Few new technologies have been as hyped - or as misunderstood - as Google Glass, says Matt Warman
Price: $1,500 (not currently available to the public)
It’s the computer that has both excited and worried millions. Forget the next iPad or the Samsung Galaxy S5 - Google Glass is the hottest property in today’s overheated world of technology, despite the fact that almost nobody who is talking about it has yet worn one and they’re a year away from going on sale. So what is it really like to use? Is it recording everybody’s every move? Is it selling your soul to Google?
Glass is a wearable computer the like of which we have never really seen before. While police and the military developed cameras that can record and send images, Glass is fundamentally a product of the web. It consists simply of a screen, sitting above the wearer’s right eye, that looks to them like a 25” display just inside their peripheral vision, a battery, and a panel that allows users to swipe through what is displayed on that screen. But the novel part is the voice control: wake up Glass by tapping the side then saying “OK Glass - take a picture”, or “record a video” or “get directions to...” Google’s idea is that Glass will integrate all the benefits of the web into human interaction, but it will be less conspicuous, less of a barrier than a mobile phone. You can ask it how to say words in a foreign language and its subtle speakers will tell you instantly. That’s useful, and it implies a future that is fundamentally more connected to the web than it is today.
For now, of course, Google’s not quite there yet. Wearing Glass around London, you’d stick out like a sore thumb. Interrupting a conversation to say “OK Glass, take a picture” would be even ruder than grabbing your mobile. And constantly flicking your eyes up to look at its screen is just as obvious as looking at a mobile phone, and rather more disconcerting.
But at Google’s I/O conference in San Francisco, a number of things are obvious. When enough people have Glass that it becomes normal then the fear factor evaporates. It’s easy to forget you’re wearing Glass yourself because the lightweight, titanium frame isn’t too intrusive, and it doesn’t take long to stop staring at other people wearing them. And when we stop concentrating on the weirdness, the power of wearable technology is revealed, from instant translation to directions to simple web search.
For now, though, perhaps the key thing about Glass, however, is the realisation that it’s not yet got many uses. In conversation, Glass is usually redundant. It’s not recording everything you see, and its video defaults to 10 second films. Although an app has been written to make it take a picture with a pronounced wink, that would make it just about the least useful covert camera on the market. If you really want to take pictures nobody knows you’re shooting, far better to do it on a phone or invest in a spy camera - you can get them hidden in a tie or a pen, which are both rather easier to conceal than a computer on your face. A battery life of three hours active use, or an estimated 45 minutes of constant recording is similarly inefficient. If you want to worry about covert surveillance, better to bang on about CCTV than Google Glass. Certainly, in the UK if not America, we are all filmed almost constantly in a way that Google Glass would hardly change.
Indeed, Glass’s main disadvantage is that it looks slightly weird, rather than that it should scare people by its implications. If anything, my concern was that Glass doesn’t yet do enough to be set to be truly ubiquitous.It integrates with Google Now to provide suggestions on, say, when you need to leave to make it to your next appointment, and it can, say, provide prompts to augment a conversation. One developer has written an app that makes Glass flash up facts he’s trying to learn so that over time he remembers them. That’s useful but not a revelation. If you forget an important fact, Googling it via voice command and instantly being shown the answer is great, but it’s not life changing.
A cheap shot is to suggest that because Google is an advertising company, Glass simply exists to further the company’s evil aims. But on using Glass there are a number of things that make that accusation seem implausible: an unwanted advert on Glass is so easy to ignore as to be largely useless. And more to the point, it introduces, so far, nothing other than greater convenience. It can film or take pictures more easily than we can currently, and when it is built in to smaller units that will be even more the case. But it is, as things stand, simply not built to package your soul in a new way that is more useful to Google. Your Android phone already tells Google where you are, providing you with useful information and Google with data on traffic conditions. And it too can film and take pictures and show you emails and search the web.
Some developers who have used Glass say they would not now live without it. I didn’t find it to be so useful that that was the case. But it nudges toward a future where Google’s growing expertise in predicting what we want will be built in to wearable technologies.
The Glass interface itself is slightly finnicky - at I/O, a number of users can’t help but look slightly awkward when, failing to use the touchpad on the side they use the back-up function of tilting their head backwards to get to the start screen so the can say ‘OK Glass' and have the thing respond. The effect is so uncool as to make a cynic wonder if Glass is somewhat over-hyped.
But Google’s idea is obviously the future - the web should be more of a part of all our lives. Those who are scared of it will, I think, find it becomes ever more present because it is obviously useful and it in reality poses very few new threats. But this design is not yet small enough or quite fit for mass market consumption. If Google can market it for $200 and iron out the kinks, they have just one major challenge with Glass: as the mobile phone was harder for them to monetise than the PC, so too Glass could be a triumph of consumer interest over corporate power.
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