The Verge's Nilay Patel wore Google's computerized glasses, called Google Glass, to the Indianapolis 500.
The night before the race, Patel was hanging out in his hotel bar documenting his "journey to the bottom of the hotel's Woodford Reserve."
Then Sarah Palin walked in.
Patel wondered if she'd like to try on Google Glass. She did not.
Patel tells the story:
The thing about Glass is that it's a gigantic LOOK AT ME plastered on the front of your face; a call for attention that also serves as an invitation for people to openly judge you. Most of us walk through life at various levels of happy anonymity, but Glass puts a spotlight on you unlike anything I've ever experienced.
"Is that Google Glasses?" they all ask. "What is it doing right now?" I had my little speech memorized by the third or fourth time around. "It's not doing much," I'd say. "It's kind of like a GoPro with Siri." I let a few people try it on, but no one could figure out the interface. "It just tells the time?" they'd ask, and then I'd have them take a picture of me, most of which I promptly deleted. I kind of wish I hadn't, now. They would have made an interesting time-lapse documentary of my journey to the bottom of the hotel's Woodford Reserve.
At one point during the evening Sarah Palin arrived at the hotel and made a smooth, practiced pass through the bar shaking hands and taking photos with a long line of admirers. I stood next to her for several minutes but she wouldn't take a photo with me or wear Glass. "What's in it for us?" asked her husband Todd, staring squarely at the camera and screen floating just above my hazy, bourbon-enhanced eyes. "We don't know what company you're with."
When I told him I wasn't after an endorsement but was rather a journalist interested in her opinion of Glass, he icily asked me to leave.
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