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For Some Would-Be Google Glass Buyers and Devs, Delays May Mean Giving Up
ErnieKey writes with a Reuters story that says Google's Glass, not yet out for general purchase, has been wearing on the patience of both developers and would-be customers: "After an initial burst of enthusiasm, signs that consumers are giving up on Glass have been building.' Is it true that Google Goggles are simply not attractive to wear? Or perhaps it's the invasion of privacy that is deterring people from wearing them. Regardless, Google needs to change something quickly before they lose all their potential customers. From the article: Of 16 Glass app makers contacted, nine said that they had stopped work on their projects or abandoned them, mostly because of the lack of customers or limitations of the device. Three more have switched to developing for business, leaving behind consumer projects.
Plenty of larger developers remain with Glass. The nearly 100 apps on the official website include Facebook and OpenTable, although one major player recently defected: Twitter.
"If there was 200 million Google Glasses sold, it would be a different perspective. There's no market at this point," said Tom Frencel, the chief executive of Little Guy Games, which put development of a Glass game on hold this year and is looking at other platforms, including the Facebook-owned virtual-reality goggles Oculus Rift.
Several key Google employees instrumental to developing Glass have left the company in the last six months, including lead developer Babak Parviz, electrical engineering chief Adrian Wong, and Ossama Alami, director of developer relations.
Google needs to change something quickly before they lose all their potential customers.
They might not be losing potential customers. Perhaps the market is just already saturated.
It's just taking to long to get released. People get over things eventually. It's been out of reach for the average person. I would have loved to have one, I think it's the future, more convenient, and people will get used to it.
But I swear it feels like it's been five years since these were announced. How long am I supposed to care before I go fuck it and move on to something else to play with and explore? I moved on. So did other people.
The only people waiting for them are the same people who are friendzoned and thinking it will change. Google, you have friendzoned us with your google glasses, and more men these days are getting the picture and moving on.
I think we do have the technology, just look at the size of a raspberry pi.
You would think they could just scale the electronics in a longer format and it would work.
Electronics are fairly light weight these days.
"Join our open beta and help shape the future of Glass." https://www.google.com/glass/s.... I think it is too expensive for a "beta" product.
There's no market at this point," said Tom Frencel, the chief executive of Little Guy Games, which put development of a Glass game on hold this year and is looking at other platforms
And why do we need games for Google Glass?
Google Glass is a good example of the old saying "Just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD."
The market is probably saturated, but only because the item is only appealing to a very small market.
First and foremost, you need someone who'd want an always on cellphone display mounted right in front of his eye. Now, I could see me wanting this. Granted, I've been into wearable computing for a while now, but I could well see a lot of people who can't take their fingers off their cellphone long enough to hold down a sensible conversation to want a HMD. That certainly would not be the problem, I can well see a lot of technically interested people wanting something like this. And if the "group selector" ended here, there would actually probably be a huge market for this item.
Then there's the price, which pretty much eliminates the under-21 crowd, arguably one of the biggest early adopters today. Face it, if some cellphone has some new feature, rest assured some high school kid will bind itself to some cell company for longer than their average relationship lasts so they can afford it. Since there is no such thing with Google Glass and the item costs quite a pretty penny, what's left after these two are technologically inclined people with quite a bit of money to spare on what is essentially a novelty luxury item.
The last nail for the coffin is Google itself. Google now doesn't really have a reputation of not wanting to know everything their customers do. That's basically their business model. They sell information. And with Google Glass you'd not only not know where it's been, you also won't know where it is going. And even if they themselves don't really care about privacy, it also means that their friends and collegues must not care about it, or else ... why bother buying something that you can't really use as soon as anyone is nearby? Because the VERY FIRST thing I'd ask a Google Glass user to do is take the thing off while I'm around. Alternatively I'll remove it from his nose.
So the market is for technically inclined people who have good enough jobs to afford this luxury who are neither worried about their privacy nor have coworkers or friends who are.
And that market is REALLY tiny.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I had initially been interested in Google Glass initially as well, though I didn't really expect to buy one soon. I figured I'd wait a generation or two and for the resolution to be Full-HD and all the kinks worked out. I had expressed my curiosity about Google Glass to my wife who flat out said no way because of the nerdy look in public. Still I followed the progress passively and it never came and it never came. I figured we be on generation 3 by now.
Now Oculus Rift is on my radar – my wife is less skeptical (mostly because I will be in the basement when I get my geek on). This one too is beginning to drag out, though supposedly now only months away.
These companies seem very hesitant to bring first generation products to market, evidently worried anything less than perfection will doom long term adoption. Seems to me Google Glass should have had a for-businesses version first that acclimated the public to its appearance. There would seem to be literally hundreds of uses business could put these things too, whereas there doesn't seem to be a killer-app for the general public yet.
As for Oculus Rift gaming is already a killer-app not to mention tele-sight-seeing and 360 degree immerse movies.
I wouldn't be surprised in the long run to see Google Glass conquer business uses, and Oculus Rift conquer entertainment uses.
Letter To Iran
From my observations putting a camera on it was a fatal decision. It really turned people off, myself included. Every time I met a glasshole the whole having a camera lense in your face, even if it wasn't turned on, was really annoying. All the focus on the device turned away from the innovative display and onto the stupid camera. I have hopes for the display technology in an improved form but Google needs to focus on that. Unfortunatly the damage done means it will take a bit until people take wearable computer optical devices seriously again.
Well it might if this was cheap commodity hardware. It's not.
Ridiculous that they would expect you to pet this for beta.
Is it true that Google Goggles are simply not attractive to wear?
Partly. They aren't stylish nor are they useful enough to overcome that deficit. But that isn't really even among the biggest problems with Google Glass.
1) People who don't need corrective lenses don't generally want to wear glasses. I wore glasses for 17 years before I had lasik and there isn't a way in hell you would get me to wear glasses again except for safety, eye strain or vision correction.
2) People don't generally like to use voice interfaces particularly in public. You don't see a lot of people using Siri out in public so why should Google Glass be any different
3) People are creeped out by the privacy issues even if many of the critiques aren't really justified.
4) They don't fit gracefully into most people's lifestyle. Much of the functionality of Google Glass is already covered by smartphones. Why do I need this conspicuous and much more annoying device second device to do something I mostly already have? It doesn't scratch any itch I have.
5) The best uses for it are more industrial - particularly augmented reality uses. Think work instructions while building a complicated assembly. But Google seems to largely be ignoring these.
I think we do have the technology, just look at the size of a raspberry pi.
Doesn't matter. The problem isn't really the electronics. The biggest technology problem is the battery. We simply do not have battery technology that is sufficiently advanced to make a lot cool ideas practical. Hell we can't even make a smartphone that lasts more than about a day or two of heavy use.
And outside of a minuscule group of techno-hipsters, the general population couldn't give a shit less.
Wearables just aren't ready yet for mainstream consumers. Tablets existed way before the iPad and worked relatively well, but had many shortcomings that prevented them from becoming synonyms with day to day life (battery life, desktop interface, too heavy and bulky, wifi infrastructure, to name a few) the iPad came at the right time and became a massive success. Google are being pretty smart I think, they could be selling it for 200$, lots of people would flock to buy it, but that would be stupid. They know it isn't ready, so keeping it within the hands of few, learning what isn't quite right with it and improving it version by version is the right play.
Twitter itself is becoming an advertising / corporate platform, perhaps not the social media magnate it once was. I'd argue that, if Glass is dead, so is twitter - or at least heading that way, and that perhaps while their assessment holds true, maybe they need to rethink their own business model.
3D printing is past peak, Glass is at the peak and heading down, private space never made sense.
The next innovations will be social, and maybe biological. But one thing I've noticed about so-called technophiles: they completely fall apart when faced with the possibility of extending human life. They turn into the crustiest pessimists the planet has ever seen.
Perhaps because human biology is one hell of a lot more complicated that microprocessors and plastic spoons? We've come a long way in the past 100 years - we still have a much longer way to go. We will get there (and what a mess we will make of it) but neither you or I will be alive when it comes about.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
To centralize things like push update APIs. So they're less resource intensive. Security, should be the best available. And a streaming interface, for high bandwidth apps. All of which needs to be done before it gets released to the open source community. Since it's all audio it could use very little bandwidth, less than 24kbps. I think it's a bad idea and I'd never use one, for trust issues, but google seems to be pretty good at OS design (Android, not chrome) and as a VOIP hardware provider ForeverPhone (only in Canada, sorry) I love being able to provide Android phones with custom Roms.
It's easier to hold ground than capture it. If you can ship a product, even if it's *cough* a bit sub-optimal, the niche is no longer empty.
That alone could put potential competitors off.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
It is an axiom of sales that delays will always mean that some will give up. Whether it's a 5 second wait for a web page to load, or a 5 month wait for a new computer, a delay always means you will lose some customers.
Google needs to make a glass without the camera. One that is OBVIOUSLY different to the average person so they do not mistake it for the one with the camera. That could take some of the stigma away from the device. It could look much more like a regular pair of glasses. Sure, half of the applications need the camera, but many ideas do not, and it would reduce the cost. The technology and the software could mature without the social stigma and would have a good chance.
I was walking in the park this summer and these two arrogant looking douchebags were wearing them. I then realized that I lumped them in with smokers as people who just don't give a crap about other people's rights. I have a right to a pollution free environment, and I have a right to not have my every move tracked by a mega corporation.
So my friend called them glassholes loud enough for them to hear and they didn't even flinch. Obviously not the first person to call them this. When people regularly abuse users of a product then maybe there should be a rethink of the use of that product.
I don't mind someone biking by with their gopro seeing that not every moment is being made available to a faceless corporation. Unless I burst into flames while the gopro person is going by the footage will doubtfully be uploaded. But with any google ass type technology there is a huge chance that some software is able to make a note of my face, place, time, the faces around me, etc. Then this can easily be used to compile a stunningly comprehensive summation of my life. If only 5% of people were wearing them then 1 in 20 people that you pass would be able to note your presence. Without any other information about me that would allow google to compile a map of where I live, where I work, where my friends and family live, who I am in a relationship with, that I have kids, where I shop, where I vacation, everything. Then as this technology gets better it could even start going nuts (and it isn't like google doesn't love more information) and gathering what I wear, what I am buying, etc.
While google glass isn't anywhere near that yet, these things are very close, and why wouldn't google gather this fantastically valuable information. They can swear on a stack of bibles that they won't be evil, but I don't remember ever hearing of google's massive storage being audited. Not to mention that they could use familiar weasel words like "Only collecting meta data."
So I for one am extremely happy to hear that this project is falling flat on its face.
Glass is a nice thing. It's also frustrating as all heck in it's limitations. I want the text on all the signs I read auto translated for me - and overlaid in such a way as to hide the original language text. I want to see the arrows on the ground/roadway showing me where to turn left, not get a tiny message up above my field of vision.
I want it to give me full on AR, not just auxiliary information.
Me, I'm hoping that Meta can get the price of these down a bit: https://www.spaceglasses.com/
Google Glass was doomed the second the term Glasshole was coined. They need a complete rebranding for these to be successful. I also think they should have promoted them as utilitarian objects instead of fashion items.
"Join our open (your wallet) beta and help shape the future of Glass."
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Couldn't be something to do with much of the world now hearing 'NSA' whenever anyone says 'Google'?
No-one wants the NSA watching everything they do when a Glasshole is nearby.
It doesn't show.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We will get there (and what a mess we will make of it) but neither you or I will be alive when it comes about.
No, but I will be.
We don't need to magic up immortality tomorrow, we just need to increase lifespan by one year every year.
My lean startup is still working on our google glass project and it's awesome! It's a reality augmentation program. Whenever you're looking at nice shaved snatch, it shows a variety of different trim styles -- 70s, 80s, 90s... classics like a landing strip, squirrel tail, even the hitler. And it lets you take a snapshot and upload it to twitter, facebook, instagram. Video can even be uploaded to youtube! Anyone interested in our early beta program, look us up at hairy-beavr.info!
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I was hoping that Meta's device would be an Eyetap, every time I see someone say "Me, I'm hoping..." in one of these discussions, that's what I'm hoping for. Simply not having to correct for parallax would be better than clever schemes which don't always work well. Although probably at this point we'll have to wait for it to be implemented as a contact lens
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you don't like it, you can take it up with the fact that I'm 6'3 and have done roofing, likely can prevent you from removing any of my technology and it would be at your own peril.
"bouncer"
1)The big fat guy standing in front of the doorway of stripclubs. He doesn't want any trouble, but if you hit him, he has every right to pummel you to mush.
They also guard doorways to celebrity parties. The rich guy bouncers are less round and more built, and can easily throw you out of a bulletproof window, but can't overturn cars.
2) A bouncer is the first face you see when entering a bar, pub, or night club. They tend to be large and muscular. their job is to make sure that the bar is safe for the customers and bar staff alike. If you act like an asshole, chances are you will wake up in an ally in a pool of your own blood with serious head trauma.
bouncer
The definitive guide to not being a Glasshole
I bought a pair, hoping to explore using it to keep notes for my slides and help track time when I'm doing a presentation and the like.
I bought it right after Facebook did the Oculus Rift acquisition, when I canceled my dev-kit order, and I wanted a thing I could fiddle around for development purposes.
So far in exchange for my trouble, I mostly get to stop and answer questions about Google Glass several times a day when I wear them. That much isn't so bad.
Now I have a device I wear that has to maintain a constant link to my phone, draining its battery, so now I have to recharge two devices faster and I can't use it as 'more convenient' navigation without getting out my phone anyway to go to the app to turn on GPS, so its day-to-day usage is just flat-out painful.
Oh, and I have to carry an extra pair of glasses, despite having switched the Glass to prescription lenses.
Why? If I walk to work, which takes about an hour and a half, if I use the glass at all during the trip, it is typically out of juice by the end of the walk, so now I have to plug my glasses in at the office, which means I need to get out another pair so I can still see.
And I better remember to carry the case, because if I go to the movie, the MPAA will get me arrested if I forget and wear them in, but since they don't fold up, I have to choose between a huge hard case or a big bulky pouch I'm constantly worried will go crunch.
Oh, and I'd better switch to my real glasses when I drive, lest I get arrested for that, too.
Oh, and if I walk by a school I get paranoid parents who think I'm out to take candid shots of their precious children, despite having a third party lens cap on.
I've had some punk kid try to rip them off my face and run on the T, so there is an apparently increased theft risk.
Now, because they polarize the glass in the prism they use to reflect light to your eye you can't get the lenses polarized or treated with any sort of anti-glare, but if you walk around in sunlight light reflects off the bottom of the prism into your eye constantly.
There is a little bit of silver mirroring that is just deposited on the end of the prism -- not covered with anything. I went for a walk in Australia on a humid, high UV day. It just flaked off, which effectively dropped my screen to about 10% brightness. They did replace it, but it meant a few weeks without a device, during which I decided I didn't really miss the inconvenience.
So in exchange for $1700 or so (after adding prescription lenses) I get to get called a glasshole by the internet and get treated as a even evil child-stalker road-hazard pirate pariah by society, and have to carry another pair of glasses anyways.
Sanity is a sandbox. I prefer the swings.
What the Segway folks didn't count on was that top Segway speeds would never be compatible with walking speed on a sidewalk. What the Google folks didn't count on was that Google Glass would never be compatible with folks who don't want to feel like everyone is watching/recording them. Google Glass is going to end up s a niche product, just like the Segway.
Ya I bet everyone's in a hurry to be called a glasshole. Plus every place I would guess these people would want to use them, have said you cant use them . So What's to get excited about? that and you don't need theses to record your surrounding wearable recording devices have been around for ages.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Badoom-ching!
Being an old 55-ish jaded longtime sysadmin: I think that the primary issue is that if you're walking around wearing GG, probably 80% of the people you encounter are going to think that you're an idiot hipster, even if they don't know what it is and the latent privacy issues. Nobody needs to be THAT connected. Pretty sure that simple social ridicule is the biggest barrier to entry for that product, no matter how good. The whole thing has the reek of Executives poking at Newtons in the early nineties. Buy it; dork with it for a couple of months; put it on the shelf and never mention it again.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
People with an irrational fear of people looking at them shouldn't go out in public without properly psychological help.
Learn to love Alaska
We don't need to magic up immortality tomorrow, we just need to increase lifespan by one year every year.
That's a bit like saying we don't need to magic up near light speed travel tomorrow, we just need to increase our capacity by 1% a year, and in 99 years we'll be at 99%.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it