So Google wants to make the scifi glasses we’ve seen in every futurist scifi novel. Quick summary of how this might actually work:
All kidding aside, there’s something I feel people are kind of missing about the Google Glass video. Viticci has some smart questions, and Joe Stracci calls them out on the “out of the way” shenanigans and Gruber agrees.
What I want to know is: what do these glasses do that current mobile phones do not? Are they just a convenient way of accessing the functionality you can already pull out of your pocket? I can’t imagine paying several hundred dollars just to avoid pulling a glowing rectangle out to do something. I mean, taking a photo requires reaching up and touching the glasses - is that really vastly more convenient than pulling out a cell phone?
I think there’s room for future technology here, but Google’s video misses it. Imagine if the camera were always running - constantly recording video, with say a rolling 30-minute backlog. When you see something amazing, like a cute puppy or a funny mishap or a fight between friends, you hit a button and it saves the current backlog to a cloud server somewhere. Video you didn’t know you needed to record, that you wouldn’t have taken any action to record normally, is now yours for review and cataloging. You could do the same for conversations, with a Google Voice-like transcription recording the last 30 minutes of conversation you’ve had. When you need to remember something - important dates, travel tips, web sites - just hit save, and it backs up to your cloud.
Augmented reality directions are cool. Augmented reality with names hovering over people’s heads would be awesome (I suck at remembering names, especially at parties). Augmented reality games would be amazing. Halting State by Charles Stross has the best use of AR glasses I’ve read, and if you ever want wacky-but-plausible futuristic ideas, Mr. Stross is absolutely full of them. But Google, I think, hasn’t seen the greater vision yet. Their video is fairly pedestrian in comparison.