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  • Googles Glass...cool. but...

    By now most of you know about Googles's latest innovation, Google Glass. Check it out here: Google Glass - What It Does

    Basically it's a jazzed up version of a near-eye headset. Headsets have been around for years and range from big bulky helmet-looking things to sleek, modern glasses. What's new is imbuing the headset or glasses with all the features of a smart phone running more or less simultaneously and on-demand by voice command. There's a video on our U-Tube thread parodying what an encounter with a nice-looking chick would be like.

    So far so good. But what would it be like if everyone using these smart glasses went around videoing everyone and everything they saw and the stuff made its way to Goodle's servers and there become subject to face-recognition software.

    It doesn't take much imagination to see where all that could lead.

    A few folks have gone beyond the gee-whiz phase of what the glasses can do for them to asking what's really in store for us.



    The Google Glass feature no one is talking about

    FEBRUARY 28, 2013 | by Mark Hurst

    (Also: en espaņol, 简体中文, 繁體中文, На русском, in het nederlands)

    Google Glass might change your life, but not in the way you think. There’s something else Google Glass makes possible that no one – no one – has talked about yet, and so today I’m writing this blog post to describe it.

    To read the raving accounts of tech journalists who Google commissioned for demos, you’d think Glass was something between a jetpack and a magic wand: something so cool, so sleek, so irresistible that it must inevitably replace that fading, pitifully out-of-date device called the smartphone.

    Sergey Brin himself said as much yesterday, observing that it is “emasculating” to use a smartphone, “rubbing this featureless piece of glass.” His solution to that piece of glass, of course, is called Glass. And his solution to that emasculation is – well, as VentureBeat put it, “Sergey Brin calls smartphones ‘emasculating’ – but dorky Google Glass [is] A-OK.”

    Like every other shiny innovation these days, Google Glass will live or die solely on the experience it creates for people. The immediate, most visible problem in the Glass experience is how dorky the user looks while wearing it. No one wants to be the only person in the bar dressed like a cyborg from a 1992 virtual-reality movie. It’s embarrassing. Early adopters will abandon Google Glass if they don’t sense the social approval they seek while wearing it.

    Google seems to have calculated this already and recently announced a partnership with Warby Parker, known for its designer glasses favored by the all-important younger demographic. (My own proposal, posted the day before, jokingly suggested that Google look into monocles.)

    Except for the awkward physical design, the experience of using Google Glass has won high praise from reviewers. Seeing your bitstreams floating in the air in front of you, it would seem, is an ecstatic experience. Weather! Directions! Social network requests! Email overload! All floating in front of you, never out of your sight! For people who delight in a deluge of digital distractions, this is much more exciting than a smartphone, which forces you back to the boring offline world, every so often, when you put the phone away. Glass promises never to do that. In fact, in a feat of considerable chutzpah, Google is attempting to pitch Glass as an antidote to distraction, since users don’t have to look down at a phone. Right, because now the distractions are all conveniently placed directly into your eyeball! (For a more accurate exploration of Glass-enabled distraction, see this darkly comic parody video. Even edgier is this parody – warning, some spicy language.)

    As if all that wasn’t enough, Google Glass comes with yet another, even more important feature: lifebits, the ability to record video of the people, places, and events around you, at all times. Veteran readers will remember that I predicted this six years ago in my book Bit Literacy. From Chapter 13:

    The life bitstream will raise new and important issues. Should it be socially acceptable, for example, to record a private conversation with a friend? How will anyone be sure they’re not being recorded, in public or private? … Corporations, police, even friends with ‘life recorders’ will capture the actions and utterances of everyone in sight, whether they like it or not.

    Today, finally, that future has arrived: a major company offering the ability to record your life, store it, and share it – all with a simple voice command.

    And this is where our story takes a turn, toward a ramification that dwarfs every other issue raised so far on Google Glass. Yes, the glasses look dorky – Google will fix that. And sure, Glass forces users to be permanently plugged-in to Google’s digital world – that’s hardly a concern for the company or, for that matter, most users out there. No. The real issue raised by Google Glass, which will either cause the project to fail or create certain outcomes you may not want (which I’ll describe), has to do with the lifebits. Once again, it’s an issue of experience.

    The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:

    There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.

    The key experiential question of Google Glass isn’t what it’s like to wear them, it’s what it’s like to be around someone else who’s wearing them. I’ll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you’ll suspect that you don’t have their undivided attention. And you can’t comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally – here’s where the problems really start – you don’t know if they’re taking a video of you.

    Now pretend you don’t know a single person who wears Google Glass… and take a walk outside. Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any bus or subway – you’re liable to be recorded: audio and video. Fifty people on the bus might be Glassless, but if a single person wearing Glass gets on, you – and all 49 other passengers – could be recorded. Not just for a temporary throwaway video buffer, like a security camera, but recorded, stored permanently, and shared to the world.

    Now, I know the response: “I’m recorded by security cameras all day, it doesn’t bother me, what’s the difference?” Hear me out – I’m not done. What makes Glass so unique is that it’s a Google project. And Google has the capacity to combine Glass with other technologies it owns.

    First, take the video feeds from every Google Glass headset, worn by users worldwide. Regardless of whether video is only recorded temporarily, as in the first version of Glass, or always-on, as is certainly possible in future versions, the video all streams into Google’s own cloud of servers. Now add in facial recognition and the identity database that Google is building within Google Plus (with an emphasis on people’s accurate, real-world names): Google’s servers can process video files, at their leisure, to attempt identification on every person appearing in every video. And if Google Plus doesn’t sound like much, note that Mark Zuckerberg has already pledged that Facebook will develop apps for Glass.

    Finally, consider the speech-to-text software that Google already employs, both in its servers and on the Glass devices themselves. Any audio in a video could, technically speaking, be converted to text, tagged to the individual who spoke it, and made fully searchable within Google’s search index.

    Now our stage is set: not for what will happen, necessarily, but what I just want to point out could technically happen, by combining tools already available within Google.

    Let’s return to the bus ride. It’s not a stretch to imagine that you could immediately be identified by that Google Glass user who gets on the bus and turns the camera toward you. Anything you say within earshot could be recorded, associated with the text, and tagged to your online identity. And stored in Google’s search index. Permanently.

    I’m still not done.

    The really interesting aspect is that all of the indexing, tagging, and storage could happen without the Google Glass user even requesting it. Any video taken by any Google Glass, anywhere, is likely to be stored on Google servers, where any post-processing (facial recognition, speech-to-text, etc.) could happen at the later request of Google, or any other corporate or governmental body, at any point in the future.

    Remember when people were kind of creeped out by that car Google drove around to take pictures of your house? Most people got over it, because they got a nice StreetView feature in Google Maps as a result.

    Google Glass is like one camera car for each of the thousands, possibly millions, of people who will wear the device – every single day, everywhere they go – on sidewalks, into restaurants, up elevators, around your office, into your home. From now on, starting today, anywhere you go within range of a Google Glass device, everything you do could be recorded and uploaded to Google’s cloud, and stored there for the rest of your life. You won’t know if you’re being recorded or not; and even if you do, you’ll have no way to stop it.

    And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience – it’s the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.

    Just think: if a million Google Glasses go out into the world and start storing audio and video of the world around them, the scope of Google search suddenly gets much, much bigger, and that search index will include you. Let me paint a picture. Ten years from now, someone, some company, or some organization, takes an interest in you, wants to know if you’ve ever said anything they consider offensive, or threatening, or just includes a mention of a certain word or phrase they find interesting. A single search query within Google’s cloud – whether initiated by a publicly available search, or a federal subpoena, or anything in between – will instantly bring up documentation of every word you’ve ever spoken within earshot of a Google Glass device.

    This is the discussion we should have about Google Glass. The tech community, by all rights, should be leading this discussion. Yet most techies today are still chattering about whether they’ll look cool wearing the device.

    Oh, and as for that physical design problem. If Google Glass does well enough in its initial launch to survive to subsequent versions, forget Warby Parker. The next company Google will call is Bausch & Lomb. Why wear bulky glasses when the entire device fits into a contact lens? And that, of course, would be the ultimate expression of the Google Glass idea: a digital world that is even more difficult to turn off, once it’s implanted directly into the user’s body. At that point you’ll not even know who might be recording you. There will be no opting out.
    Comments on the above are here:

    The Google Glass feature no one is talking about — Creative Good
    To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

  • #2
    A little off topic but what do you guys think about the possibility of using these glasses in industry? I know some VR kits are already in use in manufacturing, but one can think of stuff for people ranging from safety inspectors to machine operators. Would it be useful? Too gimmicky? What's an acceptable price point?

    Comment


    • #3
      Originally posted by citanon View Post
      A little off topic but what do you guys think about the possibility of using these glasses in industry? I know some VR kits are already in use in manufacturing, but one can think of stuff for people ranging from safety inspectors to machine operators. Would it be useful? Too gimmicky? What's an acceptable price point?
      Something similar is already being used in some commercial sectors, such as those that have large repair and parts manuals. In my business I looked into using near-eye glasses for reading blueprints on the job. I tried one out at an electronics show a few years ago. Pretty impressive that a 1" screen 1" from the eye looked like a 15-foot monitor. Fire fighters use them. Soldiers use them. But you're thinking on the right track; expect them to be standard equipment in industry someday. Right now $1,500 is as low as a decent near-eye unit goes for. The big virtual reality helmets cost as much as a new car.
      To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

      Comment


      • #4
        any issue with eyestrain or headaches with these?
        There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."- Isaac Asimov

        Comment


        • #5
          Originally posted by citanon View Post
          A little off topic but what do you guys think about the possibility of using these glasses in industry? I know some VR kits are already in use in manufacturing, but one can think of stuff for people ranging from safety inspectors to machine operators. Would it be useful? Too gimmicky? What's an acceptable price point?
          I would trust the accountability of a safety inspector than the accountability of one with such glasses.

          For machine operators, the glasses seem like they would be too distracting. Especially when you are working in proximity to some dangerous machinery which requires a higher awareness level.
          Cow is the only animal that not only inhales oxygen, but also exhales it.
          -Rekha Arya, Former Minister of Animal Husbandry

          Comment


          • #6
            Merely one of the disadvantages to Google Glasses:

            Attached Files
            Meddle not in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.

            Abusing Yellow is meant to be a labor of love, not something you sell to the highest bidder.

            Comment


            • #7
              Don't do that to Yella. He might enjoy the sight.

              If opening 50 tabs doesn't block the system, of course.
              No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

              To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

              Comment


              • #8
                I'm more concerned about the idiots that are going to drive around with these things on

                Comment


                • #9
                  I have seen enough idiots with those small LCD TV's in their cars on, you remark truly petrifies me.
                  No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                  To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    These are going to end up being something good someday. They aren't there yet though. I see these as having been a new try and take of a good idea that isn't quite ready for prime time yet. I'm glad they are trying but I think I'll adopt the version that Samsung comes out with at around $250-$500 in 2020. At that time it will easily interface with my highly capable smart phone hand comp, both of which will work nicely with my home server at that point both at home and remotely.

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Originally posted by citanon View Post
                      A little off topic but what do you guys think about the possibility of using these glasses in industry? I know some VR kits are already in use in manufacturing, but one can think of stuff for people ranging from safety inspectors to machine operators. Would it be useful? Too gimmicky? What's an acceptable price point?
                      Any job where lots of hands on experience and/or personal instruction is necessary to learn how to do it could benefit from these, I think. I was talking to a friend the other day about using something like this to teach lab techniques. It's essentially impossible to write a truly complete experimental protocol, you always forget some step, obvious to you, but not to others. With Google Glass, you just make a video of yourself following the protocol, probably with a voice over, and then send that to whoever wants it. Maybe look it over and add little pop-up notes if you need to point something out that you forgot to mention, or elaborate on something. Then, if they're having trouble getting it right, they can film themselves doing it, and you can troubleshoot from anywhere. Or if it's a dangerous or otherwise mistake sensitive technique, you can essentially watch over their shoulder, even if you can't be there physically.
                      I enjoy being wrong too much to change my mind.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        I remember at my first job there was this machine that needed repair, but had no authorized service here (one of the cons with living in a God's forgotten places).

                        Two guys (engineers) came were looking the machine for 2 days and finally said they can repair it. So they came the other day and while the younger of them started unplugging the cords and cables the older yelled "WTF you think you are doing? I haven't got my camera yet". I asked him why he needs the camera and the answer was just fab - "If something goes wrong later with assembly I don't want to look trough 4 books trying to figure out where that piece came from, I will just play it backwards and say A-HA!" Those were the days when google was in kindergarten and we had 1.44 modems.

                        My point is there are people who will always be innovative and find a good use to whatever piece of tech is available.

                        Welcome back ACG, hope you filled your batteries and will stay a while.
                        No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                        To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          They will be an impressive monitor tech for sure, but most people aren't going to tolerate a person using them in intimate or private situations. Users who require perscription eyeglasses would normally use contacts with them, prescription lenses in the display glasses would be an expensive and atypical solution. They would be analogous to texting - so they probably wouldn't be permitted while driving or operating dangerous machinery. Most people would need regular breaks from using them. The users would still need regular prescription glasses for situations where these were inappropriate if they didn't use contacts. The loss of privacy is overstated in the article, IMO.
                          sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
                          If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                            I remember at my first job there was this machine that needed repair, but had no authorized service here (one of the cons with living in a God's forgotten places).

                            Two guys (engineers) came were looking the machine for 2 days and finally said they can repair it. So they came the other day and while the younger of them started unplugging the cords and cables the older yelled "WTF you think you are doing? I haven't got my camera yet". I asked him why he needs the camera and the answer was just fab - "If something goes wrong later with assembly I don't want to look trough 4 books trying to figure out where that piece came from, I will just play it backwards and say A-HA!" Those were the days when google was in kindergarten and we had 1.44 modems.

                            My point is there are people who will always be innovative and find a good use to whatever piece of tech is available.

                            Welcome back ACG, hope you filled your batteries and will stay a while.
                            Hah, that's brilliant. Thanks.
                            I enjoy being wrong too much to change my mind.

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              They're going to be the best thing since sliced bread in my line of work. Everything a crook says and does captured in glorious technicolor along with everything you say and do - so no more false accusations about planting evidence or using unnecessary force - plus you get the dickheads in their natural state not all scrubbed up wearing a nice suit.
                              If you are emotionally invested in 'believing' something is true you have lost the ability to tell if it is true.

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