A Year With Google Glass 292
Mat Honan, a writer for Wired, has posted an article detailing his takeaways from long-term use of Google Glass. He makes particular note of how the device's form factor is much more offensive to others than the actual technology contained within. For example, his wife wanted him to take pictures and shoot videos of their child's birth, but not with Glass: "It was the way Glass looked. It might let me remain in the moment, but my wife worried it would take her out of it, that its mere presence would be distracting because it’s so goddamn weird-looking." It can get unpleasant when strangers are involved: "People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. ... Wearing Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the “explorer” program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face." Honan found most of the default software to be handy, but the third-party software to be lacking. Glass also facilitated his unintentional switch from an iPhone to an Android phone. He ends the piece by warning of the inevitability of devices like Glass: "The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face. We need to think about it and be ready for it in a way we weren’t with smartphones."
Re:True quote (Score:3, Informative)
The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face.
No, it's not going to be on *MY* face.
Re:"Think of the children" (Score:4, Informative)
Once it gets into the hands of the pubescents out there, any social norms may be thrown out the window.
This reminds me of what happens in Baxter and Clarke's The Light of Other Days [amazon.co.uk].
--- SPOILER ALERT ---
Long story short, access to cheap wormhole camera technology becomes ubiquitous. Everyone can see (and thanks to lip-reading software and the like, hear) anything happening anywhere. Among all the other societal upheavals, there's a passing mention of a couple of teenagers playing hide the sausage on a sidewalk bench in the middle of the day and no-one (by that point) caring.
Anyone who still cares for their privacy in this society wears a light-blocking cloak and communicates by touch in light-tight rooms.
By the end, they manage to send wormcams back in time, discovering (among other things) that the "first" single-celled organisms where in fact left behind by a race of intelligent crustaceans that evolved billions of years ago and were later wiped out by some kind of environmental disaster, IIRC. And yes, they did get a look at the crucifixion, but there were so many wormcams swallowing light in the sky that day that the sky grew dark and at the moment of Jesus's death, interference was too great to get a clear view.
Good book.
Re:If you ever talk to someone wearing Google Glas (Score:2, Informative)
Or, as a Glass user myself, I would simply look at you oddly and then feel sorry for the fact that you don't understand the technology, how it works, how you actually use it, and that you're so entrenched in your hatred for the device that you're willing to take hyperbole into the physical realm.
I don't understand the hate on this site. Maybe its Microsoft and Apple shills trying to drum up negativity about the device. Where I'm from (East Coast) people were excited to see it. When I was down in Miami with my company for part of an art exhibit that contained Glass, people were excited to see it. I can count on the number of thumbs on my right hand the number of people that were cantankerous and that was a guy who hated Google because he personally hated Sergey.
Maybe I just don't live in the right area to see all of this hate... Also, I seem to remember a post about an early iDevice that played music...