Sounds like you’re describing the Microsoft Hololens to me. One of the bonuses with this device is it’s unwieldliness, I can’t picture too many people wandering into a bar with one of them on, it’ll mostly be for home entertainment, work and creative uses. Will be interesting to see what Magic Leap come up with as well.
It won’t be long until these things become completely unobtrusive though, and then we’re going to be in a very difficult position with regard to privacy. Will everyone else need to be wearing active countermeasures to interfere with their operation?
This is what bother me most about the Gurgle Glub nontroversy. There are and have been many actually covert cameras on offer, including glasses, but these seem to generate no upset nor news pieces. FWIW I wouldn’t think twice about products like this, yet am likely to burn government or corporate surveillance cameras with lasers. People’s risk assessment is IMO kind of poor. An individual with intrusive technologies - be they surveillance, weapons, or disruptive tech - is always less able and less likely to interfere with your life than those things used by large institutions. But even as people complain about corporations and government, they still cling to the notion of such clusters of concentrated influence being somehow safer and more accountable.
Recording with Glass is VERY obvious; the screen is on and visible, the user is distracted (as obviously as looking at your phone) and starting up the recording or picture is also as obvious as doing the same on your phone.
Not only that, but Glass is OBVIOUS, in the same way that a phone IS NOT. No-one will think twice about a phone in your vest’s front pocket. Hell, you can’t even see if it is recording or not, as you can’t see the screen.
The difference is that you THINK Glass is more intrusive, but a phone is more so, as it just escapes your attention.
Yes, Glass can be modified so that it is less obvious to see you are recording. But if someone is that desperate to record, they’d invest 50 bucks in a pen camera you really won’t notice, or just put their recording phone in their front pocket.
Glass’ invasion of provacy is a PERCIEVED invasion, not an actual one. In fact, it is less so, because Glass use screams ‘here is a camera!’, whilst any other method of recording does not…
Being scared of Glass is like being scared of a tv crew recording you: you might have a point, but it’s quite obvious that there is a possibility of recording and it is verey obvious if you are being recorded.
That’s nice but the public kind of gave their opinion and it is that the wearers are “glassholes” and people don’t want to be around the device. Sorry if it isn’t rational enough for you.
The public can take their precious opinions and stick them where they belong.
Too bad it is Microsoft. Hope it will work cross-platform, or - better - that cheaper, open-hardware, knockoffs appear soon. It can’t be soon enough.
Why not creative uses on-the-go? Work on a CAD part when waiting for a bus or for food in a bar? Do 3d scans of the landscape/cityscape for a game or other use? Teleconference over said CAD part in a coffee shop with a virtual colleague in a tearoom/park/home half the planet away?
And then there’s the world of other possibilities. If such device annotates people and helps me remember/recognize who is who, by face, and tracks and annotates facial emotional expressions, it will make it more than priceless; THAT is what I am waiting for, for ages now.
Well, it seems Google doesn’t agree since they killed the product. That public you don’t care for is where the money comes from when people are selling something. If they don’t want to buy it, you can’t really sell it.
…in its current form I’d consider it of rather limited use, real AR display would be better. But even the rudimentary form is better than nothing.
But for that you don’t need The Plebes. You need a market niche big and/or wealthy enough. And even if we go only for specialized engineering/medical/security applications, the market is there.
Except there’s enough who want.
That said, anybody knows an affordable ($30 or less) display that could be mounted on eyeglasses and controlled via SPI or via PAL/NTSC video (should work with Raspberry Pi class computers)? Needs decent resolution (at least QVGA, better at least VGA) and small size (half-inch or so) and simple optics (I suck in optics design). Desired for workshop applications, for interfacing to a multimeter and thermal cam and comm/navg when outside and some other stuff.
…and to irk oversensitive plebes…
Edit: There’s also the possibility of going full-VR. A pair of pairs of cameras, a 4k or better video display. Digital signal processing that takes signal from low-light and high-light camera pair, and combines to a high-dynamic-range one for the eye. This way all sorts of augmentations of the displayed image can be done - putting in virtual objects, markers, annotations…, combining plain video with multispectral sensors - near-IR “infragreen”, thermal, even synthetic image from ultrasonic sonar arrays (good for e.g. diving in muddy waters), GIS data (for flying in fog), radar (for driving in fog)… Even just the HDR can be pretty useful; a prototype welding helmet has dynamic range of 1:1e7, you can see the arc, the molten metal puddle, and the workpiece, all with ease.
And if you have certain sets of vision troubles, the image preprocessing can do some compensations. And you wouldn’t want to deny disabled people their aids, even if they contain cameras and image processing - would you?
The puny biology-limited senses can get stuffed. And there’s no reason why not wear this gear outdoors.
I would bet 90% of Americans have never seen or been near some one that was using Google Glass.
Instead we have seen the vocally anti-Glass minority shouting at the vocally pro-Glass minority (who shout back just as much). Until something like Glass becomes a consumer product, and not a glorified dev kit / tech demo, it’s quite hard to know what the public will say.
I live in the Bay Area. We had a lot of glassholes around. They were banned from local bars and, in the case of at least one place I frequent, told to take it off or leave, their choice.
I’m almost as amazed that people objected to the privacy intrusion of Google Glass as I was by the fact that cities weren’t actually built up around the Segway scooter. How clueless can these guys be? Are their lives really that insular? Do they never interact with regular people (other than service workers)?
p.s. You know, bozo, if people regularly had their phones out everywhere all the time filming everything around them, there’d be as much upset about that as there is about Google Glass.
Yes, but that doesn’t change my statement, the Bay Area is not the public. It is its own microcosm that has social dynamics not likely to be found elsewhere.
With the ongoing friction between people in the San Francisco area and tech companies including Google is it a surprise that people may react badly to a new project from Google?
I live in the Kansas City area, no bars here have banned Glass that I know of, but then there are two factors to consider. I have seen no one here wearing Glass. And Google has an overall good feeling about it here as the bringer of low cost high speed internet. (I don’t personally have Google Fiber as it’s not available in my suburb yet.)
I remember the camera phone panics from the late '90s and early '00s. All the evil perverts were going to be taking pictures of women under bathroom stall dividers and uploading them on the internet. Your right though, that widespread abuse never materialized and eventually we all just forgot about it. I have this feeling that in 10 years if a Glass like product has been out for most of that time period without it resulting in rampant abuse that we will all just forget that anyone ever had a problem with it.
They do some of that, certainly, and it is a problem. But it’s not like Google Glass where the default is always worn/always on. Few people have their phone’s camera running all the time and constantly aimed wherever they look everywhere they are.
that kind of thing is unfortunate. as a 20 year veteran school teacher of 5th and 6th grade children i’m so strongly adapted to talking to children i don’t even consider those aspects of it when i’m out in public. in the situation you describe i’d probably just get the kid out and set him on the ground. i don’t know whether that makes me brave or stupid. then again, a child is generally more likely to be abused by someone known to the child than by a stranger but i suppose that’s really a side issue.
as for the google glass i’ve only run into two people with one, both white men, both at the renaissance festival my wife and i go to annually. i tried to start a conversation at a pub with one about the experience with the glass and he gave me a patronizing look and walked away. the other one i met and talked to for a while before asking about the glass and he said if i was that interested i should sign up for the beta and pay for the experience myself. i was somewhat unimpressed.
When “the public” starts labeling a group of people with a derogatory name based entirely on misconceptions and things that are completely false about that group, that shouldn’t be “rational enough” for anybody. Sorry if you think that sort of thing is perfectly all right.
But no one records video with a smartphone that way unless they’re going out of their way to hide what they’re doing, and their video quality would be crap since they wouldn’t be able to hold the camera steady or even see what was being captured.
I attended a Google Glass developer’s meeting last year where a bunch of techies were showing off the cool new ways they were using the technology. One was a videographer who showed off candid video footage that was only made possible because recording with Google Glass is less obvious than recording with other devices. In his case it wasn’t anything creepy—one example was footage for a client who wanted his proposal caught on video without tipping off the fiancé-to-be—but it was also a clear demonstration of how easy it would be to use Google Glass for creep purposes.
That friction is much more media hype than reality.
The reason bars in KC don’t ban it is that they don’t run into it. Places like the Bay Area where people actually have these devices and walk around with them result in people acting out and businesses banning them. You don’t ban things that aren’t a problem unless you’re the GOP.
