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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.'"
A mugger attractant that's more visible than white Apple earphones.
They should attach a little handle to the nose bridge so people can easily adjust the fixed focus lenses.
Research dating back more than a century helps explain this. In the 1890s, the renowned psychologist George Stratton constructed special glasses that caused him to see the world upside down. The remarkable thing was that after a few days, Stratton’s brain adapted to his topsy-turvy worldview, and he no longer saw the world upside down. You might guess that when he took the inverting glasses off, he would start seeing things upside down again. He didn’t. But his vision had what he called, with Victorian charm, “a bewildering air.”
Also, for more info on Stratton's experiment check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_M._Stratton#Wundt.27s_lab_and_the_inverted-glasses_experiments
Research dating back more than a century helps explain this. In the 1890s, the renowned psychologist George Stratton constructed special glasses that caused him to see the world upside down. The remarkable thing was that after a few days, Stratton’s brain adapted to his topsy-turvy worldview, and he no longer saw the world upside down. You might guess that when he took the inverting glasses off, he would start seeing things upside down again. He didn’t. But his vision had what he called, with Victorian charm, “a bewildering air.”
Through experimentation, I’ve found that the required readjustment period is, strangely, shorter when my brain has adapted to a dramatic distortion, say, reversing things from left to right or turning them upside down. When the distortion is subtle—a slightly offset viewpoint, for example—it takes less time to adapt but longer to recover.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
But people usually don't run around holding their smartphone in recording position because it would be hard and look siilly. Google Glass is always in recording position by default, thus removing an important barrier to have it constantly recording. And there will surely be an incentive to have the camera always on (so that virtual objects can be put in the right place, or you can get extra information on what you currently see.
Imagine a simple application which uses face recognition and image search to find out the name of the person you are currently looking at, and displaying it close to that person. An immensely useful application if you tend to forget people's names, or have problems recognizing people. However it means that (a) the wearer will immediately know the names of all people they see (as long as they are stored in the system), thus reducing your privacy relative to the wearer, and (b) Google will know the position of any person the wearer sees and the system can identify, even if that person has never used anything associated Google in their lifetime, thus reducing your privacy against Google. And if you ask how that image gets into the Google system: For example, some friend of him has stored a photo on Picasa.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
That's a pretty bid assertion. How does it feel to be old enough where you need to keep up excuses about young people so you don't have to think about your age?
Going into wearable computing, especially glass, and not knowing of Steve Mann would be like looking into fast food burgers and not stumbling upon McDonalds*
it all old dead tree stuff? really?
http://eyetap.org/publications/index.html
As if the guy who has been wearing computer glasses, he built, wouldn't use digital storage.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
TFA:
The Target Acquisition and Designation Sights, Pilot Night Vision System (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_Acquisition_and_Designation_System,_Pilot_Night_Vision_System) for the AH-64 uses a single eye piece. So it seems like this type of thing can and has been done (and this one is pretty cool, it tracks the head movements of the pilot and points the 50 caliber cannon where he/she looks). The single eye piece doesn't seem to cause problems for the pilots that use these systems. Not saying I am interested in Google Glass, but they should have been able to figure out the problem discussed in the TFA.
GENERATION 27: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
no, I don't doubt it. Maybe you should explain what gathering public data and making it available is a bad thing?
The singkle best defence the people in the US have against abuse from police is cameras.
The only people who shoud be conerned are 'UFO' watchers, and conspiracy theorist. Becasue the expansion of cameras is killing that nonsense.
Imagine looking at a constable and being able to bring up everything the public record has on him, almost instantly.
Imagine walking into a crowded room, "tagging" the best looking person there, and then doing an in-depth query on their back story. The next time you see them, appropriate info is fed to you to be able to act like you're someone they should know and like.
Both things have positive points, but can be used for great evil as well as great good.
Now imagine if Google mounted a laser on the glasses....
I don't know, some of us are very sensitive to these sorts of things, while others not so much.
People still think I'm making stuff up when I say "shakey cam movies make me vomit", or Portal 2 for that matter. Most people have absolutely no problems, a few feel mildly queasy. But some of us get physically ill. Shakey cam movies continue, and don't announce themselves as such until AFTER they've taken your money, and some video game companies still restrict FOV options or don't provide ways of disabling "head bob", and other disorienting effects. They simply don't believe there's a problem, and their testers aren't picking up (perhaps being desensitized to it from long hours anyway).
I don't think they missed anything "fundamental", but it would not surprise me at all if they missed something significant but outside their test group.
It doesn't matter. We have TWO articles on Slashdot in the last couple hours about people re-engineering the wheel and ignoring everything that came before. All these hotshot idiots with their attempts to get into orbit "their own way" are no different than Google Glass doing it "their own way" and ignoring all prior art, prior study, and prior expertise.
I've met Steve Mann. He's misunderstood, horribly geeky and incredibly brilliant. I was shocked that Google hadn't consulted with him first before they decided to chunk together their own wearable HUD. Mann has been doing this for longer than Google has existed. He is a walking laboratory and he knows, from experience, what the fuck he is talking about.
I'm sure Von Braun is laughing from his grave at these space jockeys, saying "You did WHAT?" Similarly Mann is shaking his head at Google.