Slashdot Mirror
A Year With Google Glass
Mat Honan, a writer for Wired, has posted an article detailing his takeaways from long-term use of Google Glass. He makes particular note of how the device's form factor is much more offensive to others than the actual technology contained within. For example, his wife wanted him to take pictures and shoot videos of their child's birth, but not with Glass: "It was the way Glass looked. It might let me remain in the moment, but my wife worried it would take her out of it, that its mere presence would be distracting because it’s so goddamn weird-looking." It can get unpleasant when strangers are involved: "People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. ... Wearing Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the “explorer” program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face." Honan found most of the default software to be handy, but the third-party software to be lacking. Glass also facilitated his unintentional switch from an iPhone to an Android phone. He ends the piece by warning of the inevitability of devices like Glass: "The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face. We need to think about it and be ready for it in a way we weren’t with smartphones."
"The future is on its way, and it is going to be on your face. We need to think about it and be ready for it in a way we weren’t with smartphones."
You can't fight time.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
No dumbass, we just don't like you aiming a camera and microphone at everywhere you look.
"I'm going to wear these obnoxiously ugly glasses that happen to record everything I see. People object to my presence, but that's fine, because I totally spent one and a half thousand dollars on this accessory that marks me as a smug upper-class, privacy-invading nerd. Google Glass is here to stay (and don't forget I was into it before it was cool)."
When I wear it at work, co-workers sometimes call me an asshole. My co-workers at WIRED, where we’re bravely facing the future, find it weird. People stop by and cyber-bully me at my standing treadmill desk.
You've got a standing treadmill desk, and it's GLASS people make fun of?
This guy's already living the douche life.
The ads are more relevant to his interests than ever before!
Trolling is a art,
Go f*ck yourself Matt Honan. I should invent a "Glasshole Killer" hat which projects a bright IR light onto the user's face effectively blinding the device's recording capabilities.
It will take hell or hight water to get "Glass" onto the people that spend god awful amounts of money on fashion and tech toys. The glasses are ugly looking AND imply that you're being recorded. There is resistance for a reason. The glasses need to be completely innocuous for this entire fashion/tech concept to take off. "
>> Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the “explorer” program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion
Um...OK. Self esteem problem much?
>> his wife wanted him to take pictures and shoot videos of their child's birth, but not with Glass
Maybe she's one of those "passive aggressive" weirdos who doesn't want video of their private parts uploaded to the Internet. Good luck in divorce court, man.
It will work out fine for all the people that really love technology but don't actually have any real life friends. You know who I'm talking about. No friends = no one to object.
Personally, I'm offended if one of my friends spends more than a few seconds staring at a smartphone in a social situation. Its OK if they excuse themselves from the group, but it isn't if they are sitting with other people and mentally somewhere else. Google glass is the same, but maybe worse because you think they are there but aren't.
I think it's premature to assume the ubiquity of google glass. The Nokia Ngage failed, largely due to the highly negative social factor of holding an odd large plastic brick to your head in order to talk ("sidetalking").
And it's not "inevitable". Just hip fanboi hype.
Problem with Goggle Glass is that it's in your face. It's conspicuous. It may not be recording at the moment, but you don't know that for sure.
It's like, if I'm walking around holding a cellphone in hand with arm stretched out and pointed in such a way that it looks like I'm recording a video, and then started engaging in conversation with people while still in that pose, but now the camera is pointed directly at them, people will get uncomfortable. (unless of course the person I"m talking to wants to be recorded). It's in their face. It's annoying.
Google Glass is kind of like that, all the time.
Another example: you might be walking around in a city where it's perfectly legal to carry firearms in public if you have a permit. And say it's a shall-issue state where anyone can get a permit if they don't have criminal records, so a large percentage of the population does. Now you're in a crowded city area, and you *know* many of the people are packing concealed heat. But it rarely crosses your mind because it's not in your face. Out of sight, out of mind.
But suppose instead of concealed carry, people are walking around openly wearing their Glocks on their hips, AK-47s slung across their shoulder and so on. This is in your face. Your reaction is going to be much different.
(or at least, frames which look ordinary) then you'll see wider adoption, especially among people who already have prescription lenses. You'd go to LensCrafters or whoever, choose one of the Google-Glass-compatible frames from whatever manufactures are partnered with Google (with bluetooth, speaker, and camera embedded in temple pieces), get your custom lenses ground and overlayed with a transparent embedded heads-up-display, and voila.
I'm guessing that the hardware isn't currently there, or at least not in such a small size, but soon probably.
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Personally, I don't give a fig what they look like. They don't look particularly odd to me at all, and I would no sooner welcome someone pointing a cam-corder or smartphone at me for no apparent reason (or especially if the apparent reason was that I was giving birth at the time -- sheesh!)
"Class divide"? Please. $1500 is not a lot of money for plenty of hobbies that are popular among most classes that can scrape together any amount of money at all. How far will $1500 go if you are into working on cars? Riding bicycles? Doing anything that requires a reasonably capable personal computer?
Maybe Google Glass isn't what is turning people off of Google Glass wearers. Maybe it is the wearers that are turning people off Google Glass.
There is a Black Mirror (tv show) episode which portrays this scenario. It's a frightening idea.
Dustin - A different story...
..just hold your own smartphone up by your face, as if you're recording them while you talk to them. Whether you are recording or not, I can't imagine the Glasshole won't be slightly annoyed by what you are doing.
Imagine you're using your laptop in the subway, some guy wearing Glass sits next to you, peeks at your screen for 1 second, and starts analyzing what you're working on, using his Glass.
PS: I wonder what Glass would have looked like if a human's ears were not located at approximately the same height as their eyes.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
That's planned for next year when availability is increased. It's the only thing that's kept me from getting them. For those places that don't allow it, I'll keep an extra, normal pair of glasses in my car, similar to what I already do with sunglasses.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
I've had Glass for a couple of weeks and the experience has been interesting. I live in a area w/ about 250,000 people and there are probably fewer than five (including myself) who have Glass. I've been wearing them around town to see how people react to them and so far it seems pretty positive. Some people just kind of look at me oddly, but many people recognize what it is and ask me what the experience is like. This is what I tell them: Sure, it's great to have access to (most) of the Google Now functionality without needing to look down at my phone. Text messages delivered to the HUD is handy, as is responding to them via voice. For the most part though, there isn't a whole lot these do yet, certainly not enough for average consumers to care. That said, the potential for business/industrial use is HUGE. Most people's first experience with Glass won't be as a consumer item, but rather as something they use for work. Think construction workers, or people who work in hospitals or laboratories. Many people will be exposed to these via applications in the work environment. You, as a consumer, may not be very interested in Glass, but there are many businesses who want/need something like this for their workforce.
It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the “explorer” program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face.
Really? You point a video recording device at people and you think they are getting annoyed because you are so elite? That comment says way more about the author of the article than it does about the people he interacted with.
Once it gets into the hands of the pubescents out there, any social norms may be thrown out the window.
This reminds me of what happens in Baxter and Clarke's The Light of Other Days.
--- SPOILER ALERT ---
Long story short, access to cheap wormhole camera technology becomes ubiquitous. Everyone can see (and thanks to lip-reading software and the like, hear) anything happening anywhere. Among all the other societal upheavals, there's a passing mention of a couple of teenagers playing hide the sausage on a sidewalk bench in the middle of the day and no-one (by that point) caring.
Anyone who still cares for their privacy in this society wears a light-blocking cloak and communicates by touch in light-tight rooms.
By the end, they manage to send wormcams back in time, discovering (among other things) that the "first" single-celled organisms where in fact left behind by a race of intelligent crustaceans that evolved billions of years ago and were later wiped out by some kind of environmental disaster, IIRC. And yes, they did get a look at the crucifixion, but there were so many wormcams swallowing light in the sky that day that the sky grew dark and at the moment of Jesus's death, interference was too great to get a clear view.
Good book.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Security Cameras have implied consent by you being in an area. Google Glass comes into YOUR area without your consent. Security cameras aren't also directly being uploaded to youtube and are rarely even viewed by human eyes unless someone is looking at an incident.
Or, as a Glass user myself, I would simply look at you oddly and then feel sorry for the fact that you don't understand the technology, how it works, how you actually use it, and that you're so entrenched in your hatred for the device that you're willing to take hyperbole into the physical realm.
I don't understand the hate on this site. Maybe its Microsoft and Apple shills trying to drum up negativity about the device. Where I'm from (East Coast) people were excited to see it. When I was down in Miami with my company for part of an art exhibit that contained Glass, people were excited to see it. I can count on the number of thumbs on my right hand the number of people that were cantankerous and that was a guy who hated Google because he personally hated Sergey.
Maybe I just don't live in the right area to see all of this hate... Also, I seem to remember a post about an early iDevice that played music...
Treadmill desks are actually cool. A lot of what I do is reading, thinking and typing - and (except for debugging really intricate logic), I do that as well whether I'm sitting or walking 1.6 mph. I am pleased with how my 2nd hand ikea desk + used treadmill is working out for me. An example: jerker-treadmill-desk (not mine, but a similar setup - I've read the jerker desk is out of production at Ikea, I was lucky enough to find one on craigslist).
So yeah, I'm a fan of the treadmill desk and recommend them.
Unless of course basic fitness smells too much of douchery for you, then never mind.
Or, possibly, we see our privacy slowly eroding, and people wearing glass as the modern equivalent of or the cheerleaders for this movement.
I view it as a stepping stone to more loss of rights, and you as their willing accomplice masking it as innovation and modernity.
To make the analogy: you're the sailor working on a slave ship wondering why people hate sailing.
This is just a wearable HUD, why is people so obsessed about people with glass being on a 24/7 stream of whatever the user is seeing?
First, nobody has the mobile bandwidth for a 24/7 stream. Nor the storage space. Nor the battery.
Second, you aren't that interesting when you are outside. No. Really, you really aren't. On the street every one of you, myself included, is as notorious as a gray pixel in a perlin noise image. Unless you live in a village where everyone knows each other, and even so, they already know you.
I have never seen a device creating such a level of paranoia and stupidity. You are supposed to be the smart guys, not the ones crying around like old men fearing something new. Stupidity like "hold your phone in front of them durrrr" or "punch them!" . Are you serious? Why not burn them at the stake, since you are talking unreasonable bravado, why not go the extra mile. Let's burn them all!
Fearing that magical device that surely records you without any action from the wearer. I assume that to take a picture you gotta press a button or say a keyword aloud or something, it's not gonna read your mind and turning you into a magical cyborg spy.
Of all people the people of slashdot should know the limits of technology better. You are just disappointing, I'd expect this from pitchfork villagers, not readers of "news for nerds", some hardware developers or hobbyists that know how stuff is supposed to work. You know how much taking photos and video drains the battery of a cell phone. This is a mere attachment to a cell phone, and is subject to the same limitations. Imagine a Pebble watch.
Sure, consider me a troll for being realistic, I got karma to spare. But if you want to believe in the magical device that will record you indefinitely, with an infinite battery, storage and network bandwidth so google can specifically see you scratch your crotch at a public place, sure, go ahead.
And, no, my privacy when I am outside doesn't bother me at all. I look my BEST when I am outside, please record me like that. I am precisely ready to be seen. And I am already being recorded at work, and my behavior is pretty impeccable.
And, besides, if google actually managed to produce magic to have a full stream of you talking to the glass user...you really want to be recorded being a little douchebag pointing your phone at him/her thinking you are making some heroic statement for freedom, but in reality just being a rude guy? I seriously doubt you do.
As for me, I like the idea, specially for potential AR stuff, but sounds like it will induce headaches easily. I might want to wait for an advanced second version or similar.
"People get angry at Glass. They get angry at you for wearing Glass. They talk about you openly. It inspires the most aggressive of passive aggression. ... Wearing Glass separates you. It sets you apart from everyone else. It says you not only had $1,500 to plunk down to be part of the âoeexplorerâ program, but that Google deemed you special enough to warrant inclusion (not everyone who wanted Glass got it; you had to be selected). Glass is a class divide on your face." [emph. added]
I agree and disagree with many of the above statements, but overall, I just think he simply doesn't get it.
People start talking about you openly because, hello, you are there with a device that can record their every action and every word they say, and you wear the device knowing what it can do, and without caring about whether other people like that or not. So if you allow yourself the liberty to disregard everyone else, why would you expect to be treated any differently? Maybe they think talking about you will make you stop, since for legal reasons they might not have any other way to stop you at most public spaces - besides common sense and basic social etiquette which you might consider learning about sometime.
And yes, wearing it might set you apart, but not because we might think you are 'special', or that Google thought you're 'special', but because it makes an obvious statement that you don't care about other people's opinion of being monitored and recorded without notice, which makes you a jerk (at least).
When meeting with GGlass-wearing people, I ask them to put it away while having a conversation. If they don't, then I shouldn't be talking to them anyway.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
So this would have been Google's approach to getting Glass on the air. Nobody is going to punch out a man in a wheelchair wearing Glass to free up hands that may have limited function. Once we get used to seeing Glass on the handicapped, the rest of us would already be perceiving it as useful for various kinds of hands-free work. Its coolness factor would be established, rather than that "glasshole" image.