I hate videophone myself, but since this is a large part of modern corporate infrastructure, it probably is “world changing” even if it has a lesser profile than some things.
Not unlike how 15 years ago many people I knew joked about how obsolete beta videotape was. They were completely unaware that it had disappeared as a consumer format, but was still relied upon on a daily basis in television studios. It was not readily visible, but it was fulfilling a function.
Not everything needs to be a populist shibboleth to be useful or necessary. How many people like or use it might not have any direct relationship to its significance. People savor the fruits of many technologies they neither know nor understand.
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Wearables may be tough, the way that Google chose to implement it, but they might have taken a cue from Neal Stephenson, who identified wearers of that sort of wearable computing (HUDs and always-on cameras) in Snow Crash as “gargoyles” and indicated that they would probably be ostracized by people who didn’t want their every interaction recorded for possible later commercial exploitation. Contrast that with the Apple Watch, which isn’t nearly as conspicuous, doesn’t have a video-record feature, and has a feature–sending out a “tap” or “heartbeat” to one of your contacts who also has an AW and presumably doesn’t mind–that’s almost inconspicuous.
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