Your comment is very interesting. For one thing it carries with it an implied agreement with my original comment which I have since expressed regret in making. I would also wager that you (as some form of social quid pro quo) presume to goad me into blunting my aforementioned apology by expressing some kind of trivializing sentiment to appease you. Too bad as you'll have to look elsewhere for your entertainment tonight. What I said was wrong. Your antagonism is shameful and whatever balls you have you'd better cut 'em off because I doubt they belong to you.
The one in the Google video is briefly shown as a thin strip, obviously with no cords; It has been laying around somewhere as there is no dock in sight. The viewer is left to image it is just as non-intrusive.
We know that Glass at this time has the electronics housed on the right hand side of the unit with the rest as essentially a thin strip and nose bumpers extending to the left to wrap around the user's head. In the video, you can't see the right side of the unit as it is out of the frame. Also, the video, I presume, was not intended to focus on the form factor of the device but what you could potentially do with it so showing the business side of it would be a bit superfluous. I also am quite certain that the unit is a work in progress and the final product will be much smaller than what we see today so it wouldn't even be an accurate portrayal if they had shown the whole thing. Glass will not be ready for general availability until 2013 or 2014 and I have a wristwatch (Motorola Activ) running Android that has the processing power to do what Glass does (assuming a strong server side system working in concert) and is a smaller form factor than what Larry Page has been wearing around. In a year or two, I think it is quite reasonable that an ARM device would be possible that would fulfill the demands of Glass yet be much more compact than what you see right now. After all, the ARM cpu itself is only a few millimeters square. The entire SOC could be manufactured in more than just the conventional rectangular configuration. Why not in the form factor of a wide arm of a pair of glasses? The real limitation is having enough battery to run GPS and some kind of radio for the internet. I'll err on the optimistic side and say it's doable.
The only difference is that the Vimeo one uses a lot more AR, otherwise it gets the same context data the Google one does.
Google Glass has never been shown distinguishing individual shapes and acting on that data as far as I have seen. The cucumber scene has more implications than you might realize and that is far off into the future.
Indeed, that part doesn't even matter since AR is not even the hard part - we ALREADY have a lot of apps that make use of AR.
You give those apps and the hardware they run on way too much credit. Think about the hardware side of the equation. The only way to use Layar as a consumer is to look at it overlaid on the video coming through the phone's camera. That is a nonstarter and why this version of AR will remain a toy. It is frankly fatiguing to look at the world through the phone. Glass solves this problem by allowing you to look at the actual world just adding the appropriate iconography over it. Yes, technically you are looking through transparent glass but that is a sight better than looking at a screen. But assuming the AR overlay in the video was remotely possible, there is still the question of the contact lenses and the fine grained contextual awareness. Those are the two main problems. The first would require a breakthrough in who knows what kind of physics. Nanotech? And the second I'm going to go out on a limb and say would require general AI or, again, an extremely well organized and predictable society so as to moot the intractability of computing and making sense of complex scenarios algorithmically. And when that happens, augmented reality will be the least of our concerns. Of course there's the fantasy of hacking into the woman's brain or whatever it was which would require extremely advanced brain computer interfaces. What we have right now while wonderful for the disabled is a great example of "can't get there from here". Just doing it one-way is a crude interpretation of measurable brain electrical activity. What is portrayed in the video would only be possible via nanotechnology wiring the brain manually one neuron at a time (not to imply that it would take more than a few seconds of c
The trans women contingent is a minority of a minority community. I have never one single time sat down and had a discussion that wandered to what is and what isn't offensive terminology. Yes, in retrospect, it was a questionable comment and in light of what I read at your link it is obviously a very serious matter and not to be bandied lightly. The reality is the term "trap" is accepted lingo among normal adults who use it when it is contextually appropriate (yes, I get the implied contradiction of saying something extremely is every contextually appropriate). I have obviously heard the word and was apprised to its prosaic meaning but, naturally, was not filled in on its more sinister implications or how it is associated with an existential issue within the trans community. As penance I will make it a point to apply the appropriate social pressure to anyone that uses it in my presence in the future.
The project glass video was just a little closer to reality than the Vimeo video. But not a great deal more.
To do a comparison I'll start with what I see wrong with the vimeo video. Firstly, the contact lense full AR system is wildly futuristic. As in decades away. You would have a pair of displays directly adhering to your eyeballs that presumably allow for natural focusing on far way objects like seen in the dive at the beginning, can convincingly reproduce the full color spectrum and lighting all the way from opaque black (harder than it sounds for what we're talking about here) all the way up to what it would be like opening the curtains on a southern facing window first thing in the morning and getting the peripheral lux blast from that our very on nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. I could go on but we're talking about some futuristic shit here. Quick preview: compare this go Google Glass which is just a transparent tiny monitor with an overlay of simple graphics whisking in and out of view. Google's version doesn't even have actual pretensions of being real augmented reality. Just an additional contextually aware information resource. Now assuming the contact lenses were possible or lets just remove them from the equation an insert a pair of eyeglasses with embedded displays as it would be functionally similar to the depiction shown. As an aside, note that the guy in the video is also hearing audio despite a lack of obvious sonic conveyance. We'll let that slide though as maybe he's piping it through the stereo or has really small bluetooth headphones. As far as how the thing knows he's in the refrigerator etc., I'd buy that the whole house is rigged up with rfid chips and a sufficiently sophisticated if-then tree from a really bored programmer could cover most of the normal things he's doing and display the relevant information (i.e., sitting on the couch alone on a Monday night staring at the blank wall? Football baby!). But this would break down as soon as he left his personal space unless we assume that society is covered in RFID chips that he can interface with (not a bad idea actually). Barring that however, having a computer vision system that can do a general interpretation of any scene is computationally intractable with current programming techniques thus requiring something approaching general AI which is so speculative as to not even be worth discussing.
Moving on, I would buy the cucumber cutting game with the overlay all the way up until he moves the cucumber to the side and the AR system tracks it perfectly. That is fantasy right now. This particular point in the video is really worth thinking about and is one of the most important actually as one of the grand promises of AR is to perfectly track the environment and be able to overlay the augmented version in a convincing way over what ever happens to lie in your visual space. The contacts can obviously completely block out the real world as we saw in the beginning so what is portrayed here has the unstated potential of completely transforming your perception of your entire environment at least visually. Don't like your run down shack? It's now a medieval castle in the country side. The illusion could even be padded by simulating different rooms as you walk around the virtual environment. Of course this isn't actually depicted explicitely in the video but all of the necessary ingredients are there or strongly implied.
And on and on. Basically for the vimeo video to happen would require either an extremely well organized and AR friendly society or general AI both of which are in the realm of fantasy at the present time.
Now on to this google glass video. Guy wakes up in a fairly normal looking albeit affluent western house. Slips his Glass on and an icon overlay pops up. No AR, nothing mystical just some icons painted 2 dimensionally on a transparent screen. A small amount of artistic license is applied
I wouldn't say never but I do think it is too early to realistically propose a practical implementation of AR contact lenses. However, barring the artistic license the video's author took, all of what he shows as far as the augmented reality goes could be accomplished with an advanced version of Google Glass, e.g., external display wearable on the face. If you read Neuromancer by William Gibson, he describes AR as being projected on lenses that are surgically implanted into the wearer's face. Also, reference Deus Ex Human Revolution for another example.
Look at 6:35. Those are backslashes. IN PATHS.
Only Windows uses those for paths. They are escapes on every normal system.
No fuckin' thanks.
Maybe this is a hypothetical future where everything runs on ARM processors and Treacherous^H^H^H^H^H Secure Boot is mandatory with no off switch. Scary shit.
Look at the return of the ugly big headphones that are all the rage again.
Honestly? They sound better. Yes, I realize the irony of wasting this on lossy compressed music. I'm just waiting for the return of the grooved analog medium. Can you just see the hipsters running around with some kind of modern day record player strapped to their belts? I'm sure there is some way to miniaturize the whole thing and maybe go back to cylinders but it would still be something to behold. Maybe I should patent that shit. Could throw in a tube for good measure.
Look at the number of kids that still get high.
Pro tip: Almost every single high level executive you see on TV or hear about? They're all hopped up on dope. Nobody...and I mean nobody (for statistically significant values of nobody) can work 130 hours a week as brass in a major corp and not be on something.* As far as kids doing drugs, that's a real shame. IMHO they need to learn to cope with reality with their baseline psychological profile. If you consider college students as "kids" then you have to take into account the fact that it is very difficult to accept being a B kid when you know judicious use of the right stimulant can turn you into an A student. Last study I saw showed that 25 percent of the student body on elite campuses admitted to stimulant use in the pursuit of better academic performance. Sad but true.
There are some virtual reality applications now. Some are not widely used because they do not have a purpose, or because they are privacy concerns.
Layar and its ilk all have the same fatal flaw. You have to view the world through the same screen as the data the app produces. Google Glass hopes to remedy this problem by making the screen itself transparent and just overlaying the data on top of the actual world. Looking at Layar through even an all encompassing screen would quickly grow tiring as your eyes wouldn't even be able to focus naturally on far away objects. And no video screen I've ever seen can display the full gamut of colors and lighting the human eye can process so it would be like trying to live your life through a video camera. Not happening. Now if Layar etc. could be overlaid on a set of glasses then you might be on to something...enter Google Glass.
* I do NOT have proof of any exec taking drugs other than what has been exposed in popular media and available to everyone. Only common sense gained from roaming this earth for some decades and talking to lots of successful people. If you are in a high pressure environment and you are getting over the age of 40, be positively sure that there is somebody else gunning for you that is either younger or has a prescription to Adderall, Provigil, $STIMULANT_OF_CHOICE and they are using it. If you want to stay in the saddle, what do you do? Also note that I am not writing any of this as any kind of Freudian style rationalization of my own behavior. I'm not in a competitive environment where drugs are necessary and if I was, I would strongly resist the urge.
I thought that movie overall was a much more interesting look at what is possible than the Glass videos Google put together.
That's kind of like saying Minority Report is a much more interesting look at what is possible than Beyond 2000 (debatable I know). The former is just fantasy that while rooted in a reasonable version of the future isn't constrained by "this is actually being worked on by us and we're just teasing you with what we will deliver" which is the case with the Project Glass video vs. what this other guy put together. Not taking anything away from his vision as I found it entertaining but with obviously no constraint of this being a description of an actual deliverable and the extremely speculative and frankly at times practical questionableness of some of the things he shows I think it is kind of disingenuous to compare this with what Google shows in a way that reflects negatively on the level of "interest" it generates. One more analogy and then I'm done. Star Wars for many is more interesting than a shuttle launch but you would sound kind of silly pointing this fact out.
The friction isn't solved by Glass, it's solved by algorithms.
What is an algorithm without implementation? Glass is an implementation that assuming Google follows through will be attainable by the typical westerner and reduces the friction of "just in time" information by a higher degree than anything else that you can readily get your hands on. I'm not pretending that it eliminates friction. I would imagine that Gods-like omniscience is the only thing that can do that and that isn't even on the table right now.
As anyone using a search engine (including Google's), recommendation engine, or various other information tools, can tell you, that friction still exists because the algorithms in use are simply not good enough.
This is true. Many CS problems including complete contextual awareness will probably only be solvable by general AI especially things like real time human level speech translation (to give an example) but Glass isn't claiming to be perfect only a step. Actually, I don't think Google is claiming much of anything about it right now other than it can be a neat way to get directions and take first person photos and videos. We are the ones filling in the blanks. I gave this a bit of though after seeing the skydiving stunt at Google IO and honestly, I couldn't come up with any extremely compelling scenarios where Glass would change my life for the better. But I do have a general sense of potential and as you say with the right algorithm it could be huge. However, with that being said, I do have a Galaxy Nexus running Jellybean and Google Now. The algorithm behind that does have a rudimentary contextual awareness and is genuinely helpful. Not life changing but helpful. Google will be refining it and Glass isn't even scheduled for general release until late 2013 at the earliest so they have a lot of time to work on their algorithm for it but with just what they have now in GNow, I would find a heads up display useful. More useful than pulling my cell phone out of my pocket when it beeps at me.
Also, having a constant feed of information may cause even more changes in memory ability that have already been shown from reliance on the internet -- viz., a loss in the ability to remember any information we believe the feed can easily provide.
I have seen this particular risk hypothesized before but I have seen no empirical evidence that it is harmful. I hate to use analogies but you could make the same argument about the advance of specialization post hunter-gatherer days. Before the beginning of our agrarian base society, almost everybody in the tribe "knew" everything there was to know. And if you go far back enough that is a virtual certainty. Still, nobody reasonably wants to turn back the clock in the name of regaining the ability to remember information. We are too far removed from that lifestyle. This will continue until inevitably strong AI is invented (discovered?) and we humans no longer have to do anything. I'm banking on us merging with the machines but you can assume any scenario you want as it doesn't change the presumed inevitability one iota.
The truth is that for most of us, we have little practical use for a non-stop feed of information and may well be worse off for it. There may be isolated instances where the feed would be helpful, but that's just as we already see with smartphone and tablet usage.
I think things like Glass and Google Now and Siri to a lesser extent actually help lessen the problem of information overload. Think of them as intelligent agents that present information to you as you need it. You don't have to burden your own time (and it is a factor of time really) with trying to sift through it all when an agent can just give you what you need when you need it. That frees you up for what humans are good at, e.g., being creative and making plans and simulating the possible outcomes of those plans.
I'm neither playing victim nor trying to bring attention to anything.
When you write:
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage. Try starting a company with no money to begin with and no stable family to fall back to if you fail..
You are by definition "bringing attention to" the fact that those less fortunate don't have the means to accomplish as much. Writing that on Slashdot in reply to me is the act of bringing attention to it if only to me and fellow readers here.
I see no point in your complaint about others
My complaint wasn't directed to some amorphous "others", it was directed specifically at you. My original question was essentially "why deride the accomplished" and you responded with a general statement about how accomplishment is easier when you have means. First of all, that's pretty obvious so I'm not sure why you bother to bring it up, second of all, I reasonably interpreted your statement as a challenge to my original question. My response in that case was very logical as it questioned your presumptions as while your statement may have been technically logical, it didn't really make sense in the context of the conversation. At this point, I believe I am arguing with a poorly worded opinion which is really pointless.
Are you against trying to make it fairer? Are you against the expression of opinions? Are you against fairness? Are you a fanboy? Because honestly I see no other logical reasons for your stance!
You lead with multiple strawmen then question my logic. But to answer you, I believe that objectively speaking the world is "fair". Kind of like how local phenomenon can seemingly violate the third law of dynamics, local phenomenon even that exceeding the time span of the existence of the human race and certainly shorter amounts of years can seem to violate "fairness". That is an illusion.
That would be effing hilarious. Desensitizing a generation of western civilization to a gaping goatse asshole would probably do us good. Seriously. Think about it.
The only thing Google is in control of as far as you are concerned is what you allow them to control. I'm not even sure that's actually true as how are they "controlling" you anyway? As far as them having you under surveillance, just turn them off. It's pretty easy just log out and shut your account down then never use their products again and if you just can't help it, don't run any personally identifying information through their system. Try this if you think it's what you need. And if you're worried about somebody wearing a Glass and getting picture/video of you then you should demand that nobody take a picture of you at all as many people's cell phones automatically upload to dropbox/flicker/faceboot/Google+ these days. Lobby your MP or congressman if it really offends you. Or stay in the house. Whatever floats your boat. But railing against people online that don't have as big a problem with the loss of privacy as you do is pretty pointless as you come across as an extremist. Catch flies with honey and so forth.
It's the same old, same old, just on contact lenses.
I'd argue otherwise. Yes, there is a world full of information that is contextually relevant to whatever situation you find yourself in. The only problem is there is friction between you and that information at any given time. If you can devise a system where you get a "just in time" feed at any given moment then that has the potential to catalyse a real fundamental shift in our ability to perform maximally in any given moment. It has the potential to blunt the Dunning-Kruger effect in a general way which if I may say so myself is a pretty exciting prospect for the future of humanity.
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage.
Welcome to the real world. We hope you'll stay a while. I'm sorry to break it to you but the sooner you accept the fact that "fair" is an indulgent figment of your (and many other's) imagination(s) the better off you'll be. How fair is it that you have the means to complain about it online whereas hundreds of millions of other's are having trouble feeding themselves today? I'm not trying to diminish their plight but using this as an excuse to take away from other's accomplishments because they do have means is a rather pointless exercise as there are much more productive ways to bring attention to the needy. I'd suggest joining peace corp if you really want to help.
For further reading, I'd suggest The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright which is an absolute tour de force in full on hard sic-fi post human futurism. Predicting 10,000 years into the future is basically impossible but the author weaves a very believable scenario. Not to put too fine a point on it but these books are the primary reason I lost interest in popular "fantasy" science fiction aka skee-fee.
Every generation since time immemorable has always thought "this is it". The world's going to hell now. Arrogantly we presume that this will be the time of cataclysmic change. The world was just waiting for me^H^H us to get here to seek it's retribution on mankind. And then...amazingly...not much really happens and the next group of younglings arrive...thinking the same thing. The "future" will be just fine, worrywart. I promise.
He says this as he lazily passes a Sunday afternoon reading tech blogs about things he doesn't care about. Like I said above (or below, dear reader), the Internet is a funny place.
Google, Facebook, 100 advertising sites, are all busy trying to gather as much information about me as possible, and not giving me any control over it.
Um, really? Really? and if that's too much trouble, you can probably hire somebody on mechanical Turk to do it for 10 cents.
The Internet is a funny place. About half the comments on any blog post about Glass are comments mocking it. Yet in the next breath, the same commented will decry "lack of innovation" in the tech industry. Personally I don't need yet another way to edit my spreadsheets or unlock my phone. I'm ready for something new and consumer palatable augmented reality is it. Google might still get it wrong but I'm with them all the way for trying.
Um, it's not even for sale to the general public so how would you have any idea what it will cost? And if you think the explored kit they are selling to the Google I/O attendees is indicative of the real price, I ask you, have you priced console dev kits vs. The price of the consumer hardware lately? The two have nothing in common.
Slashdot Mirror
Your comment is very interesting. For one thing it carries with it an implied agreement with my original comment which I have since expressed regret in making. I would also wager that you (as some form of social quid pro quo) presume to goad me into blunting my aforementioned apology by expressing some kind of trivializing sentiment to appease you. Too bad as you'll have to look elsewhere for your entertainment tonight. What I said was wrong. Your antagonism is shameful and whatever balls you have you'd better cut 'em off because I doubt they belong to you.
The one in the Google video is briefly shown as a thin strip, obviously with no cords; It has been laying around somewhere as there is no dock in sight. The viewer is left to image it is just as non-intrusive.
We know that Glass at this time has the electronics housed on the right hand side of the unit with the rest as essentially a thin strip and nose bumpers extending to the left to wrap around the user's head. In the video, you can't see the right side of the unit as it is out of the frame. Also, the video, I presume, was not intended to focus on the form factor of the device but what you could potentially do with it so showing the business side of it would be a bit superfluous. I also am quite certain that the unit is a work in progress and the final product will be much smaller than what we see today so it wouldn't even be an accurate portrayal if they had shown the whole thing. Glass will not be ready for general availability until 2013 or 2014 and I have a wristwatch (Motorola Activ) running Android that has the processing power to do what Glass does (assuming a strong server side system working in concert) and is a smaller form factor than what Larry Page has been wearing around. In a year or two, I think it is quite reasonable that an ARM device would be possible that would fulfill the demands of Glass yet be much more compact than what you see right now. After all, the ARM cpu itself is only a few millimeters square. The entire SOC could be manufactured in more than just the conventional rectangular configuration. Why not in the form factor of a wide arm of a pair of glasses? The real limitation is having enough battery to run GPS and some kind of radio for the internet. I'll err on the optimistic side and say it's doable.
The only difference is that the Vimeo one uses a lot more AR, otherwise it gets the same context data the Google one does.
Google Glass has never been shown distinguishing individual shapes and acting on that data as far as I have seen. The cucumber scene has more implications than you might realize and that is far off into the future.
Indeed, that part doesn't even matter since AR is not even the hard part - we ALREADY have a lot of apps that make use of AR.
You give those apps and the hardware they run on way too much credit. Think about the hardware side of the equation. The only way to use Layar as a consumer is to look at it overlaid on the video coming through the phone's camera. That is a nonstarter and why this version of AR will remain a toy. It is frankly fatiguing to look at the world through the phone. Glass solves this problem by allowing you to look at the actual world just adding the appropriate iconography over it. Yes, technically you are looking through transparent glass but that is a sight better than looking at a screen. But assuming the AR overlay in the video was remotely possible, there is still the question of the contact lenses and the fine grained contextual awareness. Those are the two main problems. The first would require a breakthrough in who knows what kind of physics. Nanotech? And the second I'm going to go out on a limb and say would require general AI or, again, an extremely well organized and predictable society so as to moot the intractability of computing and making sense of complex scenarios algorithmically. And when that happens, augmented reality will be the least of our concerns. Of course there's the fantasy of hacking into the woman's brain or whatever it was which would require extremely advanced brain computer interfaces. What we have right now while wonderful for the disabled is a great example of "can't get there from here". Just doing it one-way is a crude interpretation of measurable brain electrical activity. What is portrayed in the video would only be possible via nanotechnology wiring the brain manually one neuron at a time (not to imply that it would take more than a few seconds of c
This so deserves to be modded up. Accept my own ephmeral +1 Effing Hilarious. Get to fucking those cancer curing saints, Google!
The trans women contingent is a minority of a minority community. I have never one single time sat down and had a discussion that wandered to what is and what isn't offensive terminology. Yes, in retrospect, it was a questionable comment and in light of what I read at your link it is obviously a very serious matter and not to be bandied lightly. The reality is the term "trap" is accepted lingo among normal adults who use it when it is contextually appropriate (yes, I get the implied contradiction of saying something extremely is every contextually appropriate). I have obviously heard the word and was apprised to its prosaic meaning but, naturally, was not filled in on its more sinister implications or how it is associated with an existential issue within the trans community. As penance I will make it a point to apply the appropriate social pressure to anyone that uses it in my presence in the future.
The project glass video was just a little closer to reality than the Vimeo video. But not a great deal more.
To do a comparison I'll start with what I see wrong with the vimeo video. Firstly, the contact lense full AR system is wildly futuristic. As in decades away. You would have a pair of displays directly adhering to your eyeballs that presumably allow for natural focusing on far way objects like seen in the dive at the beginning, can convincingly reproduce the full color spectrum and lighting all the way from opaque black (harder than it sounds for what we're talking about here) all the way up to what it would be like opening the curtains on a southern facing window first thing in the morning and getting the peripheral lux blast from that our very on nuclear fusion reactor in the sky. I could go on but we're talking about some futuristic shit here. Quick preview: compare this go Google Glass which is just a transparent tiny monitor with an overlay of simple graphics whisking in and out of view. Google's version doesn't even have actual pretensions of being real augmented reality. Just an additional contextually aware information resource. Now assuming the contact lenses were possible or lets just remove them from the equation an insert a pair of eyeglasses with embedded displays as it would be functionally similar to the depiction shown. As an aside, note that the guy in the video is also hearing audio despite a lack of obvious sonic conveyance. We'll let that slide though as maybe he's piping it through the stereo or has really small bluetooth headphones. As far as how the thing knows he's in the refrigerator etc., I'd buy that the whole house is rigged up with rfid chips and a sufficiently sophisticated if-then tree from a really bored programmer could cover most of the normal things he's doing and display the relevant information (i.e., sitting on the couch alone on a Monday night staring at the blank wall? Football baby!). But this would break down as soon as he left his personal space unless we assume that society is covered in RFID chips that he can interface with (not a bad idea actually). Barring that however, having a computer vision system that can do a general interpretation of any scene is computationally intractable with current programming techniques thus requiring something approaching general AI which is so speculative as to not even be worth discussing.
Moving on, I would buy the cucumber cutting game with the overlay all the way up until he moves the cucumber to the side and the AR system tracks it perfectly. That is fantasy right now. This particular point in the video is really worth thinking about and is one of the most important actually as one of the grand promises of AR is to perfectly track the environment and be able to overlay the augmented version in a convincing way over what ever happens to lie in your visual space. The contacts can obviously completely block out the real world as we saw in the beginning so what is portrayed here has the unstated potential of completely transforming your perception of your entire environment at least visually. Don't like your run down shack? It's now a medieval castle in the country side. The illusion could even be padded by simulating different rooms as you walk around the virtual environment. Of course this isn't actually depicted explicitely in the video but all of the necessary ingredients are there or strongly implied.
And on and on. Basically for the vimeo video to happen would require either an extremely well organized and AR friendly society or general AI both of which are in the realm of fantasy at the present time.
Now on to this google glass video. Guy wakes up in a fairly normal looking albeit affluent western house. Slips his Glass on and an icon overlay pops up. No AR, nothing mystical just some icons painted 2 dimensionally on a transparent screen. A small amount of artistic license is applied
The contact lense thing is never going to happen
I wouldn't say never but I do think it is too early to realistically propose a practical implementation of AR contact lenses. However, barring the artistic license the video's author took, all of what he shows as far as the augmented reality goes could be accomplished with an advanced version of Google Glass, e.g., external display wearable on the face. If you read Neuromancer by William Gibson, he describes AR as being projected on lenses that are surgically implanted into the wearer's face. Also, reference Deus Ex Human Revolution for another example.
Look at 6:35. Those are backslashes. IN PATHS. Only Windows uses those for paths. They are escapes on every normal system. No fuckin' thanks.
Maybe this is a hypothetical future where everything runs on ARM processors and Treacherous^H^H^H^H^H Secure Boot is mandatory with no off switch. Scary shit.
Look at the return of the ugly big headphones that are all the rage again.
Honestly? They sound better. Yes, I realize the irony of wasting this on lossy compressed music. I'm just waiting for the return of the grooved analog medium. Can you just see the hipsters running around with some kind of modern day record player strapped to their belts? I'm sure there is some way to miniaturize the whole thing and maybe go back to cylinders but it would still be something to behold. Maybe I should patent that shit. Could throw in a tube for good measure.
Look at the number of kids that still get high.
Pro tip: Almost every single high level executive you see on TV or hear about? They're all hopped up on dope. Nobody...and I mean nobody (for statistically significant values of nobody) can work 130 hours a week as brass in a major corp and not be on something.* As far as kids doing drugs, that's a real shame. IMHO they need to learn to cope with reality with their baseline psychological profile. If you consider college students as "kids" then you have to take into account the fact that it is very difficult to accept being a B kid when you know judicious use of the right stimulant can turn you into an A student. Last study I saw showed that 25 percent of the student body on elite campuses admitted to stimulant use in the pursuit of better academic performance. Sad but true.
There are some virtual reality applications now. Some are not widely used because they do not have a purpose, or because they are privacy concerns.
Layar and its ilk all have the same fatal flaw. You have to view the world through the same screen as the data the app produces. Google Glass hopes to remedy this problem by making the screen itself transparent and just overlaying the data on top of the actual world. Looking at Layar through even an all encompassing screen would quickly grow tiring as your eyes wouldn't even be able to focus naturally on far away objects. And no video screen I've ever seen can display the full gamut of colors and lighting the human eye can process so it would be like trying to live your life through a video camera. Not happening. Now if Layar etc. could be overlaid on a set of glasses then you might be on to something...enter Google Glass.
* I do NOT have proof of any exec taking drugs other than what has been exposed in popular media and available to everyone. Only common sense gained from roaming this earth for some decades and talking to lots of successful people. If you are in a high pressure environment and you are getting over the age of 40, be positively sure that there is somebody else gunning for you that is either younger or has a prescription to Adderall, Provigil, $STIMULANT_OF_CHOICE and they are using it. If you want to stay in the saddle, what do you do? Also note that I am not writing any of this as any kind of Freudian style rationalization of my own behavior. I'm not in a competitive environment where drugs are necessary and if I was, I would strongly resist the urge.
I thought that movie overall was a much more interesting look at what is possible than the Glass videos Google put together.
That's kind of like saying Minority Report is a much more interesting look at what is possible than Beyond 2000 (debatable I know). The former is just fantasy that while rooted in a reasonable version of the future isn't constrained by "this is actually being worked on by us and we're just teasing you with what we will deliver" which is the case with the Project Glass video vs. what this other guy put together. Not taking anything away from his vision as I found it entertaining but with obviously no constraint of this being a description of an actual deliverable and the extremely speculative and frankly at times practical questionableness of some of the things he shows I think it is kind of disingenuous to compare this with what Google shows in a way that reflects negatively on the level of "interest" it generates. One more analogy and then I'm done. Star Wars for many is more interesting than a shuttle launch but you would sound kind of silly pointing this fact out.
The friction isn't solved by Glass, it's solved by algorithms.
What is an algorithm without implementation? Glass is an implementation that assuming Google follows through will be attainable by the typical westerner and reduces the friction of "just in time" information by a higher degree than anything else that you can readily get your hands on. I'm not pretending that it eliminates friction. I would imagine that Gods-like omniscience is the only thing that can do that and that isn't even on the table right now.
As anyone using a search engine (including Google's), recommendation engine, or various other information tools, can tell you, that friction still exists because the algorithms in use are simply not good enough.
This is true. Many CS problems including complete contextual awareness will probably only be solvable by general AI especially things like real time human level speech translation (to give an example) but Glass isn't claiming to be perfect only a step. Actually, I don't think Google is claiming much of anything about it right now other than it can be a neat way to get directions and take first person photos and videos. We are the ones filling in the blanks. I gave this a bit of though after seeing the skydiving stunt at Google IO and honestly, I couldn't come up with any extremely compelling scenarios where Glass would change my life for the better. But I do have a general sense of potential and as you say with the right algorithm it could be huge. However, with that being said, I do have a Galaxy Nexus running Jellybean and Google Now. The algorithm behind that does have a rudimentary contextual awareness and is genuinely helpful. Not life changing but helpful. Google will be refining it and Glass isn't even scheduled for general release until late 2013 at the earliest so they have a lot of time to work on their algorithm for it but with just what they have now in GNow, I would find a heads up display useful. More useful than pulling my cell phone out of my pocket when it beeps at me.
Also, having a constant feed of information may cause even more changes in memory ability that have already been shown from reliance on the internet -- viz., a loss in the ability to remember any information we believe the feed can easily provide.
I have seen this particular risk hypothesized before but I have seen no empirical evidence that it is harmful. I hate to use analogies but you could make the same argument about the advance of specialization post hunter-gatherer days. Before the beginning of our agrarian base society, almost everybody in the tribe "knew" everything there was to know. And if you go far back enough that is a virtual certainty. Still, nobody reasonably wants to turn back the clock in the name of regaining the ability to remember information. We are too far removed from that lifestyle. This will continue until inevitably strong AI is invented (discovered?) and we humans no longer have to do anything. I'm banking on us merging with the machines but you can assume any scenario you want as it doesn't change the presumed inevitability one iota.
The truth is that for most of us, we have little practical use for a non-stop feed of information and may well be worse off for it. There may be isolated instances where the feed would be helpful, but that's just as we already see with smartphone and tablet usage.
I think things like Glass and Google Now and Siri to a lesser extent actually help lessen the problem of information overload. Think of them as intelligent agents that present information to you as you need it. You don't have to burden your own time (and it is a factor of time really) with trying to sift through it all when an agent can just give you what you need when you need it. That frees you up for what humans are good at, e.g., being creative and making plans and simulating the possible outcomes of those plans.
I'm neither playing victim nor trying to bring attention to anything.
When you write:
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage. Try starting a company with no money to begin with and no stable family to fall back to if you fail..
You are by definition "bringing attention to" the fact that those less fortunate don't have the means to accomplish as much. Writing that on Slashdot in reply to me is the act of bringing attention to it if only to me and fellow readers here.
I see no point in your complaint about others
My complaint wasn't directed to some amorphous "others", it was directed specifically at you. My original question was essentially "why deride the accomplished" and you responded with a general statement about how accomplishment is easier when you have means. First of all, that's pretty obvious so I'm not sure why you bother to bring it up, second of all, I reasonably interpreted your statement as a challenge to my original question. My response in that case was very logical as it questioned your presumptions as while your statement may have been technically logical, it didn't really make sense in the context of the conversation. At this point, I believe I am arguing with a poorly worded opinion which is really pointless.
Are you against trying to make it fairer? Are you against the expression of opinions? Are you against fairness? Are you a fanboy? Because honestly I see no other logical reasons for your stance!
You lead with multiple strawmen then question my logic. But to answer you, I believe that objectively speaking the world is "fair". Kind of like how local phenomenon can seemingly violate the third law of dynamics, local phenomenon even that exceeding the time span of the existence of the human race and certainly shorter amounts of years can seem to violate "fairness". That is an illusion.
That would be effing hilarious. Desensitizing a generation of western civilization to a gaping goatse asshole would probably do us good. Seriously. Think about it.
The only thing Google is in control of as far as you are concerned is what you allow them to control. I'm not even sure that's actually true as how are they "controlling" you anyway? As far as them having you under surveillance, just turn them off. It's pretty easy just log out and shut your account down then never use their products again and if you just can't help it, don't run any personally identifying information through their system. Try this if you think it's what you need. And if you're worried about somebody wearing a Glass and getting picture/video of you then you should demand that nobody take a picture of you at all as many people's cell phones automatically upload to dropbox/flicker/faceboot/Google+ these days. Lobby your MP or congressman if it really offends you. Or stay in the house. Whatever floats your boat. But railing against people online that don't have as big a problem with the loss of privacy as you do is pretty pointless as you come across as an extremist. Catch flies with honey and so forth.
It's the same old, same old, just on contact lenses.
I'd argue otherwise. Yes, there is a world full of information that is contextually relevant to whatever situation you find yourself in. The only problem is there is friction between you and that information at any given time. If you can devise a system where you get a "just in time" feed at any given moment then that has the potential to catalyse a real fundamental shift in our ability to perform maximally in any given moment. It has the potential to blunt the Dunning-Kruger effect in a general way which if I may say so myself is a pretty exciting prospect for the future of humanity.
Accomplishing shit is easier when have an advantage.
Welcome to the real world. We hope you'll stay a while. I'm sorry to break it to you but the sooner you accept the fact that "fair" is an indulgent figment of your (and many other's) imagination(s) the better off you'll be. How fair is it that you have the means to complain about it online whereas hundreds of millions of other's are having trouble feeding themselves today? I'm not trying to diminish their plight but using this as an excuse to take away from other's accomplishments because they do have means is a rather pointless exercise as there are much more productive ways to bring attention to the needy. I'd suggest joining peace corp if you really want to help.
How is 4chan a glimpse of the future of augmented reality?
For further reading, I'd suggest The Golden Age trilogy by John C. Wright which is an absolute tour de force in full on hard sic-fi post human futurism. Predicting 10,000 years into the future is basically impossible but the author weaves a very believable scenario. Not to put too fine a point on it but these books are the primary reason I lost interest in popular "fantasy" science fiction aka skee-fee.
Maybe it was a blind date.
Every generation since time immemorable has always thought "this is it". The world's going to hell now. Arrogantly we presume that this will be the time of cataclysmic change. The world was just waiting for me^H^H us to get here to seek it's retribution on mankind. And then...amazingly...not much really happens and the next group of younglings arrive...thinking the same thing. The "future" will be just fine, worrywart. I promise.
He says this as he lazily passes a Sunday afternoon reading tech blogs about things he doesn't care about. Like I said above (or below, dear reader), the Internet is a funny place.
Google, Facebook, 100 advertising sites, are all busy trying to gather as much information about me as possible, and not giving me any control over it.
Um, really? Really? and if that's too much trouble, you can probably hire somebody on mechanical Turk to do it for 10 cents.
"She's" a trap, dude. Unless you're into that kind of thing of course in which case carry on.
The Internet is a funny place. About half the comments on any blog post about Glass are comments mocking it. Yet in the next breath, the same commented will decry "lack of innovation" in the tech industry. Personally I don't need yet another way to edit my spreadsheets or unlock my phone. I'm ready for something new and consumer palatable augmented reality is it. Google might still get it wrong but I'm with them all the way for trying.
A Pissoir might serve one of the purposes of a bathroom but it is not a bathroom. I know lexical laziness is en vogue so pardon my pedantry.
Um, it's not even for sale to the general public so how would you have any idea what it will cost? And if you think the explored kit they are selling to the Google I/O attendees is indicative of the real price, I ask you, have you priced console dev kits vs. The price of the consumer hardware lately? The two have nothing in common.