Developers Begin Hunt For a Killer App For Google Glass

holy_calamity writes "Companies large and small are working to create the first "killer app" for Google Glass, the wearable display to go on sale later this year, reports MIT Technology Review. Evernote is among large companies that got early access to prototypes and has been testing ideas for some time, but is staying quiet about its plans. Meanwhile new startups with apps for Glass are being created and funded, although uncertainty about whether consumers will embrace the technology has steered them towards commercial and industrial ideas, such as apps for for doctors and maintenance technicians."

Face labeling

[Coward Anonymous]

So I don't need to remember my best friends' names.

Sarcasm aside, pasting people's names over their heads would make Dale Carnegie warm all over. It would be useful for bosses, politicians and other people who need to fake caring about others.

Re:Programmer's App?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but now you will be able to detect syntax errors in all of your printed physical copies of your code!

My Killer App...

[VirginMary]

...would be translation, à la Google Translate. When I was in Japan on a vacation, I would have killed for something like that! Imagine having signs that you look at translated. Or menus, comics, etc.

Re:Privacy and etiquette

[timholman]

Then add the aspect that someone looking at you wearing one is "recording" or at least "analyzing" everything seen and heard and sharing it with Google or whomever is quite invasive. It is one thing to give away your own privacy... and quite another to violate the privacy of everyone around you all the time.

And please don't bother replying to this with crap like "but you are in public". It doesn't matter if you are in public or not. And quite frankly, sitting in a booth at a restaurant with a few friends, there is way more than a reasonable expectation that your conversations, your body expressions, what you are wearing and eating, etc are not shared with Big Brother or the entire world.

While I agree that wearable computing will have many drawbacks just as you describe, there will be benefits as well. It is not a black or white issue.

Consider a world where no child will be able to bully another without leaving irrefutable video evidence, or a world where no public servant will be able to act like a thug or a rude asshole without leaving a video trail. Consider a world where no supervisor will be able to sexually harass a subordinate without having video evidence sent straight to the subordinate's attorney. And for that matter, consider a world where accusations, true or false, will no longer depend on one person's word versus another's.

Most anti-social behavior takes place in private between two people (perpetrator and victim); by effectively taking away that privacy, you are exposing that perpetrator's behavior to the world. There's the old saying of "an armed society is a polite society", and when everyone is effectively "armed" with video surveillance tech that sends data straight to the cloud, the bullies and low-lifes of the world will indeed be forced to be more polite, whether they like it or not.

The world of wearable computing will indeed be very different, and there will good and bad aspects to it, just as there is with any transformative technology. But that world will be inevitable in any case, because the technology will be too cheap and useful not to be exploited in every conceivable manner.