it's got it's downsides, but I don't think ignoring the upsides and assuming that society will stay static while all this changes is unrealistic.
Even better, facial recognition plus a decent method of determining height, weight and ethinicity, and you have an x-ray specs app. The first person to make that work is probably going to be a millionaire.
Perhaps billionaire, unless the current startup bubble bursts first.
Let's see:
LinkedIn -- get an idea of income via job category
Tinder -- hmmm, someone "looking for love"
Uber "walk of shame" -- someone not just looking
Oh, and I that my consent is required before somebody does face recognition on me.
It's not even remotely enforceable. For better or worse, this is the future.
I don't see how a mandatory shutter sound is blocking "technological progress".
But this specific example isn't the point. My point is that as information becomes more widely available and integrated in our lives, there will be plenty of ways to find out plenty of stuff about all but the most cautious hermits. Trying to plug every hole just isn't practical.
Most of standalone digital cameras have an option to mute it, too.
If this happens, I suspect it will change human interaction significantly and make it more different to be casually anonymous. I'm not so worried about people I casually interact learning my identity; I'd be more concerned about cradle-to-grave government collection and permanent storage of these records, coupled with license plate scanners, etc.
One of the earlier successes of face recognition as described in Pentland and Moghaddam's paper was to use simple PCA on the images of faces normalized by eye position. This PCA would use all the pixels of a vector made from an image. Obviously there's been a lot of progress since then, but all pixels are getting used for information.
Principal Component Analysis looks interesting, but I'm struggling to understand how 2D pixel data would be transformed into the appropriate covariance matrix. Any insight on the missing link you could offer?
The technology has advanced far beyond that, but that was the start where automatic face recognition first became realistically possible.
As far as recognition goes, most modern algorithms don't use fiducials (what you call 'nodal points') to do recognition. So there's nothing in our code that has to do with interocular distance or mouth width, etc., so all of the features are "learned". However, fiducials are used to do a frontalization or re-alignment step before passing it through the feature extractor (neural network or otherwise). This type of frontalization step allowed Facebook's deepface algorithm to use locally learned filters for their CNN as opposed to shared weights.[1][2]
[1] http://www.cv-foundation.org/openaccess/content_cvpr_2014/pa...
It is amazingly courageous how you manage to go through life with such an inescapable handicap. It must be so hard for you, having to contend with the possibility of encountering strangers and having to deal with them by yourself in a public space. What has the world come to, when such cruelty is not opposed? Something must be done! Now where are all those useless, good-for-nothing men?
Both my sisters have told me about borderline harassment and/or inappropriate attention they received while going about their daily lives.
But in small communities, everyone already has this feature (by virtue of their being few enough people that an unaided human brain can track them all). And in small communities, you don't get a lot of jerks going around randomly harassing women on a daily basis. Why not? Well, the identity of the jerk who does the harassing is also known, and social (and ultimately physical) sanctions will be applied.
Now you're saying that in a large community where people are anonymous, there are jerks going around harassing women on a daily basis. But that's in a large community without identity tracking, where the jerks don't fear reprisal.
So what you're saying is actually an argument in favor of implementing AR identity tracking and letting human capabilities catch up with community size.
This may be a 'significant augmentation' but it's not sure it's one that I want.
Recognition technologies currently in development can identify a person by gait, posture, and by face while disguised, turned away from the viewer, or otherwise obscured, albeit with a low probability of success. For now.
One of the few countermeasures shown to be effective against the newer recognition systems is "dazzle"-style camouflage. The other is to keep yourself out of any databases used for matching. Obviously, the former looks a bit outlandish for anyone out in public.
The paranoid and prepared will start scrubbing their social networks, wearing veils of some sort in public, and intentionally sewing rocks into their shoes now, so that when the technology matures later, they will be a "no match" to the databases already being built right now. Everyone else will screw their eyes shut and scream silently into their own skulls as their lives are pushed ever closer to resembling all the various sci-fi dystopias and utopias, blended and amalgamated into one terrifying and beautiful reality.
Businesses do that all the time. No one ever needs the next big thing, which is why they work so hard to make you want it.
What Google wants is to extend the capabilities of G+ into the real world. That's what augmented reality is, with Google behind the wheel. The problem it's meant to solve is the problem of you not generating marketable data while offline. Well, now you need never be offline. Now everything you see and hear is a part of the social layer. Isn't that wonderful?
You do realize most people consider that an anti-feature, and is exactly why a lot of people are worried about it, right?
I'm pretty sure this is a good reason NOT to give Glass to the masses.
Google, and hence the NSA and the US of America(thanks to Patriot Act) having the information of who is at every moment at a given bus, restaurant, party in any part of the word.... is kind of creepy to me.
With mobile phones they can do it today, but with lots of effort, it draws the battery and I could give my phone to someone else, or leave it on a Faraday box if I want.
With cameras pointing to people you have lots of other metadata, like who is kissing or smiling or hugging whom, who is serious with whom. Who is a leader, who is a follower.
In essence, it is a spy. It is not amazing, people from secret services regularly kill people from other countries if they consider it worth "national security", like a news reporter that wanted to know too much and know hold information that puts "the country at risk".
Talking to people like Arturo Perez Reberte that has been war reporters for decades they tell you very clearly that secret services from the big boys(Russia, US, Israel) have killed some of their friends.
Think for a moment how people, specially women preferred to live in cities instead of villages because they were not controlled in everything they did.
I think AR could have a very significant impact in all situations where it's hard to succinctly convey the entirety of what's going on and people tend to say, "you need to be here to see it."
If one could localize a dozen Google Glass like devices within a 3D model of a locale of interest, like a construction site or the site of a large public news event, then the various POV of the cameras could be represented within the 3D space. This would allow viewers to place the various POV in context. Zooming around the space then into the POV of a reporter onsite would really make such locations concrete for viewers in the way beyond what a shot with buildings in the background and a crowd in the foreground could not.
I also think that AR could be used to allow a team of human experts and assistants to augment an agent, negotiator, or executive at an event or meeting, much as one sees lawyers whispering into the ears of executives and politicians. This would have the advantage of not having the whispering expert be visible. It would allow executives and politicians to project a more competent image. (The current Google Glass could not suffice for this, as it is still too obtrusive.) The same 3D virtual space could also be used to aggregate and contextualize the situation for the remote experts. It's also easy to see how aggregating various POV from security guards and bodyguards would give a much clearer picture of the security situation around a VIP.
tl;dr - I agree that devices like Google Glass have the most value integrated into teams of people who are dealing with the integration of disparate information in complex situations.
Why not just use a good old-fashioned earpiece?
You can do a lot with that, but you could do a lot more with the AR/VR setup I've described. The assistants could see the body language of participants and take that information into account when formulating advice. (In fact, assistants could flip between multiple POV and gauge the body language of a sampling of the crowd or all of the key players.) If an assistant has a piece of side knowledge, like they happen to know on sight that someone's brooch was made by a famous craftsman, they could provide that as a conversation starter and help the executive score points. If an important person is walking up from behind, the executive could be alerted to end the conversation and so she can present her argument first.
As often noted around here, one can do more with more data. The AR/VR combination I've described would provide that additional data.
So you say. I was taking the conversation in a related direction. Somehow the idea that we can't talk about technological potential seems a bit out of place, even irrational for HN.
By now, everyone is far too aware it's all about PROJECTING and IMAGE (and not into the user's eye about their environment, but into the audience's mind about the user), and at this point it's widely agreed that the image it projects is that of a Narcissistic Douchebag Glasshole.
If you read the comments carefully, you will realize that I explicitly stated that the current devices would be too obtrusive for this purpose. It is possible that there would be a negative backlash over the use of such a device, but it would not be caused by the appearance of the device, if properly executed.
I argue that is primary feature for all the time. Every time I reach for phone (to look something up, check weather, directions, status of things, name that song, take picture, check calander, etc. etc.) I would much rather have that in a HUD, voice controlled or not.
In future (and guess I'm in minority) I would LOVE full mediated reality. Sound suppression/augmentation, ad blocking, alerts of people I know, tags and notes from (geolocated, item/face recognition). So much more. I sort of doubt the tech for this will arrive mainstream in my lifetime. mostly due to low demand and individual impowerment making it anti-commercial.
:))) i somehow suspect that the "full mediated reality" would be an exact opposite - a new ad medium where you'd have very hard time avoiding the ads. I mean compare placing an ad on real Golden Gate Bridge vs. placing it on the Bridge in your AR.
Don't you? That's exactly when I pick up my phone; unless I have something to think through, walking to/back from work, etc. feels like a waste of time for me so I do want to do something then (read, reply to emails), or at least distract myself with social media.
- map, with routes etc. proximity of my "friends" - location direction distance to cops (like weekend downtown horse patrol's ) - ability to overlay datasets (crime, traffic, business ratings, etc) - notice of interesting history/landmarks (basically wikipedia) - notice/splice with local news (yesterday this happened here). - notice/splice with events (in hour so and so will be signing books at store on your left), tonight x band is playing at bar on right. - splice with my notes of place, when/how often here, money spent, stuff ordered, etc.
I want augmented memory and senses.
pie in the sky, I want it to face recognition and tell me the name and why I know guy (which I don't remember) who is talking at a me like he knows me.
There are industries where a mini heads-up display would be valuable. Consider, for example, a mechanic. Peering into an engine and seeing the parts labelled, color coded and flagged by diagnostics would be powerful. Or a policeman surveying highway traffic. Or a lawyer reviewing paper documents. In none of these cases would a Glass-like device be awkward.
The technology isn't ready for overlays; we can't take a picture, analyze it, and pipe a drawing to a display fast enough. If it's not fast enough you get lag which is confusing and distracting and wrong.
the problem is wearing it and getting in an accident is basically asking to wear an eye patch.
You are implying Google Glass was a failed product but I would argue that discovering those specific applications is precisely what Google sought to achieve by mass releasing the product. I doubt they ever expected Google Glass in its current form to succeed as a consumer product although I bet they'd been happy with that outcome too.
These aren't applications discovered with it, these are applications potentially implemented with it or similar tech. I'd wager that video games (primarily the real-time sort) have given more inspiration for applications of AR and proper worn HUDs than Google Glass itself produced.
The Apache helicopter pilots in 1985 had helmet mounted displays (HMDs). I remember being blown away when I first saw a demo. They could select a target by looking at it!
It was able to capture neat videos, but I think a gopro stuck to the helmet would do a better job.
Google's self driving is far less dynamic as they would have you believe. Areas are extremely heavily analysed with a massive array of sensors, analysis and even human input/sanity checking before cars are allowed to drive in a specific area.
No doubt this preparation is expensive and the resources to do it are finite. I could easily see some very accessible normal place be unavailable to a self driving car.
Source: 2 of my coworkers worked at the start-up that originally developed the core self-driving platform that was acquired by Google(No, Google did not develop the origin technology). The both worked for some time at Google working on the project.
BTW. This situation is one of the many that make me more and more convinced that we can't have both privacy and continued technological progress; we need to pick one.
I honestly see this as unavoidable. There are important problems to be solved that need more data and constant monitoring.
Want to have early warning about diseases and their spread (extremely important as we're entering the age of garage biotech)? We need more data about people, their movements and health, preferably realtime.
Want to have better weather prediction? More data.
Want to have better disaster relief? More data, more monitoring, as real-time as possible.
Want to turn social sciences into some kind of actual hard-ish science? More tracking, more data.
There are absolutely enormous benefits we could get from constant gathering and processing of data about people. There are tons of security issues here which are of course important and need to be talked about, but it seems to me that this is the only thing people are talking about now, and no one is noticing that we could use this data to further improve our lives.
While threats to one's safety are real and have to be adressed, I'm starting to believe that the notion of "privacy" as is currently understood needs to go, if we want to enjoy the continued progress of mankind.
Someone wrote somewhere downthread that society is based on trust. I think it should be based on "I trust you won't harm me with what you see" kind of trust, rather than "I trust you don't look at me even though you can" kind.
Can you not collect the necessary data about disease and its spread without being able to immediately call up the medical history of every specific person you see? Does better weather prediction mean NOAA has to know where I am, by name, to within a centimeter at all times?
Data doesn't need names, places, faces, phone numbers, geolocation and social media accounts correlated and updated in realtime to be useful, unless you're trying to sell that to advertisers, or a government. I'm not convinced it has to be as intrusive as it is.
But the second, more important angle is that at this scale, there is no such thing as "anonymized data". There have already been papers showing that what is now called "anomymized" can be trivially deanonymized by mashing together other data sets and some computing power. Trying to hold on to the concept of anonymized data is futile - the reality itself is highly correlated and interconnected, and all those causal relationships will be reflected in the colected datasets. The more data sources you have, the easier is to deanonymize them all together.
So the choice is - either stop collecting data or accept that there ain't such thing as anonymity. What we definitely shouldn't do is fooling ourselves that we can do both. Datasets are and will be trivially deanonymized if anyone cares to do so.
EDIT:
> Data doesn't need names, places, faces, phone numbers, geolocation and social media accounts correlated and updated in realtime
Names - social studies. Places - social studies, urban optimization. Faces - social and medical studies. Phone numbers - dunno, probably something. Geolocation - urban optimization, crime prevention, social studies once again. The more data you have, the more interesting experiments you can devise.
I'm pushing that social studies example for a simple reason - this level of data collection is a holy grail for psychology, sociology, et al. Right now those sciences mostly keep faking "lifelike" conditions to test some theories and we all know how much problem there is with small sample sizes, unrealistic experiment setups, etc. Inferences based on natural patterns of behaviour of millions, or even billions of people would be much, much more reliable. We could finally learn a lot about ourselves, just by observing.
Of course there is.
I work in a business today that collects highly personal consumer data and does advanced analytics. We strip personally identified invention once the data is brought in so there is technically no way to to deanonymise it.
We are hardly unique.
I don't know what kind of data you're working with, but for the sake of example let's assume you're handling buying records from supermarkets. You obviously hashed people's ClubCard/credit card numbers. But let's say I get hold of the data from an ALPR on a street near one of the markets. Would correlating that with your database not help to deanonymize a lot of your data?
My point is - as the data collection of every kind increases, for every dataset you have anonymized, there will be a lot of other data sets of all sorts that can be used to deanonymize back yours.
Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)
> Even if there is a possible net benefit, there will also be, inevitably, be a loss of control over identity and autonomy that no one can be blamed for not wanting to give up without a fight (futile though it might be.)
I think we'll have to learn how to live with that. I doubt that a lot will change though.
There aren't a lot of random spy shops down the corner, and not a lot of random stalkers sneaking upskirts of people on escalators with pen cameras hidden in their shoes.
You could make the argument that cellphones are far more powerful as tools for surveillance (and they certainly are in regards to surveilling their owners) than Glass would have been capable of. And you would have a point - for maybe the first couple of generations, and before there were several million Glasses in the wild. At that point, being a random stalker becomes socially acceptable, and being randomly stalked becomes unavoidable.
Consumer AR isn't entirely dead. I've seen it on portable game consoles. But Google's attempt to literally shove it into people's faces demonstrates that there are more than technical hurdles to overcome.
>See attractive woman.
>See bespeckled gentleman apparently leering grotesquely at the attractive woman.
>Realize he has Google Glasses on. OK, he might just be checking the weather. Perhaps in order to use this, you have to stare off into space, with your mouth hanging open like the creepmaster.
>Second-guess whether he was really using the glasses or just filming the woman.
It isn't just that one knows there's a camera, it that using the thing mucks deeply with humans' instinctual reaction in reading people's eyes and faces. It's the ambiguity around the camera and the undermining of one's instinctual reactions to eye-contact. A shoecam is a shoecam. Something mounted near your eyeballs is entirely different.
There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)
I can't help but ask: so what? I know I might be totally biased here as I never had an issue with being filmed, but such examples make me feel we're trying to blame technology for what is our society having trouble with its own sexuality.
I accept this is an issue, though I personally don't "feel it".
> There's also the aspect that may of us already spend 50-75% of our lives looking at screens. Most people know 'that guy' who can't go out for breakfast without checking his feeds between bites of huevos ranchero. IMO, "it make anti-social activities even easier" was never a very good sell (perhaps outside the googleplex.)
Now this attitude, very common among people, is IMO unfair and feels like bullying. I am 'that guy'. And you know why I'm sticked to some screen for most of the day? Because brain-computer interfaces are not here yet. I'd be happy to use some different interface like, say, AR glasses but hey, aren't those being frowned upon because they have a camera? sigh.
But, I think the question is who gets to make that decision? Who gets to say how much should be relinquished and decide when there is more benefit than harm?
You could say, "well, anyone who doesn't like it can elect not to use X technology." But, that will become increasingly difficult as more and more "core" technology adopts less privacy-oriented models.
So, I am cautious about advocating an approach of continuing to push and erode privacy as long as there is some argument for additional benefit. I think it is very much a slippery slope and we have already experienced some of the slippage. A little privacy here. A little privacy there. And, it is difficult to walk it back.
So, we are redefining what we consider a reasonable expectation of privacy as a society. Too much of that definition seems to be coming from commercial interests and, I believe, many people are feeling uncomfortable with the increasing erosion of their privacy and the decisions that are being made for them.
> I honestly see this as unavoidable.
You might be interested in reading "Industrial Society and Its Future". It has a lot of well-argued points along these lines. Highly recommended.
This is true, but it seems that rather than acknowledge this, many technology producers are purposely pushing the needle the other way. That is, they frequently opt for the least privacy-oriented approach, even when more privacy-oriented approaches are available at the same or lower cost.
Take FitBit. I am opposed to the tracking it does on so many fronts. But, I received one as a gift, so thought I would investigate further. Here's the short: It only syncs my data to the cloud, and doesn't even provide the option to keep it locally. This, even though it requires a desktop app and USB dongle to wirelessly sync my data from the watch to my laptop. So, it could very easily provide a local dashboard, but, it's not an option. They want my data.
Then, I look at their privacy policy. The usual stuff about not selling my personally identifiable data, but the right to sell it in aggregate form, give it up if compelled by subpoena, etc.
But, why do I want even them to know when my heart beats or when I sleep? And, do I really want to take the risk that my information can be used against me in some insurance claim that goes to court one day?
Point being, that it truly is unnecessary for their product to work against privacy, but they've opted for a longer view that sacrifices my privacy for their future profits. This erosion of privacy for commercial gain is part of the ethos that is being foisted on consumers at so many turns that it is normalizing the approach, and leaving us with fewer options where this is not the case.
Google Glass has a bright future in B2B — minus the stream everything to our cloud approach, I hope.
I'm still not sure about how my feelings toward "streaming everything to cloud", but I totally want that camera in my AR glasses. Armed with proper software, this is a huge area for immensely useful solutions. Unfortunately for now you need to offload the data somewhere for processing, as there's only so much computing power that can fit in your glasses.
That is both incredibly accurate (watches will already provide you with all the information you need in a less obtrusive manner), and it reminds me of that toothbrush test Google gives its products:
> We ask ourselves, 'Is this something people use once or twice a day and does it solve a problem?'
They might need to revisit this. Airplanes wouldn't pass the test, for instance. Glass shouldn't have; they simply tried hard to make it pass the test.
Now if you could talk to you devices without actually talking it would be great.
Like they do in "Ghost in the Shell"[1].
The Nest division, where glass seems to be headed now, could maybe evolve into a completely new branch with a more straight forward business model, more product than platform. Maybe there glass could still be salvaged, surviving as a simple, focused HUD tool for the "jet pilot", after failing as a pervasive wearable for the guy on the bus.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmet-mounted_display#Helmet-M...
Then Google came across a fiber optic eye-ball projector that made the Glass visual interface look like an 8-Track of the Doobie Brothers. They immediately realized this and dumped a half billion dollars on the project, Magic Leap.
http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new...
Some day, Google will spring a productized version of this on the public and it'll be like nothing before, including Oculus. Its the best shot we've got at 'true' augmented reality.
Genuinely interested in your rationale though.
But yeah, probably worlds ahead of Glass for AR.
I've always felt that consumer products were going to be really hard for Google to pull off. It reminded me of Intel trying to make an LED wristwatch in the early 80's. Too much consumer 'hands on', too much industrial design. Neither of which Google are strengths.
I expect glass is dead, all the money they might have invested in making it real they spent on Magic Leap, and now its up to the Leap guys to be the 'visual interface to Google.' The small android experience will fold into the IoT part of Google (Nest) and that will be that.
It's as if they are an eventually consistent system that is constantly moving towards a state of consistency that they never completely reach.
They have some products which were nearly perfect. For instance, the Chromecast is more or less finished. It's not intended to be a game console or something to have apps in on a television. It's an extremely cheap device that allows you to stream a tab or from apps. That vision is well-executed, because it is cheap and works well for streaming. Of course, some people will have gripes about the Chromecast, but the fact that a device that looked incredibly boring at the start is now a pretty big success indicates that for many people it's exactly the product that they want.
But I agree that Chromecast gets things just right. I want the ability to "throw" an image or video from my PC, tablet, or phone to my big dumb screen on the wall--whatever proprietary smarts the TV manufacturer is trying to make me interact with--and that's exactly what Chromecast does.
Maybe it's different where you are, but where i live the chromecast is literally useless due to the restriction and nobody has one.
Why the Chromecast has the ability to run it's own Wi-Fi network to only connect to another is a design decision I don't understand. The other parts of it are great, but it's a shame that for such a small and portable device, it's such a pain in the ass to use away from home.
I can certainly see how for some people it's not useful, but its of people do have reliable internet access where they'd want to use it and aren't limited by that requirement.
However, it's terribly advertised, and it still annoyingly says "beta" all over stuff. I feel like I bought it out of some kind of anonymised side-door at the back of the warehouse.
I know what you mean, but I'd actually say the opposite:
Google has a history of dumping a bunch of resources into a first release. Which may be quite good (Google Books), barely a proof of concept (Wave), somewhere in between (Hangouts), or bizarro what (Plus). And then withdrawing all resources, never iterating on it again, never delivering any major improvements.
In fact, this, it seems, is what Glass-purchasers felt for the past year and a half -- So, this is a good first draft, but when's it gonna get better? Answer: Never.
Presumably the projects which start looking like they will make money for Google receive further investment.
If people think SDLC is hard, what about traditional hardware product lifecycles?
I think it's interesting that Google, being built around continuously moving, never-really-finished, web products, has tried to move into really-has-be-finished-to-ship hardware...and I think it's been hard for Google to do, it's just not in their blood.
Occasionally something comes out, the Chromecast, or early 1st round versions of something. But then they seem to get lost in the weeds, not to mention weird cancellations of products right before they're ready to ship.
It kind of reminds me of what I've been reading about what went on inside of Atari during the boom days.
Second: Glass isn't just any GoogleX project. It's the most publicized and most heavily bought into except perhaps the automatic car. Large investors may well expect Google to chase some dead-ends, but to kill them before they get to the prominence and public stature of Glass.
There are plenty of other reasons why Google might save face on Glass -- there might be internal morale reasons or the pride of an executive or wanting to keep competitors guessing.
I believe I read a comment here that basically said that Google didn't kill glass, they stopped selling it and moved the work to another division. So I think you could debate forever about whether this is considered "killing" google glass or not, but that's neither here nor there.
Without a camera it would have been so pointless no one would have bothered to look at it.
(seriously, can you imagine the sky diving demo sans camera? 'What was thing thing on his face?' 'No idea, I think it was showing him tweets or something')
It was a $1500 accessory that never really solved a common problem. Many confused it with Augmented Reality, even the top comment on HN.
If anything, it's analogous to the segway - ie. an expensive, niche piece of technology seen as a novelty.
This is how we have ended up with mobile phones with cameras that nobody seems to mind about. Phones only got cameras halfway through their life. By then, it was too late to stop.
We do have visual sense. Completely different. The output of the system is a perception, an interpretation of reality.
Most of what you are seeing right now is going to be forgotten just in seconds. You only leave what holds your attention.
Cameras store the raw content of what they point to. That is gigabytes of information.
The speech information is barely kilobytes of information.
I think the screens will lead the way. Seems "the screen" will migrate from the phone to the watch, and maybe then to glasses. Apple's move here seems smart.
Google glass jumped the gun, going after what was possible over what society was ready for.
What percentage of drug deals do you estimate both buyer and seller are carrying a phone with a camera? 70%? 90%?
I laugh when I imagine how many movie plots are broken now that everybody has an audio recording device in their pocket.
Instead of marketing the benefit of HUD form factor, they have mainly shown off the device as a photo taking device. I remember when it was first appeared at I/O, their marketing video was mostly, if not only, about taking photo and video.
Edit: Fixed bad sentence break.
The irony of this is it's not hard to conceal cameras on people in order to record their surroundings if you're so inclined, and the reception to Glass just demonstrated how opposed people are to this when it's a visible intrusion, regardless of the actual threat presented.
The idea that something is technically possible but socially unacceptable is not irony. Concealing something socially unacceptable is not ironic. Expressing disapproval of someone openly breaking social norms is not inherently ironic. The idea society runs on trust is not ironic!
Take it easy - we know what was meant. No need to get pedantic about the definition of "irony."
Unless you're a woman who's ever worn a skirt in public, gone to a gym, or used the changing room in a store.
Well, yes. Because they're...covert. People rarely worry about things they don't know exist.
And obviously the camera led to a ridiculous amount of privacy related angst.
Edit: "Glass at Work has been growing and we’re seeing incredible developments with Glass in the workplace. As we look to the road ahead, we realize that we’ve outgrown the lab and so we’re officially “graduating” from Google[x] to be our own team here at Google. We’re thrilled to be moving even more from concept to reality." https://plus.google.com/+GoogleGlass/posts/9uiwXY42tvc
These things will be back, but they won't be Google Glass, they'll be the "GoPro of Google Glass". Probably single function at first, cool looking, wearable/usable, with modders and hobbyists starting to build out functionality piecemeal until they have something really cool.
And back to that form factor, I'm just a regular guy, and I wouldn't be caught dead in these things. When the visual impression of your product is Robert Scoble wearing them in the shower, you know you're doomed.
Probably about time - Glass needs to sink or swim already.
Google Glass = ti OMAP 4430 → Texas Instruments axed the OMAP division → no more (closed source) driver updates → no more easy kernel updates → no more Android/system software updates → end-of-life. ☹
> She and the Glass team will report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest
It sounds like they're just transitioning the responsibility to an Apple vet who has good taste.
Meanwhile, we drastically underestimate the potential utility of non-visual sensory augmentation. For instance, a hidden device providing vibrotactile information could provide far subtler, lower-level cues about the world around us, even to the point of widening the human experience to nearly limitless novel senses [0].
That's the direction I'd love to see us move wearables and technology in general: pervasive, yet unobtrusive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895743
tldr; all XE development stopped as of Monday
Google made a massive mistake by bundling the Glass with the camera. Camera is the reason for the backlash and the seriously tainted brand ("glassholes" and such). Of course they couldn't launch it as is. Though I wonder if they learned the lesson or if they will just hold a pause and relaunch it with no hardware changes.
If it was me I think I'd be upset to see that my expensive piece of kit had effectively (if not officially) been end-of-lifed. (if not for Google themselves but almost certainly for any 3rd-party developers.)
But, I suspect some people would like the new exclusivity and perhaps the rare collectibility?
I'm happy with my participation, it was a chance to play around with a bit of what the future could be like. It was like owning a Nokia internet tablet back in the day. You could see what it would be like to make (skype) calls , stream music, and use apps on a connected computer in your pocket. But that didn't mean that one didn't think it was a great thing when the iPhone came out, and pushed the vision at consumer scale.
So I am hoping that augmented vision catches on, in more than just niche categories, so that the hardware can evolve more quickly.
It probably needs to be carefully separated from the recording capability, to work around the "creepy" factor.
Is that division made up of people from Magic Leap by any chance? http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new...
The next step is to project 3D images directly into the eyeballs!
The problem with the product is that people like the compartmentalization of the smartphone, you take it out of your pocket to take a photo, nothing surreptitious. And to be honest, the smartphone just does a lot more. This is going to be the challenge that the Apple Watch will also face, it competes with the smartphone for your attention and has to add enough additional value to justify the product segment.
Meanwhile, it's no big deal, products come and go and some end up with much smaller target customer base, although I suspect Glass is (as Segway was) being considered for a few specific markets but over the coming year or two will just vanish only to be revisited in a decade but with holographic projection (a la R2D2) and streetview-like surround-camera and built in plethora of biometric sensors that all feed into the big post-Singularity GoolgleBrain to provide it's eyes, ears and voice...
i take this as a cautionary tale of product-market fit. as mark andreessen says, where a market exists and a competent but not visionary startup finds itself, the market will often "pull the product out of the startup."
that obviously didn't happen here. i think it is because glass was both narrative AND product. narrative meaning that glass was supposed to be a transformational product, meant to elevate google from a search company to a product company.
they weren't going to let the product find its market (my thesis: industrial). instead, pushed it to the market they wanted it pushed to (consumer), because it fit a narrative they _wanted_ to be true.
https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/1015157966444465...
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/google-glass-2-0-eight-things-addre...
There's a huge fit for Google glass. But there is no high volume huge fit. And Google doesn't care about low-volume as they can't move enough ads across it.
Take the Newton and the iPad, I can't think of a product category which hasn't been tried before and failed. When you have a screen on your glasses or contact lense I can't see how it can't succeed.
At the current price-point? Enterprise would be the only market that would pay $1000 in decent quantities for such a niche device. If they could get it down to $200? It could be great for the GoPro set.
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/wearables/1000284/google-glass-app-la...
Nice timing.
I'm kind of glad that it flopped in its current form and that those days are over.
It's a shame though, Glass hate is coming from the old school, technophobe camp. While it _is_ a clunky, underdesigned, underpowered piece of tech, we should aim for sleeker, more powerful, more useful head-mounted computers… instead for no HMC at all.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/17/lakeysha-beard-kick...
But many, if not most people have learned how to respect people around them while owning and using a cellphone.
Are you implying that doing these things with a cellphone is now alright?
Basic human decency and social norms haven't changed as much as you think. Walking around talking to a computer strapped to your face, staring at a little screen in the corner of your eye, is profoundly anti-social.
Because no intelligent, technically competent person has ever had a reasonable criticism to make about Glass, or the track record of the company making it, in regards to privacy and participation with NSA surveillance, or of the potential downsides to adding even more ubiquitous, fine-grained surveillance to the modern world.
I mean, Glass is no more ominous than cellphones. It's just a cellphone strapped to your face and pointed right at everyone you're looking at. No one would be creeped out if you held your cellphone out in front of you and recorded everything going on. It even has a little light that shows when you're recording, which is controlled by perfectly trustworthy software.
Bunch of Luddites, they all are.