I mentioned that Google’s Field Trip app hints at the future of Google and its Project Glass. I wanted to learn more about Google Glasses. First thing I learned: don’t call them glasses…there’s not a lens…just a tiny display at the upper-right. Puzzling how that’s going to work…until you think more about it.
David Pogue in in an article titled Google Glass and the Future of Technology calls it an entirely new gadget category…”like a smartphone that you never have to take out of your pocket”. He also has one of the few first-person accounts of it’s like to wear Google Glass:
…the tiny screen is completely invisible when you’re talking or driving or reading. You just forget about it completely. There’s nothing at all between your eyes and whatever, or whomever, you’re looking at.
And yet when you do focus on the screen, shifting your gaze up and to the right, that tiny half-inch display is surprisingly immersive. It’s as though you’re looking at a big laptop screen or something.
If you wear glasses you can try a little experiment. Shift the lens of your glasses up a bit above your eye. Then glance up at the lens: it’s remarkably clear. Hmmm, I wonder if that’s the effect of Google Glass. Having worn glasses for my nearsighted vision since the age of ten, I’ve long been used to that bit of blurred vision outside of the frame. (It doesn’t take a huge stretch of the imagination to see how Google Glass could be adapted to also include lens for corrective vision.)
Beyond the hardware innovation the real advantage to users is that Google Glass presents the possibility of a hands-free approach to interacting with a computing device. While a touchpad is integrated in the earpiece it’s certain that voice control offers more advantages.
Earlier in the year Google released a video that gives a point-of-view perspective as to how Google Glass might work. Of course, that video is clearly just a concept rendering with a lot of help from motion graphic designers and not an actual recording of what it’s like to actually use the product.
At the Google I/O 2012 conference Sergey Brin shows the video capture capabilities of Google Glass (“being able to share what you’re seeing live”) by having a group of skydivers stream real-time video from their Google Glass to the auditorium.
Will people actually wear these things? That’s an obvious question, but we already do wear odd things on our bodies. Farhad Manjoo, writing for Technology Review, places Google Glass in a long line of “functional wearable objects—think of glasses, monocles, wristwatches”. Bluetooth headsets being among the latest in that line. And there’s those earplugs with thin cables that trail down into our pockets connecting to our smartphones.
Another first-person account with Google Glass
Spencer E. Ante writes of his experiences with Google Glass, “…long-term potential. The device fit well. It was easy to snap a picture or video without taking my smartphone out of my pocket. It was cool to see the information there in front of my right eye, though a little disorienting.”
Google Glass holds the potential for seamless access to the digital world without managing a gadget.
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