Google Glass, for those of you who have been living under a rock the past week, is a new technology product that resembles a funky pair of modern glasses… without the glass. Over one eye, instead, is a cube of glass that displays information in front of your eyeball. Instead of looking at a handheld device’s screen, you’re kind of looking at this “heads-up” display of info. It takes voice commands to navigate, just like the latest generation of smartphones can.
Some people are really excited by this new technology device. It is one step closer to interacting with a computer inside your brain rather than through our organic input devices (in this case, our eyeballs and voice).
But it begs the question — who is having difficulty using existing devices where wearing your computer on your head is less obtrusive (or obnoxious) than wearing it in your pocket or purse?
Robert Scoble, one technologist, listed three cool things about Google Glass from his personal experience after wearing it for 2 weeks:
1. They are much more social than looking at a cell phone. Why? I don’t need to look away from you to use Google, or get directions, or do other things.
2. The voice works and works with nearly every one and in every situation. It’s the first product that literally everyone could use it with voice. It’s actually quite amazing, even though I know that the magic is that it expects to hear only a small number of things. “OK Glass, Take a Picture” works. “OK Glass, Take a Photo” doesn’t. The Glass is forcing your voice commands to be a certain set of commands and no others will be considered. This makes accuracy crazy high, even if you have an accent.
[3.] I continue to be amazed with the camera. It totally changes photography and video. Why? I can capture moments.
Let’s go through these, shall we?
1. How is pretending to look and pay attention to someone — simply because the screen is in front of you as one eye is looking at them — any different than looking away to check a screen on a handheld device? At least with a handheld device, the other person knows when you are no longer paying attention to them. With Google Glass, you might seem to be looking at me, but you could just as well be buying a pair of shoes on Amazon.com.
From a human interaction perspective, this is maddening. Google Glass is going to once again blur the lines between real social interaction — being “in the moment” with another human being — and just being physically present. Being present is what a lot of people do at their full-time jobs (e.g., people who aren’t doing what they love for a living). You clock in, put together the widgets, then clock out.
When I’m engaged in a social interaction with another human being, I want them to be not just physically there with me — but also emotionally and intellectually engaged with me. If they are only “half there” while checking stock quotes and their Facebook page on Google Glass, honestly, that’s not a quality human interaction any longer (nor one worth my time).
Because we have a mountain of research that demonstrates — without a doubt — that people are generally poor multi-taskers. So while you think you won’t be noticed checking Facebook on Google Glass, guess what — you will be. And it’ll be a huge turn-off.
2. My five year old car has voice commands. I never use them because it takes more brain processing power to speak something than to push a button on the dash.
I think some technologists in our society became enamored of voice commands through science fiction like Star Trek, e.g., “Computer, tell me what’s our current speed.” Wow, that’s great, the computer responds with your current speed, “Warp 5.4.” Looking at an intelligently designed dashboard could’ve gotten you the same information with just a glance — and again, expending zero brain cycles in having to formulate a command — and in Google Glass’s apparent case, the correct command — and then speak it.
My iPhone also has extensive voice commands, and while I use them to compose text sometimes, I’m not really clear on how doing it through thin air (e.g., Google Glass) is somehow “better” than doing it to a handheld device I have to pull out of my pocket first. More convenient? Perhaps, ((Really, is reaching into your pocket that big a deal??)) but it’s offset by the lesser convenience of having to wear (and constantly recharge) a somewhat heavy (as far as glasses go) and unconventional pair of glasses.
3. People seem obsessed with “capturing moments” in their lives. Each and every one of us already does this every day — they’re called memories. Memories are wonderfully artistic, colorful and vibrant things. But we actually have to fully experience the event we’re trying to capture in a memory in order to recall it later.
Today, we’re losing that ability to a pale imitation of memory — photographs and videos. A photograph or video can never replay the actual emotional and intellectual experience of being at an event or living in a moment of time in your life.
In the movie, Strange Days, people could experience other people’s recorded experiences through a neural interface — but it was the full experience: emotions, smells, sights, sounds, you name it. Short of that, even a video taken today is equivalent to a Civil War photograph in terms of being as immersive and fully-experienced compared to actual memory.
Now don’t get me wrong — it’s great to capture a moment in photographs or video from time to time in your life. But not every moment. And not to the point where capturing the moment is more important than living in the moment.
Someone wearing Google Glass might claim, “Well, that’s the beauty of Glass — I can capture it without interruption.” Umm, sure ya can. Until you hit that memory limit, or need to try and do a real-time upload of video on a sketchy wifi or 3G connection. Or find your battery is running low (again). Or any of a number of other technological things that can and do happen when you have an always-on connection to unlimited distractions.
Every time a Google Glass wearer starts talking to me, my first thought is always going to be, “Are they really listening to me or updating their Facebook status? Are they really here with me, or are they out there somewhere online?” When I see that person not really following what I’m saying, I’ll have my answer.
Google Glass could be a game changer for some. For instance, I think that for some people who have certain handicaps, it could really help improve their lives.
But for most of the rest of the world, Google Glass is going to be an interrupter — not disrupter — of social interactions.
It is one of those technologies answering a question — much like the Segway — that nobody asked.
For further reading: The one big factor Google Glass is missing
10 comments
Consider the therapeutic possibilities in the future! Rather than relying on a client’s report of something that happened, the therapist can actually watch it unfold if the client happened to be wearing his or her Google glass and it was set for permanent record (as many peoples’ will be, it’s inevitable).
Similarly, who’s going to be the first to put their entire life up online for anyone to see at anytime in retrospect? Surely there will be people who will record their entire lives for archiving and playback.
Therapists aren’t private investigators — they aren’t there to interpret reality to the patient. They are there to help the patient interpret the patient’s perception of reality. This has worked just fine for many decades, with millions of patients helped. Google Glass, in such a context, seems just like a technological time-waster that will do little to improve a patient’s psychotherapy outcomes.
Just consider an example. A patient comes in and complains, “This woman was so rude to me while I was getting my coffee. It completely ruined my whole day!” Now, do we really need to see whether the woman was as rude as the patient believes she was to her? Or is it the reaction — and what being rude to the patient really means (e.g., the internal self-talk dialogue, such as “I’m worthless and everybody treats me like dirt”) — more important? I’d argue the former is just wasting the patient’s time, while the latter is what psychotherapy is primarily about.
Sure, there might be exceptions to this, but they are just that — exceptions.
As for a replay of the Truman Show (really, how original is that going to be?), no thanks. I have zero interest in watching other people’s lives when I’m too busy living my own.
Having spent several years paralysed, I can see major advantages for the dissabled. Apart from that, I orefer to use the keyboard for my laptop, etc. Much faster & I often prefer to remain quiet … or, listen to the radio or watch tv while using my computer. If there are others around one while using the Google glass, how do they know when one is speaking to them, or to the computer? Love the development of the technology for the other applications.
Exactly — for people with disabilities or handicaps, I can see this being a great helper! I could see it becoming a game changer in many people’s lives and help improve their quality of living.
But for most people, I just see it as a total distraction to genuine and mindful human interaction.
I’m sorry, but this article couldn’t be more off base. While I understand the deeper concerns that it is attempting to reach, the reality is not even remotely as interesting as this article would have people believe. Anybody who has seen Google Glass in operation knows that most of the examples set forth in this article are not realistic. (I am speaking as someone that has a pair of the glasses and just finished wearing them to an event that consisted of both family and strangers.)
Let’s start with the three initial counter-points to what Robert Scoble had to say.
1. The statement that the glass portion is in front of the person’s eye is only true if you take a very broad meaning of “in front”. The screen portion is located just above your line of sight. So, it is obvious when you are looking at the screen as your eyes look upward. If you are truly engaged in a meaningful conversation with someone, you are looking them in the eye while talking. If someone’s eyes suddenly darted upward even for a second, you would notice. Then, there is the idea that a person looking at someone wearing Glass can’t tell if that person is checking Facebook. The only way this could happen is, again, if the person NOT wearing Glass was themselves not fully engaged in the conversation. First, the screen portion of Glass is not always on. To turn it on you either have to reach up and tap the frames or make a rather obvious head gesture. Second, when the screen is on, it is clearly obvious to anyone looking at the face of the person wearing glass. (The person not wearing glass will see a tiny version of what the wearing is viewing. Probably not enough to know what they are looking at, but enough to know something is on the screen.) And finally, interacting with Glass requires that you either touch the frames to use the track pad, or that you speak to the glasses themselves. In fact, today when I was using them I said “Ok, glass. Record video” and the result was someone turning, looking at me, and saying, “Huh? What did you say?” Using glass is the same as tapping away at your cell phone, or talking to your cell phone.
2. When you take the myopic position that you have, you would be correct in your statements about voice commands. However, if you take a step back you may realize that there are place that using voice commands would come in handy. The problem is, things like voice recognition don’t just magically appear and work 100%. Instead, it takes a significant amount of time and AI training to reach any level of accuracy. The more people contributing voice samples to a voice recognition AI, the better the AI will become at recognizing voices with different accents and speech patterns. Further, there are already instances where voice control makes a lot of sense in our day to day lives. While it may be easier on a car to change settings by reaching down and touching the device, you fail to consider a situation where the number of options that a device can provide is significant enough that you can’t have a button for each selection, or finding the correct selection takes long enough that the amount of time you take your eyes off the road becomes dangerous. Take my 3 month old car. The number of inputs on it is significant. You have AM, FM, XM, USB, iPod, Bluetooth Audio, AHA, and aux. I can reach over to the touch screen and manually select one of those inputs, or I can just hit the voice button and say which one I want. The problem with manually selecting an input is there are so many that the screen has to scroll to provide them all. No longer is it a quick “reach down and hit the button”. Even a well designed dashboard may not be sufficient to offset the amount of time your eyes are off the road and the increased danger of an accident. However, hitting the button on the steering wheel and saying “Bluetooth audio” does require a bit more conscious effort, but it doesn’t require that I take my eyes off the road. Finally, as voice recognition and AI systems improve, systems will start to understand the nuance of human speech and some day just saying “Hey car, turn on the radio” will be enough.
I will agree that people do like the sci-fi aspects of shows like Star Trek. However, I will also argue that a lot of those aspects have come to life in various ways that have improved our lives. The idea of having a personal communicator is the same basic idea as a cellular phone. Yes, in the wrong hands someone using a cellular phone can be a horrible thing. But, show me anything in life where that isn’t true. Having a super computer on your star ship that contains all of the information in the world is somewhat similar to having access to the Internet. You can find out almost anything you want, when you want to.
3. Again, I somewhat agree. However, the opposite side of the coin is that memories fade and are difficult to share in a way that a picture can. Memories can provide details that you can’t capture in a picture, such as smells and sounds. But, sharing a memory with a friend is difficult at best without a picture. If you attempt to verbally share that picture, the view the other person will have in their mind will be colored by their own views and experiences. What may be a vibrant and beautiful memory to you may end up flat and pointless to someone else. This is why the saying goes “A picture is worth a thousand words.” That said, the current methods of acquiring pictures require that we disconnect ourselves from the event by placing a device between us and the thing we are taking a picture of. Because of this, it is impossible to be “in the moment” while taking a picture with a camera or cell phone. Something like glass that can be used while you continue to view the action directly can actually enhance the value of pictures by allowing you to form memories that go along with the pictures. I believe this will actually allow us to use the pictures in the future to give us better recall of what the moment was actually like. Is it perfect? No. But, it is better than what currently exists.
The argument that battery life, storage space, and real time data connections are a good reason this is not the case is disingenuous at best. When I was young, I had a 110 camera that could take somewhere between 24 and 48 pictures per roll of film. If I wanted to take pictures indoors, I had to use a flash, which required batteries (and, at the time a flash cube, which further limited the number of pictures I could take). By comparison, today I can take thousands of pictures, indoors or out using batteries on a camera that will generally last a whole day. Yes, if I fail to charge the battery I am left without the ability to take pictures. However, with older cameras I had to carry a bag of extra film around with me. If I ran out of film, I had the same problem. Further, with the shear number of pictures you can take with current flash memory technology, you argument simply falls flat.
In closing, to make the argument that Glass will be less useful to the general populace that some might expect is a silly one. Before cellular phones, why would you want to have a cellular phone in a city? There were pay phones on every corner and phones in every house! Such things would only be useful to a small portion of the population that needs to conduct business while on the go. And even then, it won’t work very well because it is limited to the areas covered by a cellular tower. This argument was true and completely valid at the time the cellular phone was invented. Yet, now I see teenagers walking down the street talking on their cell phones. But, that would be impossible because cellular phones were an answer to a question nobody asked.
While I have gone on and on about the topic at hand, I ultimately have two points. 1. Don’t judge a technology that you have never used. (Certainly not based on articles written by other people that have also never used it, but claim to be “experts”.) 2. Just because you can’t see the value in a given technology is no reason to write it off. There is a significant amount of “pointless” technology in the world that people value greatly.
As someone who currently has, and is using Google Glass I can say that I understand why people are skeptical of its value. With the current state that Glass is in, I too have questions about its value. However, I can also see potential if the final product is refined in a lot of ways. So, why not just watch what happens and when it is finally released, let the market decide if there is any value? You never know when you will be surprised.
Google Glass is in no way the same as tapping away at one’s smartphone or mobile device. You say it’s “obvious” a person is using Glass because it will only be on when a person is actively using it. So how long do you think it’s going to be before most people just keep the glass portion on all the time? Why wouldn’t you?
When cell phones and computers first came out, people actually turned them off when they weren’t using them (some people still do, but I suspect it’s a minority now). How long will it be before Glass lets you know you have a new text waiting, or a new Facebook update? How long will it take ordinary people to resist the temptation to check to see what that text or message is about?
If the screen is always in front of you, what normal human being wouldn’t be curious to just quickly check it out? I mean, that’s the whole point of it, right, convenience?
My point is that people will use Glass just as they use any technology that’s always on and always right in front of them. Human nature is to not to be able to resist it. People will nearly always succumb to their curiosity when given the choice and if there’s little significant ramifications for doing so. This is how technology can insidiously and discretely chip away at direct face-to-face interactions.
Glass is simply going to speed up this process because it is more convenient — apparently — than your typical mobile device. But it doesn’t appear to offer anything more substantial in exchange for this bargain.
I’m certain that the market will define that Glass has value. My concern is how technology like Glass chips away at our social interactions without giving a lot of value back or adding to them in any significant, meaningful way.
(I think you missed the point of my call-outs of the technology — I wasn’t implying that Glass was somehow deficient in these areas, or that they weren’t necessarily important to some people. Scoble was claiming these 3 things were amazing aspects of Glass, and my main point was that they’ve been available in technology devices and are used in much the same way for years. Except with one hand in play. )
FBA was pretty much dead on with all his statements.
I will give a small example.
This past weekend I attended a meetup with 20+ Glass Explorers. Now one would think there would just be people tapping and swiping and not paying attention. The exact opposite is what happened. No one was pulling out their cell phones and disengaging with people. At the most you would see someone nod up, take a quick look and be right back into the conversation. Taking less than 2 seconds. We took a run down the beach. I can’t tell you how many people I saw stop and check their phones from a full stride. We just kept trucking along.
Granted, there will be people that stand there all day and look at the prism, just as people do with their cell phones now.
fba is also correct in saying, you really shouldn’t bash a tech without trying it first. Making assumptions based on what you have read or heard doesn’t give you the information needed to make an truly informed judgement. That being said, I am sure there are plenty of Explorers in your area that would love to come to you and let you demo Glass for yourself. I assure you, you will gain much more understanding of the device than you do now.
Dave
It’s funny how many people in this thread just assumed I hadn’t tried it. For the record, I had time with Google Glass on two occasions, and on one of them for about an hour with someone helping me understand the capabilities and such.
While testimonials are great, they aren’t data. I would never imagine a group of 20 people who were at a meetup about X technology would be engaged with anything other than X technology. I go to meetups all the time, and people seem to be engaged with one another on the topic of the meetup — not with their heads down on their smartphones. Sure, are there times people do that? Absolutely. But if the point of getting together face-to-face is to, well, get together face-to-face, most people will be there to engage with one another.
How long does that 2 seconds extend if you want to reply to a text you just received, in a private manner? Oh yeah, you can’t actually respond to anything privately with Google Glass, since its interface is primarily voice-activated. Meaning it’s great for one-way digestion of stuff (and very limited video recording), but horrible for the stuff people primarily use their smartphones for (communicating with one another).
Dr. Grohol, the previous poster, ‘fba’, has a point. He (and I) have worn Glass (me since May 2013) and while I’ll stop short of suggesting you haven’t, it’s almost a sidebar to your comments. It’s not important as to who has / has not. The comments seem to point more toward a theoretical perspective than actual however.
An underlying premise of Glass, as extolled by Sergi Brin, one of the founders of Google and the vision behind Glass, has stated that the goal is specifically to get people to stop engaging with their tech long enough to have a human-to-human interaction. The filter of everything through digital has us staring at a display of one type or another almost non-stop from morning to night.
Great case in point was opening day this year at the ballpark – while everyone around me was watching the events via their smartphone display, which riveted their vision to their iPhone / SmartPhone as they try to record the events, I was able to readily watch the events unfold, experience them and never once had to look at the display while it was recording. The device was not between me and the events occurring – it was ancillary and completely out of the way.
When I am with friends, it’s nothing to take the device off and speak to those at the table. Particularly if the discussion is NOT about Glass.
I am troubled by the idea that Glass would only serve to extend dis-engagement – but most people think millennials are not engaging with one another, but I see a different image emerging. Millennials use the tech to create off-line engagement opportunities pretty regularly. They want to know where their friend are, so they look on-line, but they do so and then go to meet with them. I find many nay-sayers forget the meet-up part of the equation.
I also do not see what, if any, alternative you propose. Yes, people need to speak with people, real-time, face-to-face about all the things that people need to connect with one another on. The ability to connect online however does not suggest an inability to connect off-line.
What I think is still often overlooked is that the ability to connect digitally has been around for less than a single generation and we do not yet fully understand how it’s going to impact the culture – social norms will be transformed, the word ‘discussion’ will take on a different meaning when used with ‘on line’ and we’ as a culture and species will adapt. The doom ahead is what makes news though.
Adaptation for the better or worse though? I don’t know yet and not understanding how you could know – the tech is too nascent and the cultural aspect of wearable computing is way too early. The predictions for a doom and gloom outcome is always fodder for popular news, but it usually does little to enhance understanding.
Most of us in the XE program will not have your credentials but I’m betting a few do. Would you be interested in having your post put up on the Explorer website so others can help explore the question?
There are limited, specific use-cases that can be made for Google Glass — I don’t deny that. I think for some professions, they may actually be a productivity boon. Short video-taping of some event you need to record? Sure, I could see that. But I don’t think Google sees Glass as just another Go Pro, no?
And I see little actual benefit in everyday use for ordinary people for the most common tasks people conduct on their smartphones. It’s no different — and certainly no better — than pulling out your smartphone and tapping silently for a few seconds to grab the info you’re looking for (except, of course, with the current iteration of Glass, it’s not a silent transaction). It literally takes about 5 seconds to compose a text on my smartphone; it takes about 20-30 seconds to look up a piece of information.
Maybe it has a use for augmented reality, but that’s an area that hasn’t really caught fire yet for anyone. And maybe that’s Google’s goal — to spark new ways of thinking about the world around us with this kind of new technology. But to-date, everything released for Glass has not exactly been innovative. Interesting, sometimes yes. Game-changing? Not yet.
Connecting digitally has been going on since I was a teen — so it’s more than one generation. We’ve learned a LOT in that time — there are entire journals devoted to online interactions and how humans communicate mediated by technology. But Glass isn’t about that as far as I can tell… it seems to be more about making video-recording and picture-taking a little easier. And maybe looking information up, but that component of it is clunky and time-consuming.
In other words, it’s a product half-baked with limited everyday use scenarios. And with Google’s well-worn track record of creating and then abandoning products, it’s just another strike against it gaining any kind of popular traction.
John
PS – I’m happy to have Explorers come over and join the discussion here, but I see no reason to move the discussion to another forum.