No, that would be a dystopia. Let's look at this. Self-driving cars? Everybody wants that. We've been promised it since the '30s. It's right up there with wrist phones and jet packs. "Wearable computing"? Neal Stephenson wrote Snow Crash in '92. Check this out: TV Tokyo ran Serial Experiments:Lain in 1998. Here's their take on wearable computing: And that's the fundamental problem with wearable computing: when the visionaries you're pantomiming regard it with disdain and disgust, don't do it. There are legit applications for Glass. I could see wanting one for when I'm on my motorcycle. Surgery? Yeah, I could see that, too. But just walking around? No. It's a solution looking for a problem and since nobody wants to look like this guy: It better be one hell of a problem."If there was 200 million Google Glasses sold, it would be a different perspective..," said Tom Frencel.
Glass was the first project to emerge from Google’s X division, the secretive group tasked with developing “moonshot” products such as self-driving cars. Glass and wearable devices overall amount to a new technology, as smartphones once were, that will likely take time to evolve into a product that clicks with consumers.
Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.
I've seen like, max 4 people wearing them in public in the bay, and that was like, 10 months ago. I forgot that they were even a thing, but apparently so did their target demo.
I'm in LA. Westside. Work in the entertainment industry. Surrounded by B-listers all day long. I've never actually seen a pair. Had a friend who qualified as an explorer. He asked me if he should buy them. I asked "what are they going for on eBay?" He responded with "didn't think of that... holy shit. Entering credit card info now." Apparently he flipped 'em for a good $700 profit without so much as opening the box. Closest I've gotten to Google Glass - advising a friend to investigate profiteering instead of turning them down cold.
There are a few in Boulder. People own a couple, and a pair that someone donated to the library that I got to try. It was cool for like five minutes, but everything new is cool for five minutes. Then I felt like a massive douche. I see see them on the street, and think the people wearing them are massive douches. I can't help it.
Literally the only thing I could come up with for using them is make protocols for Jove doing lab stuff. That hardly necessitates some goofy future goggles. I've reached a personal point of tech saturation, someone is gonna have to seriously come up with something out-of-the-box for me to buy anything farther down the rabbit hole than the (purely masturbatory) LG G3 I just got. Fitbit? Amazon Echo? All this consumer tech shit flies in the bay (on a 30 foot tall wave of hype) cause you have young, tech-hungry folks with no kids, okay with being early adopters, with plenty of disposable income and a religious outlook on optimizing and quantifying every second of their lives. And most of it is just outsourced apps. The incentive just isn't there. 3-D printing? I have your Neotechnological Luddism thread stickied forever cause it's so on point. Ran it by the mechanical engineer I work with and he laughed and said "pretty much" and that whatever you could ever do with that would never be to spec enough to function properly unless the thing you made was designed to be constantly fixed , tossed out readily and re-made, or non-vital. He did mention one application that had arisen because of some of the concepts underlying it in the manufacturing process, but then again, that was just the slow creep of progress on already well-vetted processes. nothing really "disruptive". just traditional engineering.
Does it make me crazy that I've been fascinated by Professor Steve Mann for twenty years? I hope not. Then again, I don't want to look like him. Once it's properly inobtrusive then I'll look into then through it. For now I'm happy to work on my silly 7-segment LED hello-world repetitions on various MCUs and read on my large but not crazy large cell phone.
I've been moderately interested in him for ten... I keep waiting for him to come up with some cool reason to put up with all the hardware but you don't need Terminator vision unless you're the Terminator. You know, there's a metaphor there: If you're uncomfortable with your environment and don't wish to interact with it as an equal, all the HUDs and telemetry and shit give you power. But if you're actually interested in having a conversation with someone, all the interface tomfoolery is a barrier between you and them. I think Google Glass could be straight up invisible and it would still be a barrier to communication.