I have a three month old daughter now and I find myself fumbling about with my phone trying to take photos of her. Just last night I dropped my Pixel phone while trying to capture a photo of her. Phone is fine, but she wasn't too happy with the loud noise of my phone hitting the wood floor :) I kind of miss Google Glasses simply for the camera feature.
Instead of a minimal heads up display, I would much rather have a minimal wearable camera without all the extra functionality Google Glasses offered. Google Clips seems to be an alternative hands-free camera with different pros and cons (+I can be in the photo. -Can't capture the same type of photos from my eye viewpoint).
Regarding an always on camera - I'll second other comments in warning there are just so many concerns with abuse, I don't see how to get around those.
I hope that doesn't sound strange, but you start thinking about these things during these times.
A heads up display with no way of taking in data from the outside world is gimped to the point of uselessness and I think you really need to sit down and logic through the "concerns of abuse". There's no opportunity for privacy violation that isn't easier with another form of tech; at least Ive never heard one that sounds remotely plausible.
The trade-off between the convenience of having an always-on camera and living in a society in which everyone has an always-on cameras seems like a no-brainer to me.
There's even a Black Mirror episode like that - "The Entire History of You".
I think Google's onto something with Google Clips. But I think there's more to this concept. Would definitely be interested in a v2 that is able to capture video.
But please don't be "that guy" constantly recording unwilling subjects (except in your own home, of course)
The trouble is in resolving that against the kind of culture that has fostered things like the "creepshots" subreddit.
Smartphones (and GoPros) have already shown the value of being able to film and share more of our lives, but they've also shown the downsides of having our graceless moments broadcast to the world, or the many events that are now impossible to enjoy in a sea of smartphones held aloft, or, if you're an attractive woman, far more of you put online for other people to gawk at.
Until those abuses are resolved somehow, people are going to resist having a little camera attached to everyone's face.
The negativity around Google Glasses amounted to a mismanaged launch. iPhones were introduced to a public already familiar 1st-hand with cell phones, camera phones, and digital cameras. The public was already passingly familiar with smart phones. Google Glasses were introduced with maximum hype to as many early adopters as possible, with no thought as to how it could backfire, and how to navigate those pitfalls. In retrospect, is it any wonder that there were so many inadvisable actions, all adding up to a societal backlash?
Google Glasses should have been rolled out to far fewer people, and in a form factor almost indistinguishable from ordinary eyeglasses.
This is completely different from a device like Echo which sends your voice (and everything it hears in the background) to Amazon for processing.
Another reply mentioned Snaps, which I haven't heard of. It looks interesting, but ultimately it has the same flaw. I'm not going to wear dark sunglasses with LEDs indoors to take family photos.
I suppose there really is no ideal solution. It's either going to be noticeable and thus culturally acceptable or hidden and be bashed for being used by creeps. I suppose a device like Google Clips is probably a better solution for my needs, but it lacks that killer "wink to take a photo" feature.
It's probably better for you -- and for her -- not to have so many photos.
That should be, "you could really capture some great moments directly on film..."
You already captured these moments; you were there; they are ingrained in your memory.
> My mother recently passed and out of all the photos [..] staring right back into my soul."
First of all, my sincere condolences.
Again, you were there. That moment, that specific wonderful moment you witnessed, nice as it is to have something to remember it by, it feels very personal, not something you could share unless you were there, and you were you.
Back in the days of photo-lab development, there existed magic moments caught on camera as well, but it was the luck of the draw. Since they were so rare, there was no fear of missing out, but any such moment caught on camera was all the more special for it.
Maybe this fear of missing out on your own life, pushing one to commit everything to camera, comes at the cost of actually missing out. Life is made better by witnessing these magic moments, but I'm unsure the drive to capture them all enhances the experience, witnessed and remembered in that particular fashion by no one but yourself.
The nice thing is, that they are completely "invisible" for other people around me.
My main problem is what does it give me over wearing a smart watch? The only thing I can think of is being slightly more discreet and the "gesture" not being rude to activate when you are in company. That is something I found out quickly when I started wearing an Apple Watch - even if you are just checking a text message it appears you are checking the time and want to leave. Since then I have greatly cut down on notifications going to my watch, and have even fewer that even ping on my phone.
To me, having a camera on it is what would make it compelling, but at the same time make it creepy. Say being able show driving directions overlaid on the actual road, versus some floating text. Or you sit down at a desk with just a keyboard and mouse and your "displays" are only shown in your field of view - and you can customize, move and resize them as you wish.
This. I don't wear glasses and don't like the idea of walking around with notifications floating around my eyes.
But a set of monitors that fill my field of vision and fit in my pocket sounds awesome.
Smart watches are not for everyone either. I hate having things weighting down my hands or hitting tables so this would be a device I’d choose over any smartwatch.
Also I think it’s nice to have a device that is instantanous to put on and take off. You want to focus on something for 15 seconds ? just take them off. Finished focusing ? they’re back on.
I often wonder whether I'm alone in thinking that checking messages in company is rude too? I'm quite sure that it would be considered rude 10 years ago, but I feel like general opinion has changed on that.
Turn by turn directions when riding a bike. Easy to track countdown timers that don't require swiping/navigating through a smartwatch UI.
Limited purpose devices are useful because the UI can be optimized to just a handful of use cases. Just like the original Palm Pilots were (IMHO) better for organization than modern smartphones. (The original Palm Pilots also had a more responsive UI and never decided to, at random, take 10 seconds to load my home screen after unlock.)
Combine this with Amazon's smart store that knows when you've put an item in your basket, and a shopping list. Have your shopping list appear one item at a time, and automatically progress to the next item as you fill up your basket!
No need to flip through the UI on a smartwatch to get to the shopping list, it just appears when you walk into the store.
From the article:
>> It projects a rectangle of red text and icons down in the lower right of your visual field. But when I wasn’t glancing down in that direction, the display wasn’t there. My first thought was that the frames were misaligned.
The HUD in Google Glass was also outside of your normal field of view and for certain things this was a poor experience. For example, using Google maps integration I felt like I was taking my eyes off the road and felt safer simply using my smartphone mounted to my windshield.
In fine mode, it would give you a fairly detailed readout of the bearing and distance to your target (marked with GPS). It required doing that thing where you're looking up-and-to-the-right in order to see what was going on.
In coarse mode, the entire Glass display was changed to a single color. I found that it showed up well even in someone's peripheral vision and the colors were distinct enough that you could navigate pretty well without having to watch the display.
I tried using symbols (giant triangles to indicate direction and such) but none of them worked as well as the color blocks.
As someone who wears glasses, I find it impossible to run with them because of the movement or them just falling off. Are people who wear glasses able to run with them - am I doing something wrong?
Get a strap for your glasses and have it pulled fairly tight to your head. They are cheap. One similar to this. It needs to be the correct shape for your glasses frame so it's probably best to go to a real store and try a few straps in person.
https://www.amazon.com/Peeper-Keepers-Eyeglass-Retainer-Hold...
Worst case scenario: Companies make what are essentially prescription goggles, like you can see in the NBA
FWIW I also agree there is a strong market for endurance athletes - the progress of Recon Jet has been followed pretty closely by many in the Cycling/Triathalon community, where getting Garmin Edge computer style realtime metrics for things like speed/power output etc into glasses has been a dream of many for a while. This is a market already used to high priced electronics for training (a good bicycle power meter regularly runs over $1000 alone).
This might just be the start of a new, big, market at a time when they desperately need to diversify their sources of revenue. Seeing them achieve that through in-house innovation as opposed to copying (or buying) competing products would be great.
It sounds like Intel's tech is fundamentally different—they paint your retina with a laser—and this may make the background issue irrelevant. And it was certainly part of the safety pitch, which was that this is a very low-powered laser. If it had blue or green in it they couldn't make this claim.
They should have looked at a larger sample size. Red is used in rangefinder viewfinders for over 30+ years. Leica M240 has red and white as options. Red is by far the best from all standpoints - contrast, legibility and versatility.
Red dot sights are used in firearms and they are also by far superior to any other color.
I am doubtful of Google engineers and whether they put enough thought into exploring colors by using a larger sample size or cross checking different industries.
The article mentionned there's no interaction yet; I wonder if they could track eyeball movement and use eye blinks for clicking. (Someone else mentionned a ring as an input device which is also an excellent idea.)
Right now, what I'd want is a very simple, slim, long-lasting watch that would notify me of emails, messages, phone calls and notifications based on their origin (business account, work account, personal, random). It doesn't even need a display, different vibration modes and LED's would do fine.
Honestly, they've always looked like a less functional phone strapped to my wrist.
[1]https://www.wareable.com/smartwatches/best-smart-analogue-wa...
You can still buy an older watch and play around with it if you are a hacker, but its probably a bad idea for the general consumer because it doesn't receive support/updates.
How many characters can it display at once? One line or multiple lines? What's the resolution? Are images supported?
I don't think a monochrome device will sell, but the display is (to me) by far the most interesting development here.
So we'll need new social norms to control what people share about what they learn. E.g. we already don't mention what we hear from behind bathroom doors in polite company. We'll need rules so that people can continue to operate as humans in this new paradigm.
It's not hard, it's an innate characteristic of porn. It's the inverse of rule 36 - as long as a communication channel exists, it will be used for porn, no matter how inconvenient it might be. Also, playing it straight, someone will have a fetish for porn over that channel, no way around it.
Now you mention it, probably...
Now in addition to people talking out loud alone on the streets, people checking their notifications on their watch and phones at dinner, we'll have people looking at your teeth doing weird eye and head motions when you talk to them...
Google products come with visible and invisible strings; this, at least for now, doesn't.
For the glasses, the laser is probably being scanned using a mems mirror (like how a DLP tv works, sorta), and modulated in brightness periodically to create the pixels. Since there's only one "point" of contact between your lens and the beam, the lens doesn't distort the beam like it would an image. That's where the idea of focus comes in. If you were looking at a photograph with your eye, there would be many sources and colors of light. Since the lens refracts incoming light based on direction, position, and color, your lens' job is to make sure the "pixels" of the photograph stay spatially organized with respect to each other. That's what being in focus means. And since the laser has only one color and one direction, all that light stays together and makes a nice dot on your retina. The only thing left to do is make a correction to the overall distortion pattern your lens introduces ,which is similar for pretty much everyone. Same reason you need to add barrel distortion before sending video to an HMD. I think that's what they were showing with that "warping" red image of the glasses' display.
bufferless - Don't wait for an image, just stream pixels as fast as you find them
clockless - No world "ticks", the world is an append-only log of "percepts"¹ which can be projected onto any time.
stochastic - Don't wait for certainty about a pixel, just push out the most probable ones first
signed distance field - Afformentioned "percepts" don't have well defined boundaries like a polygon, instead "fields" centered on a point describe how light moves around them. Any two fields can be trivially summed, so you can ignore most of a scene when searching for a specific pixel near a small number of local fields.
Together they allow you to supply the eyes with nearly zero-latency data with arbitrarily low computing power.
¹ As an aside, there is evidence humans don't see a "now" tick either, we perceive "fields out of time" directly, log them, and interpolate their relationship to "now" thereafter, such that we feel that we are "seeing" something which our eyes have already stopped reporting about. Thus SDFs and clockless rendering are a natural fit and map well to human perception.
I was just learning how to make a "Julia Child" omelette and would've loved to have her technique (<5 secs!) on repeat while I perform the maneuver.
Q. Hey, this won't just try to show me
more Twitter bullshit, will it?
A. No, no, no! Heh heh! It will show you
Yelp bullshit. Much better, yes?
Q. Ah... so the advertising will finally
be the kind we all yearn for?
A. Yessssss!
They should really have a chat with my SO. She can always tell if someone is paying attention.
I think squinting is a pretty natural gesture that could be used for controlling this device. That is - if it's feasible to make it so.
There’s also the thing that blue light accelerates retina cell death.. I‘d rather wait for some long term studies before putting these on.
Interesting choice of location -- I would have thought it would be better to put it somewhere above the normal field of view, as most people tend to look up when thinking and trying to recall something. The kind of information smart glasses offer seems like it could be more naturally accessed that way.
1. I paid to have my eyes fixed so I do not need glasses. 2. I am not sure what value any of this brings. I have not see the killer app..
That being said there is an irrational part of me that wants to hold out for the in eyeball version of this. The real issue is the killer app, now that I think about it, is the brain interface where you can think about they information you want and have it come up. Until then...well.
If I was them, I would add a bone conduction speaker in the stem so it can give you audible information as well.
I also like the ring input device another commenter mentioned.[1]
It would probably be too heavy, part of their 'non-intrusiveness' goal is to make it be very light.
Battery life, normal temperature, reliability vs a gimmick that 1 out of a 1,000 users will want.
The first successful business in the "glasses with HUD" space will be one that targets businesses which manufacture complex things using human beings.
Luxottica-Essilor? They own global eyeglass distribution, both offline and online. They can take the Android market. Apple’s glasses are supposedly a couple of years away.
I don’t like huge thick rimmed glasses and I never will.
This is the kind of product I would be really interested in using. I was sad when Google Glass died after pushback in the Bay Area.
Since Intel doesn’t productize themselves, I wonder who Intel will find to build and sell it. Traditional PC companies don’t seem like a great fit, but I have a feeling the launch partners will be companies like Asus anyway.
Another proposal I had was a bracelet that would sense capacitance changes in the hand upon fingers touching each other; this way you could have a 12-key "keyboard" on the phalanges of the non-opposable fingers (3 phalanges x 4 fingers) touch-able by the thumb.
Such technologies would require minimal power input and provide good interaction with any headset; but at the time Intel were not interested in the research needed to build a prototype.
I think some of it depends on which finger you're targeting, too. Wearing it on the index finger makes it easier to tap/push buttons using the thumb.
In my HCI class, we went over this paper [1] (2010). It has a wide variety of always-available input and output and many of them would work well with these glasses. My hardware crush is a Myo [2], although I don't know how well it works. The videos of it look neat, at least :).
Also, I had the exact same idea for a hand interface as a project for my Ubicomp class, but I didn't have the skills to do it. I ended up doing research for "smart jewelry" instead :|
[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1761670738/ring-shortcu...
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...
That sounds awful! Like some shit from Black Mirror! Jesus, Fuck!
>no microphone (for now)
This is already the case.