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Adjusting to Google Glass May Be Hard
New submitter fluxgate writes "Steve Mann (whom you might know for his having pioneered wearable computing as a grad student at MIT back in the 1990s) writes in IEEE Spectrum magazine about his decades of experience with computerized eyeware. His article warns that Google Glass hasn't been properly engineered to avoid creating disorientating effects and significant eyestrain. While it's hard to imagine that Google has missed something fundamental here, Mann convincingly describes why Google Glass users might experience serious problems. Quoting: 'The very first wearable computer system I put together showed me real-time video on a helmet-mounted display. The camera was situated close to one eye, but it didn’t have quite the same viewpoint. The slight misalignment seemed unimportant at the time, but it produced some strange and unpleasant results. And those troubling effects persisted long after I took the gear off. That’s because my brain had adjusted to an unnatural view, so it took a while to readjust to normal vision. ... Google Glass and several similarly configured systems now in development suffer from another problem I learned about 30 years ago that arises from the basic asymmetry of their designs, in which the wearer views the display through only one eye. These systems all contain lenses that make the display appear to hover in space, farther away than it really is. That’s because the human eye can’t focus on something that’s only a couple of centimeters away, so an optical correction is needed. But what Google and other companies are doing—using fixed-focus lenses to make the display appear farther away—is not good.'"
Hard to imagine Google missing something fundamental? No it's not. Sure, Google's business is powered by search, but consider the age of the papers they'd have had to read to know about Steve Mann's work. 30 years? The engineers fooling with Google Glass are younger than the papers in question. :P Which means they suffer from that peculiar brand of cognitive myopia that afflicts their whole generation: if it's not digital, it doesn't exist.
Those papers are no doubt available solely in dead tree form. Or possibly they're available through Excelsior in a crappy scanned form for outrageous fees, which again, these young engineers aren't going to even consider. Who pays for digital information like that? Nobody. (If you're a Google engineer, that's what you think.)
In any case, it wouldn't be the first time a wheel was reinvented badly when it came to electronic gadgets. Between engineering arrogance (nobody could possibly have thought of this brilliant idea before I did) and corporate policy (by all that's holy, do NOT do a patent search on the subject), it happens frequently. Nor is that likely to stop any time soon. Google's stated goal of cataloging all the world's information is a long way from being achieved, especially when there are plenty of forces trying to prevent the digitization of that information.