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Google X Display Boss: Smartphones, Tablets, Apps Are "Mind-Numbing"
curtwoodward writes "Stop drooling over that new iPhone. Put away the fancy tablet. Because the real hardcore nerds find that stuff 'boring' and 'mind-numbing,' says Mary Lou Jepsen, head of the display division at secretive R&D lab Google X. At MIT's EmTech conference, Jepsen said the next generation of 'moonshot' tech is much more exciting and interesting. That includes Google X projects like the driverless car, Project Loon, a stratospheric balloon-based wireless network, and Google Glass."
You had me until Google Glass. Until talking to yourself without a cell phone to your ear is socially acceptable, it's a niche gadget.
Another manager says their product is really exciting and interesting and everything else boring.
She's right about everyone else, but Google Glass is also boring.
boob to the boob tube
blog to the blogtewb
huh?
I looked at cnet.com a couple weeks ago and the whole site, almost every image on every story, was just a column of rectangle slabs, "mobile," "mobile," "mobile," and nothing else. All minor variations on the same thing. I'm sick of it.
It looks like she might have overlooked the glaringly obvious fact that the entire reason why Google X and her job position exist is because of "mind numbing" technologies that serve as ad serving platforms that get in revenue for Google. Ask her to get driverless cars, balloons and a headpiece to start generating income!
Are they cloning Sergei Brin?
I'm sure glad, as a nerd, that Ms. Jepsen took the time to inform me there are projects in the works that I can get really excited about without actually telling me what they are, just after making condescending remarks aimed at consumer electronics and just before extolling the genius of Google's new cell phone that holds itself up to your face. Because I am a nerd these things really appeal to me. Thank you Ms. Jepsen and Mr. Woodward, you guys are really nerds like me.
When it comes to smartphone apps, I couldn't agree more.
She seems to be telling us that when technology finally becomes useful enough to be mainstream, it's boring. OK, fine, I can accept that, somewhat. But the point of developing something new and "exciting" is so that someday it will be mundane and boring. And when Google spends all their time on the new, that makes more room for others to innovate with the "old".
The latest rectangular-slate form-factor toy pushing a few more pixels isn't changing the world in a substantive way. Arguably, such things aren't changing the world any more than the proverbial sugar water a la Steve Jobs.
But, those are the kinds of things that are tangible to the average consumer. As soon as the average person can go out and purchase Google self-driving technology for their personal vehicle, you'll see the appropriate level of excitement.
She has a point that it may be boring for intelligent engineers to work on yet another new, incrementally better iteration of a smartphone, tablet or laptop. Many consumerss, me included are not that in awe anymore of a somewhat better new generation of iphone, galaxy, ipad, thin laptop etc. They were very good before and are now a bit better. Hence her research might be interesting, but I am not sure that Google Glass will be the answer. Now I am not as cynical as many on /. - I think that moving towards near-invisible wearable computing is a very exciting next step and I am curious what she and companies like Apple will eventually come up with.
I don't know if I should be insulted or depressed that someone can bandy about "moonshot tech" in this day and age and not be referring to space exploration.
A laptop is a TOOL. A cellphone is a TOOL. When you need them to be the entertainment in themselves you have issues.
“I interviewed a month ago a recent college graduate from Stanford—a mechanical engineering degree. She was already on her third cellphone or laptop and bored out of her mind,” Jepsen said. “She graduated in 2010. I think it gets depressing. It was so exciting three years ago.”
Three years ago your cellphone and laptop were "exciting", but now they are "boring"? If you are talking about building them - maybe. But using them? If the form factor of your computers and communication devices are boring you "out of your mind", maybe that's your problem more than the devices'.
Lots of smart people without focus producing nothing of much impact
Is she related to Carly Rae?
Yeah, tablets and apps are not as impressive as people think. That said, google has given birth to some absolute duds.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
It sounds like this Jepsen is more than a bit
full of her own importance in the world and that she
lacks a basic understanding of what actually makes
something interesting or boring.
Even a humble flash drive can be extremely
interesting.
If you don't believe me, ask Edward Snowden.
But more to the point, the world doesn't need more gadgets.
The world needs sources of energy which will not destroy the
only place humans have to live in the process of either harvesting
or using that source of energy. Compared to this, anything Google
is working on is a child's toy.
All that other stuff is bullshit. Once you combine teledildonics with direct brain stimulation, it's game over man.
What utter bull sack! I'll have you know I hand craft the kerning of my fonts with painstaking attention to detail, and sculpt those myriad of pixel perfect displays and animations a single frame at a time. When it all comes together right in some yuppie's eye, IT IS Exhilarating!
The only thing more exciting than building those big, beautiful, almost intuitive, displays is making the tools one uses to make them:
A P fucking I's!!!
Why, I once met a guy who helped standardize IEEE 1364...
That's Verilog to you philistines.
He was a veritable volcano of vivacity whose smile beamed with the brilliance of a billion bacon breakfasts.
The further down you go the more excited the turtles are!
Until you get us gravity-defying skateboards, I am not impressed. Now, get back to work, troll some more.
Visicalc was invented in 1979.
It was written by two hard-working geniuses who busted ass for months and months to get it to work. Visicalc changed the world.
The reason they were able to write this software is because the Apple II had the tools to do so. If you had an Apple II, you had everything you needed to develop new software for it. Same goes for the PC.
Mobile phones and tablets have no such tools. They are locked, proprietary devices forbidden to developers. They use locked, proprietary programming languages, obscure, flabby and inconsistent APIs and cannot communicate with anything but the "cloud."
They also suck ass as computing platforms. Their operating systems are shit packed on top of shit, and their hardware is flimsy plastic shit to go with it.
Mobile phones and tablets are fiddly little distraction machines that function as brightly colored noisy little pets. They are nothing more than over-engineered tamogatchis. They are useless for real work, especially compared to open platforms like the PC. At best, they are a good place to store phone numbers. They also give teenage girls a way to drain their parents' wallets by sending nonsense to each other 24 hours a day for $1500 a megabyte.
The "post-PC world" is a marketing slogan designed to get you back on the upgrade treadmill and wanting the next version of the device you bought last month.
The difference is mobile devices cannot replace or even occasionally substitute for the PC, because there is no mobile device software that even remotely compares to the world-changing technology the PC made possible.
What was the last "visicalc-level" software title developed from scratch? I'm going to say the last of them debuted in the mid 1990s. With the exception of FOSS, there hasn't been shit developed for any platform since. It's like the fucking software industry was unplugged in the late 90s. (Gee, I wonder why?)
The worst part is, anyone in their teens or early 20s right now is so distracted by Unity and HTML5 and Haskell and all the other flavors of proprietary dumbfuckery that they will never learn why things work on a computer.
And that's a fucking shame.
Tablets and smartphones stopped being exciting 3-4 years ago. Now they are reliable, established tech with minor improvements every year.
Every major technology goes through the same cycle; they start off as innovative, exciting and new (and scary to some), then they gradually improve and become reliable and established. Once your mother has startet using them, they are most definitely no longer exciting.
Luckily we live in an age where there's always another exciting new thing around the corner.
I don't want electronics in my car... but I'm ok with increased gas mileage.
I don't want a computer to control my car... but I'm ok with Cruise Control.
I don't want a ticket when I text & drive.. but I'm gonna sue that MF who hit me while text'in.
I don't want to complain.. but I've got nothing better to do.
While I'm certainly one of those people that find it "mind-numbing" that someone would want to use tiny screens, tiny fiddly on-tiny-screen change-mode-every-3-keycaresses (can't make myself call *that* key-"stroke"s), wasting an entire hand holding the device, barely-past-modem-era-connections, modem-era-connection-reliability, etc.. in the first place, when large-screen laptops with decent keyboards and 100Mbit/s to the home and office are readily available, it can also be said that the only thing to be gained, in my view, the "mobile" aspect, reminds us of the *other* meaning of mind-numbing: It will numb your mind to be "online" and "reachable" all the time, because your mind *requires* being "offline" for its normal functioning.
https://neurowiki2012.wikispaces.com/Default+Mode+Network
Now.. driverless cars may be a solution.. give you time to daydream so your DMN can function properly, unless you spend the time "being online".. But I'm not charmed by any of the other "moonshots", either. For Glass, it's a matter of being able to take it off, and not becoming a Gargoyle. And Loon.. Are "rural areas" then to be Google's "persplex boxes" as in
http://www.piers.org/piersonline/vol1/2k5hz_p638.pdf
to see if rural folk's albumin will leak out of their brains, as it did in the rats (sarcasm, but not quite crazy)?
-f
Google glass is possibly the worst version of a heads up display i have seen. I love the idea of a hud but i wouldn't buy glass if it was $50. Give me a proper set of glasses that fold, with 2 screens for 3d, display in the middle of each eye for better augmented reality/comfort and clear and see through (we have this technology), oh and if you can squeeze it in, some kind of 'leap motion' like control input, so you can touch/gesture control the virtual image.
Rocket Surgeon.
I just want my phone, tablet, and i5 desktop to act as a cluster and share cycles and memory. This seems easier than most of Google's moonshots.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Autonomous solar power airships are a much better idea. Navigation would be easier and you end a lot of other driving problems on the way.
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
These are all really old ideas waiting for technology to make them possible, i.e. driverless cars and 'wearable' computers. Whether they're ever going to be practical or useful is another matter. The 'computer embedded in glasses' concept is something I've seen people working on 10 years ago, but even then I wondered, "who in their right mind would want to wear glasses unless they absolutely had to?"
I have to wear glasses - I can't drive, read, or carry out a host of other daily tasks without them. I've grown used to them (to a degree) but still hate wearing them for a variety of reasons:
1) Fragility: The only frames I haven't broken were made of titanium, but even then I've broken the lenses several times. Something perched on the front of your face is exposed to the elements - wind, branches and other obstacles, and even toddlers (who seem fascinated by glasses and like nothing better than unexpectedly whipping them off your face and throwing them on the ground). And plastic lenses is not an option - they're much lighter, but they will become scratched no matter how careful you are.
2) Weight. Any amount of weight sitting on the bridge of your nose is noticeable and irritating. The longer you wear them, the more irritating it becomes. And for reasons outlined above, plastic lenses are not an option (even wiping with an ordinary cloth causes tiny scratches from small particles of dust/grit), so you need the heavier, but tougher glass. Would I want to add a computer? And screen? And batteries? No way!
3) Cleaning. Glasses are a dirt magnet. Dust is readily drawn to the lenses. And flaking skin cells. And hair. Your skin constantly produces oils and sweat that readily spread to the frames. And environmental factors such as rain and wind-blown dust can quickly obscure your vision. Constant cleaning, i.e. many times a day, is a fact of life for glasses.
4) Skin irritation. For many eczema sufferers, anything pressing against your skin for an extended period causes swelling, itching, or splitting skin. I'm vulnerable to this where the frame comes in contact with my ears, and it's a constant source of irritation (especially in the peak of allergy seasons).
Would anyone willing expose themselves to this? Is this where you want to keep your 'wearable device'? Speaking as someone who has to wear glasses, it seems completely insane.
Instead of working on mind-numbing and boring smartphones and pads, I'll work for balloon-based wireless transponders for those mind-numbing and boring gadgets.
Hurray!
Bring it on Google! And stop just talking about it.
And no, I don't mean useless crap like the current Google Glass or copycat mobile OSes. Bring on the interesting stuff! We're waiting...
This "Frontiers in Science" article was bought to you with a grant from Google. We use corporate grants to provide you with unbiased, ad-free stories and so that we don't have to constantly beg you for money. ... except twice a year for two to three months at a time.
Google+ is boring and a deserted ghost town. Google glass is boring. (Has anyone come up with an application for it other than maps/geolocation yet?) Driverless cars are not practicable, but will be an interesting exercise in dynamic systems. (What happens when all cars in a line react to the same event and introduce non-linear dynamic chaos into the system? Probably worse than pile-ups we have now, because at least today's pileups stop the cars from moving.) Targeted ads are boring. (When I search for the band The Police, I am not interested in targeted ads for law enforcement degrees from diploma mills.) Google's new programming language is boring, because I can't even remember its name and I don't think anyone is using it.
Oh, I know - ChromeOS is exciting! It's a crippled Linux that violates the spirit of open software by creating a "cloud" based walled garden to take away users' freedoms! But it's cheap, so it gets a lot of news media coverage. None of the coverage mentions the freedom that ChromeOS takes away, and how it exploits open source software to produce something that is the antithesis of the spirit of open source software. Yeah, let's stick to boring.
I'll believe "Google Glass" is actually something when more than just a select few can actually _buy_ it. I've been hearing about Google Glass for so many months and have to see anything I can actually buy I could puke.
Google Glass is see-thru vaporware...
And with the new release of Google Opiate, your mind can be numbed like it never has before.
Piss off, honey. I am the only real hardcore nerd here. If I like it, it's cool.
And all meetings start when I get there and are over when I leave.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
The point here is to realize R&D is needed in more applications. Good that she is trying to open up the field. Might I suggest interest in hyperloop transit. I know I am tired of sitting in traffic.
Should say "real hardcore nerds who coincidentally also have access to tons of capital." Not many are so lucky. It doesn't strip them of hardcore nerd status.
"Love heals scars love left." -- Henry Rollins
Humans will never be able to drive in the winter, because the windshield will be covered in snow so you can't see out. I'm not seeing how this problem is any harder for a machine, especially since you already rely on mechanical wipers to solve it for you.
It's not the snow on the car that is the biggest problem. It's the snow on the road that obscures lane markings, signs, and road edges. Buried curbs can be detected using snow-penetrating radar, but non-raised features like painted-on markings are a difficult problem.
Does that mean Pixel Qi dead?
I've been looking forward for years for their displays to go mainstream.