Thanks very much for this. You precisely explained why I feel GG is doomed to failure:

They are trying to get technology out of the way. Right now our technology draws us away from people and our experiences. We're constantly reaching for and looking down at our phones, breaking away from out interaction.

This represents a fundamental misstep of colossal proportions by Google, and they're too arrogant to know it.

The social cue of "look at my phone" isn't a byproduct of the phone's non-immersive GUI. It's a social adaptation to the fact that unless everyone is looking at the same phone, one person must leave the conversation in order to look at their phone. This is why it's construed as rudeness - your attention is necessarily shifting. With Glass, the social cue becomes "I am never fully in this conversation." Even glasses made out of glass are a social cue to "there is distance between us" and that's without constantly looking to the periphery and breaking eye contact.

There are reasons for HUDs. They're not new. The US Army has had helmet displays on Apache helicopters for 20+ years:

The Air Force was exploring the idea back when helmet displays were preposterously oversized due to primitive tech. There's an image I can't find, which bums me out, because it was basically a dude wearing a Dutch Oven with lenses on it. Either way, the needs and uses are simple - you need the ability to put stuff in front of your face because you're moving your head around a lot and your hands are busy.

It makes sense for motorcycle riding… sorta. I can put a GPS mount on my bike no problem and bluetooth into the helmet and I'm there. There's a boom operator in my union who rigged up a HUD for booming - he takes a video feed from the DIT, feeds it to an RF modulator, then straps and old Gameboy Advance to his hip and runs the video out to some hacked VR glasses. All this so he can know for sure that the boom is in the shot without having to remember the framing.

And that's just it - there are so very, very few things in the average person's life where they can't look down at their damn phone. There are so very, very few times in the average person's life where they can keep having a conversation with another person while Google is clawing at their periphery. It's a solution in search of a problem… and the actual problem is out there in military-land while the solution makes Geordi La Forge look like The Fonz.

Head-mounted shit is going to be isolating and solitary. It'll be like losing your face in your phone only worse. The social cues sent by users of this technology are not compatible with modern society, and they aren't going to be for a long time. Google Glass is Google Wave in hardware. Yeah, it's neat that you can do that, but you don't need to do that. Thinking about it, if I had the choice between taking a set of GG off my dresser and slapping it on or throwing my phone into my tank bag and setting it to GPS, I'll take the phone every time.

I just don't need that much mandatory tax on my attention span.

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That said, put down your $1500. The markup on eBay is impressive. Buddy of mine got his a month ago and made over a grand.