Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.
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.
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/