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The Future of Project Glass
An anonymous reader writes "Project Glass made a big splash not too long ago at Google's annual developer conference when they showed several users falling on to the Moscone West in San Francisco. Google's pretty bent on showing us the sharing possibilities with Project Glass, but it feels like in time that technology could become a ubiquitous part of our lives. Fortunately for those of us who lack a hyperactive imagination, a short film popped up recently that can help fill in the blanks. The world created in the film was made possible by wearable tech. Games, cooking challenges, information in real-time about the person you are talking to, all made possible by the contact lenses being worn. And of course there's a darkside to the equation, the potential to hack and therefore influence the actions of others. Ultimately, it's a realistic idea of the future we all face."
Showing how life would really be with Google.
Look if they can shrink it down to something fashionable they might have something. But most people aren't going to wear something that makes them look like freakish cyborgs.
Apple will release their version as an out-of-sight contact lens (available in prescription strengths). A year or two after this happens, you'll start seeing a few others as contact lens. Apple will sue (they've of course patented this) while others claim it was totally obvious to do that, and that if Apple hadn't, someone else would've anyway.
http://vimeo.com/46304267
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
games, cooking challenges, information in real-time about the person you are talking to, all made possible by the contact lenses being worn. And of course there's a darkside to the equation, the potential to hack and therefore influence the actions of others. Ultimately, it's a realistic idea of the future we all face."
I'm not worried about hackers influencing the actions of others. They've had many, many other avenues for doing this, and for the most part they don't. The only thing anyone who's up to no good is regularly interested in is money: Either by browser hijacking or identity theft. What I AM worried about is businesses. Getting by in modern society increasingly requires that we surrender our personal information to faceless corporations who can do pretty much whatever they want with it. Want a job? Give us your Facebook password. Don't have a Facebook? That's a disqualifier. Want to buy anything? We only take credit cards here. Want to get on the internet? We'll be monitoring everything you do, storing that information forever, and selling it off to anyone who wants it. Cell phone? Same deal. Even your electric meter on your house is now phoning home with details of when you watch TV, cook dinner, etc.
I might as well not wear clothes anymore; Corporations already know everything about me, and for a pathetically small fee, so can you. Why the hell should I be modest about showing a little skin too? It's about the only thing you don't have pictures of. Wait... pictures from the full body scanners at the airport are being posted online? Sigh... nevermind...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Would you be comfortable sharing a pissoir with a member of the borg collective?
I think Google is missing the point when it tries to focus on "fashionable" side (or lack of) in the glasses.
Once it becomes useful, it has a potential to replace all displays and soon after the fashionable point becomes moot as people really want the thing. Yes it will be ugly first, but just like tablets, hands free dongles, USB sticks etc. the exterior will mature once it's useful.
But I'm afraid Google is doing this wrong, just like Bill Gates and Microsoft as they tried to introduce concept of tablets too early, when the technology was not ready.
The anime "Dennou Coil" explores the idea of a glasses-computer world pretty interestingly...
and I outed myself as born in the late 70s ;)
but it's "coooooooooool"
Here is an excellent blog post by a Valve Software employee about the potential of augmented reality. Basically, the real thing like what you see in the video above while the guy is cutting the cucumber is very hard. Things like perfect motion tracking, contextual awareness, seamless overlays are science fiction at this point. But this is a very compelling scenario and very smart people are working on it so sooner or later it's happening. Hopefully Google Glass will get us one step closer. Ironically, one of the best uses for it is real life ad block. Imagine riding down the freeway and every billboard is replaced by a giant sequoia. Or a mushroom Smurf house.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
VR has been there for quite a while, and the reason it is not widespread isn't lack of imagination but its prohibitive costs. And since Google Glass still costs an arm and a leg, it won't start any revolution.
M.T. Anderson envisioned a fairly dystopian society where everyone receives an implant at birth. While the book was a simple and fun read, the implications of such tech were definitely scary. http://www.amazon.com/Feed-M-T-Anderson/dp/0763622591 ("Feed" by M.T. Anderson). **spoiler alert** - The scary part of the story involved a character who was hacked into (more like, was given some malware) and many physical problems arose as a result.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
More and more I feel as though I'm the mark of the information age, rather than benefiting from it. Google, Facebook, 100 advertising sites, are all busy trying to gather as much information about me as possible, and not giving me any control over it. I've long been a fan of augmented reality appearing, but it's coming in an age where user control is removed, and the information sources to which it has access are filtered, censored, and engineered by others, who have their own agenda. Soon we'll all be living in a reality distortion field, carefully engineered to make sure we keep buying a certain set of products, vote a particular way, or perform certain tasks for our overlords. Media distortion already works by selective omission of information, as the information becomes closer to us and higher volume, it will work the same way. Advertisement will become pervasive, more subconscious, and much harder to avoid. Just wait until they start correlating the placement of their corporate logo in your visual field with purchasing habits. They'll optimize it for human learning: show their ad/logo in an optimal learning pattern spatially and in time, so you won't forget it. We really will be programmed consumer-bots.
How do we prevent that dystopia?
1^2=1; (-1)^2=1; 1^2=(-1)^2; 1=-1; 1=0.
That's some hipstery sugarly interface.
Pass.
The story kicks in when you realize the future is really shitty.
The Internet is a funny place. About half the comments on any blog post about Glass are comments mocking it. Yet in the next breath, the same commented will decry "lack of innovation" in the tech industry. Personally I don't need yet another way to edit my spreadsheets or unlock my phone. I'm ready for something new and consumer palatable augmented reality is it. Google might still get it wrong but I'm with them all the way for trying.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Polished piece of work... must have been quite a bit of work, but there is a major inconsistency:
For the major part of the film and during most of the interaction with the girl he is dating, the info he gathers on her is a distraction and makes him look like a dork.
Indeed, this is all information (her Facebook profile) he could have read beforehand, which is already possible and happening in the real world. As his prior gathering of info would have been rather uninteresting in the story (although it would surely have been more efficient for him achieving his goal), here it is shown happening in real time. It can only be a distraction, especially in a live conversation, and the film carries this quite well. The guy looks like an idiot.
Then, at the very end, what has been portrayed as a debilitating distraction suddenly turns into an absolute power of manipulation, out of all conventions built during the preceding scenes, and without letting the viewer know what would be the source of that power. He stops her going out of his apartment by a simple voice command, and presumably rewinds her memory to prior her discovery of damning information on him. All of this happens in the very last seconds of the film, where we are suddenly thrown in deep sci-fi territory, in a completely inconsistent way. The film concludes on that little surprise, and it is obvious that it could not have carried on after such a stunt.
So, I see this as a slick flick without much depth, attempting to piggyback on the publicity surrounding Google Glass. Clever.
If you want to go full to the future, those novels from Dan Simmons references what could be the a far future from the project glass, both from "interaction" (i.e. thinking in geometric shapes to activate some function) to going so far to become unusable (i.e. activating the wikipedia-like function to know everything in detail of what you are seeing around, at the point of becoming unpleasant to use)
Whuffie
You call that hyperactive imagination?
I know I have a pretty good imagination, but compared do that lame shit, I'm a imagination god!
Come on, this is chartered accountant level "imagination"!
It's the Apple way. Expect lawsuits to follow. Google Glass will probably be pulled from the market for copying Apple's idea.
Look at 6:35. Those are backslashes. IN PATHS.
Only Windows uses those for paths. They are escapes on every normal system.
No fuckin' thanks.
And he actually *watches* ads. Yeah right. A *developer* doesn’t have an ad blocker, *and* doesn’t switch away. Riiight.
Also a supposed developer is using a bog standard keyboard layout?
SEEMS LEGIT.
This is not believable, even for a made-up story.
Watching people watching. What video could be better?
During the date he said he worked at the SIght company and was a programmer.
The woman commented that she heard rumors they could plant ideas in people's heads, which he denied but was obviously more than true.
He also did look at her profile beforehand, he picked out the restaurant without knowing she was Veg.
I agree accessing the information distracted him and at first made him look like a dork, but it was also an interesting thing to think about - when we can have invisible access to apps any time without people knowing, wouldn't most people just access information during awkward moments? Or be tempted to look something up and be caught out by the sluggish response?
I also thought it was really interesting to have the idea that everything you did could be a game, which he had taken to the extreme and she was disgusted by.
I do agree the end was a bit abrupt but part of what I liked about the way it ended was the mystery of it - you knew he could kind of control her, but how far did that go and what did he have in mind? I also thought he was going to erase some of her memory but I don't know why I thought that.
I thought that movie overall was a much more interesting look at what is possible than the Glass videos Google put together.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The contact lense thing is never going to happen; Vernor Vinge talked with a lot of engineers about it, and it's totally infeasible. He said that if he were to rewrite Rainbow's End, he'd make it a cybernetic implant of some sort (interface with the optic nerve?), but not contact lense. There's no way to put a "retina display" on a contact lens like that.
Richard Feynman wrote that: "There's plenty of room at the bottom."
The thing is, we've excavated to the bottom since he wrote that.
http://communitywiki.org/en/RainbowsEnd
How is this +1 informative, you little shit of a troll?
Keep modding me down, assholes... I got plenty of karma...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
How is 4chan a glimpse of the future of augmented reality?
You know how when you look at things there are no goatse or similar images everywhere?
Now imagine everything you see with a floating, animated goatse (or worse) over it.
You KNOW it is inevitable.
... But i can't help thinking we'll have to buy buckets of blue pills, if we really come to this...
And, to speak of the Google Glass project, i'm not sure : people that don't wear glasses will have hard time to acustomed to this (i mean, if you don't really need it all the time, you don't wear glasses beside the few minutes the 3D film is cast in the cinema). And people that do wear glasses... Well they need special glasses so they can actually see...
And i won't even mention the need for something that actually makes feel nice or is just different (wearing glasses is not nice, so your glasses have to be : it's your face, damn it : the first thing you see, the first impression you give to others - Ok.. may be the second or third for girl meeting horny geeks, but anyway...-).
I can't see how google can succeed with those glasses, despite that nice "always on" promise (well it's nice in the first place, but see how enslaved we are to our smartphone... Do you really want to feed another addiction ?)...
As someone with mild associative prosopagnosia (google for Face Blindness), I *really* want this. Way too many people look alike to me, and I miss out on a lot for the first half of most conversations. I have to avoid names and only talk about general, common topics until I figure out who the heck I'm talking to. With a VR system, I might be able to follow the plot of more movies, too!
From a technology angle, contacts simple can't work for this application. You can't read text that's not directory in the center of your view.
See also: http://www.xkcd.com/1080/
It's funny, since that's also what all of Apple's competitors said when they unveiled the iPhone.
The contact lense thing is never going to happen
I wouldn't say never but I do think it is too early to realistically propose a practical implementation of AR contact lenses. However, barring the artistic license the video's author took, all of what he shows as far as the augmented reality goes could be accomplished with an advanced version of Google Glass, e.g., external display wearable on the face. If you read Neuromancer by William Gibson, he describes AR as being projected on lenses that are surgically implanted into the wearer's face. Also, reference Deus Ex Human Revolution for another example.
The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
Oh really? That's what the engineers were saying? Care to show me where?
You've got to get electrical power to the contact lenses, render several **millions** of pixels at least 30x a second, including accounts for the eye's saccades, which means you need to be calculating the entire display (or, transmitting these vast screenfulls straight to the eye, with sufficient bandwidth, ...) within a tiny space smaller and thinner than your fingernail. If you're streaming in the data, that means that the source of the streaming is accounting for your saccades and getting all those millions of pixels to your contact lens intact within single or double-digit milliseconds. If the contact lens itself is doing the calculating, then great -- you've got to fit all this computation within your contact lens. You're basically fantasizing that suddenly Moore's Law is going to pick up again, not just for a little while, but for decades more. The ITRS has given up on Moore's Law, why haven't you?
Why has not google, allowed developers, to purchase a 'glass' device, having been into wearable comps, for years, and owning a few different sets, it kinda pisses me off. was google at the last ISWC?
meh, anyway its not covert enuff, for me, something like a dark pair of sunglasses with a display within would be nice
I, and I am sure many many others, will not resort to being fed continuous streams of disinformation wearing gimmicky hipster devices.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I'm not crazy about this thing, only since its going end up being something of a another distraction. Maybe it will be useful in the work place..i don't know.
I remember old RPG game called Shadowrun. Where cybernetic enhanced humans could use Reality fileters, seeing world way they wanted to. Like in example: Everything/everone you see is 1970s Disco era look/outfits.
For a better idea of what could happen if you have total control over sensory overlays, there are much better examples that don't require unspecified, magical leaps in brain manipulation.