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.
Honestly, what happened more than anything was the takeoff of smart watches, which do everything glass can without the being glasses. Glass isn't VR, in order to really succeed, it should have been, or will have to wait for the technology that exists in order for it to be.
We have had: Apple's creation of a watch Android wear Moto 360/others. For those who want a "fast platform for checking things" watches serve the purpose of glass a thousand times over, while being smaller, easier to use, and less stand-out. "taking off" doesn't mean everyone has heard about and is using them, "Taking off" just means that there are a lot more watches and development behind smart watches now than there was when google glass first started getting popular.
1) Don't lecture me. 2) No one has bought an Watch so discussing the market response is premature. 3) 30% of Galaxy Gears were returned. Which is pretty bad, 'cuz they only shipped 800,000 of them. Not sold, shipped. 4) there are 19,000 different android devices as of August 21. As of today, there are five Android Wear watches. If you want to define "taking off" as "available" I'm with you. If you want to define it as "selling in any way other than slow and stagnantly" I'm not. 800,000 "shipped" minus 250,000 returned isn't quite Amazon Fire Phone bad, but even Microsoft managed to sell 2 million Zunes and that device is regarded worldwide as a resounding failure. Again, "taking off" is hardly the phrase I'd use.
I'm not even going to bother to respond to "don't lecture me". I don't know what you mean by "market response", as smart watches have been being released and developed before the I-watch. The only big deal about the I-watch is that it promotes and brings the idea of a smartwatch to the public eye. The galaxy gear was absolute shit. Not only that, it only worked/works on high end samsung phones. It's failures are for reasons not related to it being a smartwatch. Comparing the number of current android devices released to the number of watches is like comparing modern cell phones to landlines in the 70's. Smart watches are an emerging/new sort of thing that is just starting to take off. The momentum building is exactly why apple decided to create the I-watch. Taking off, as stated before, is the idea that it is a new and recent technology that is just getting it's feet under it. The current smartwatches are like the early android/smart-touch phones. Kind of clunky, kind of big, and without too huge a number of features. As time passes people will get more used to it. And as a disclaimer, I have no excitement over the I-watch or android wear. The pebble has it right as to what smart-watches should be. Watch with extra features, not smartphone on wrist. The pebble, though, remains a smartwatch. Disclaimer: I own a pebble. Splurged fifty bucks on ebay. Worth every penny.
Borg has never been a good design philosophy for humans. Once humans latched on to the idea of "the individual" being the end all be all ... what gets us away from that? I don't think technology owned and operated by a legal fiction will be that thing. I suppose it could but that world would be terrifying. That is the world that Elon Musk & James Cameron have given the best hints to the ramifications of that world.