Google Says Developers Can Now Purchase Latest Smart Glasses (bloomberg.com) 38
Google is making it easier for developers to purchase the latest version of its smart glasses, with the company saying on Tuesday that the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 is now available from some hardware resellers. From a report: "We've seen strong demand from developers and businesses who are interested in building new, helpful enterprise solutions for Glass," Google said in a blog post, adding that the new headset was already being used by people with jobs in logistics, manufacturing and field services."
Wait, why? (Score:2)
I always wanted to recycle the term "Glasshole"...
In all seriousness though... what compelling case did they make for this? It's one thing to willingly violate one's own privacy (e.g. Alexa and various IoT devices), but violating everyone else's? Sounds like an awesome way to get disinvited from parties and pretty much any other social event.
(no, really, you stay out of my car and my place until you ditch the glasses, dweeb.)
Re:Wait, why? Industry. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most companies have realized that there isn't much demand for this in the consumer space, but for work augmented reality is just getting started.
- Surgeons can have a PIP picture of what's going on along with any extra data they need, as well as operate on fake patients. [statnews.com]
- Mechanics overlaying data to debug machinery [youtube.com]
- Augmented reality for construction inspection [youtube.com]
- Using the HoloLens for accurate subsurface utility pipes augmented reality [youtube.com]
There are a lot of industries where having both hands free and being able to see live data would be a benefit.
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Shit, you're even greener than I am.
If you're looking for greybeards, try a Boeing article.
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Re:Wait, why? (Score:4, Funny)
Did you even read the post? He wants to recycle the term "Glasshole". He can't do that if he finds out there's an actual use for the things.
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They invariably all use the same example: "Let's say a car mechanic wants to reference a diagram while working on a vehicle". yadda yadda. As if car mechanics having to walk over to a book is major problem in the world right now.
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As if car mechanics:
A) Don't charge your ass by the hour.
B) Don't already know how to do shit (or yell "Hey Joe, how's this one go?" if they're green).
C) Care.
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> B) Don't already know how to do shit
You know very little about car mechanics. These days they spend a good chunk of their time looking up manuals. It was easier to disassemble a carburetor than it is to figure out what is wrong with a modern engine.
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Modern "problem solving" on cars involves plugging a computer (usually a tablet) into the car and asking it whats wrong.
They then remove said part completely and replace it with a new one. So for example the car says the alternator is not charging correctly, they remove the entire thing, voltage regulator and all and replace it with a new one. No testing if it's just the voltage regulator,
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Last time I hired a mechanic to help me fix my car, I had to follow him around with the pages I copied from the factory service manual to stop him from screwing everything up doing it the way he was taught, instead of the way that the engineers designed it to be done.
And luckily I stopped him from doing it the old-fashioned way, because he'd have "saved" me $7 on a disposable bolt and grommet which have meant I'd have had to take the car to a shop and get the alignment redone; in a vehicle that is designed
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Good mechanics only reference the diagram once in a while because for the most part, the equipment is the same on every vehicle. The diagram reference is just to figure out where the end points are and what might actually interfere with the work and need to be removed as well. And a
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OK, how about let's say, camera or no camera in the glasses. Augmented reality, why does that need a camera in the glasses. Really their primacy function should be as a screen for a smart phone without a screen but with the camera.
So two versions one with camera hugely privacy invasive of others and one without the camera. Need a camera pull the phone out of your pocket or you can clip a camera onto the glasses with a cable running back to the smart phone.
Next thing though is super tricky with wider adopt
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...by law it should be the entity who put the image on the screen and those costs could be stupendous...
Woah, there, cowpoke, W T F are you talking about?
Whose workplace is it? That is whose insurance pays.
Goodness.
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The camera is necessary to get new AR functionality to work. The computer needs to know where to overlay the images.
Even if they went the style of VR headsets with IR cameras, a camera is still involved.
Most of your fears are overblown. We use imaging in many life-critical services already. Is an arthroscopic surgery display going to have pop-up ads? Or a fighter pilot dismissing ads on their targeting display?
There will be people want free versions where they are the product, but Google is focused on busin
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It's one thing to willingly violate one's own privacy (e.g. Alexa and various IoT devices), but violating everyone else's?
That high horse you're on, did you by any chance name it hyperbole? Got any evidence of this "privacy invasion" of other people? Maybe if you find these privacy invading people you can take a photo of them with your phone for evidence.
AR is a thing, it is heavily in active development through multiple companies. It's quite telling that you're more concerned about recycling the term Glasshole than you're concerned about what the product actually does, and even more telling that you're worried about some dude
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In a factory or warehouse etc. where AR is going to be used the most and this guy has never set foot.
My sister works with logistics software systems and they currently use voice prompts to tell the forklift drivers to what to pick up.
They would jump at switching to AR, I imagine it would be faster for the drivers to receive and act on visual cues than to listen to a computerised voice droning in their ear. The drivers as well, they are paid bonuses for how much t
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Fundamentally, it is no different from simply being in someone else's field of vision and they happen to remember seeing you. If you are so narcissistic as to to presume that they can't possibly have any other agenda behind wearing these but to infringe on your privacy, that's ultimately your own problem.
It is in principle absolutely no different than judging a person's character based on some superficial detail that is objectively immaterial to what a person may be actually like. "Oh, look, that pers
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I would love to have these at work. When you are doing lab work, its really easy to miss recording some detail.
Last year a group of us were installing a radio telescope at the south pole. At some point while we were working a new noise source appeared, but we didn't know until later data analysis. Around the same time some building electrical work was done. Unfortunately we don't know if those happened at the same time - but if we had been recording we could have checked.
Sounds specialized, but its a sp
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What sort of hellish social scene are you in that you can't bring your voltmeter? Who doesn't bring a voltmeter??!
Glasses + new rand() picture printing (Score:1)
More compelling tech from Bosch (Score:3)
Imagine combining this with the Echo (Alexa) frames.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech... [ieee.org]
Rather than projecting an image onto the lenses of the glasses themselves, the Bosch “Light Drive” uses a tiny microelectromechanical mirror array to direct a trio of lasers (red, green, and blue) across a transparent holographic element embedded in the right lens, which then reflects the light into your right eye and paints an image directly onto your retina. . .
When fully integrated, glasses with Bosch’s light drive embedded in the frame look almost completely normal, with just a slight bulge on the inside. Bosch also emphasizes the brightness of the display (it’s easily visible in bright sunlight), its power efficiency (you get a full day of use with a 350mAh battery embedded in the frame), and how they’ve been able to bring stray light reflections down to almost nothing.
That last point is particularly important: the lenses are transparent, and the lack of stray reflections means that nobody looking at the glasses can tell that the display is active. It also means you can use the glasses while driving at night, which can be a challenge for other systems. Bosch worked very, very hard to develop a system using a holographic film with this level of optical transparency in the lens, and it’s something that sets the Smartglasses apart.
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It's from Spectrum, the newsletter of the IEEE, other than being an IEEE member and a frequent user of Bosch hardware over the years I have no association with the product. Just looks like better tech than what Google was using (although I admittedly didn't look at what they're currently doing with the new release yet.)
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I don't trust an eye laser from Bosch not to fry my retina. Bosch used to be the epitome of quality, now they make cheap crap and sell their name to China. They were also part of German diesel cheating, which couldn't have been done without them.
Musicians? (Score:2)
I wonder about the usability of this for musicians. A little display showing the sheet music or lead sheet instead of a stand and a tablet or a stack of paper...
Or for that matter, folks giving speeches. Maybe a teleprompter type of application would be useful.
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It would be great for some of the road crew, too. Maybe all of them, so people who are in a noisy spot can send a text to everybody's screen instead of just yelling into a radio and hoping somebody heard them
again? (Score:3)
This again?
I don't think the devs that bought the hype a couple of years ago and paid $1500 for the dev kit will be keen to pay for the NEXT ITERATION of a failed product.
Why bother with whimsical google? You don't know if they will be supporting the product next week.
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A bigger problem IMO is that you still don't have full access; it runs android.
For a lot of the use cases I'd want to target, that's just not going to be acceptable. Android is great for appy apps for appers, but for serious tools you need more control over the device to justify sinking the development effort into it. Which costs a lot more than the hardware.
It isn't for appy appers, but it still has Android. So it will not meet their engagement metrics, and it will be cancelled quick. If they gave full acc
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As a software developer, I try to stay clear of anything developed by Google.
Right now I have to support a project made in Tensorflow. It's a nightmare. The API, already in version 2, keeps introducing breaking changes from one release to the next. The app you wrote last month is most likely not to work if you upgrade the Tensorflow library.
I know Google has all the cash in the world for the best developers, but unfortunately my company doesn't and can't justify spending weeks chasing bugs or breaking chang
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The funny part is that in the Go language they basically make it so there are no external dependencies, and you don't ride on top of the upstream changes, you import a snapshot into your code, and then you mostly never update it unless there is a security problem or some other reason under your control.
Their Java people are as awful as anybody's, but their infrastructure people don't tolerate it or use that stuff.
I build products with Go and I love it, but the only part I use from Google is the language dis
Fool me oncey th... (Score:1)
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Glass still alive? (Score:1)
I thought this had already been killed off ages ago?
"For developers" (Score:2)
Why can you only buy it "for developers"? Is it somehow unfinished and unsuitable for real use?