I can see this effecting not just things like person on person crime (muggings, rape, battery, etc.) but also burglaries, arson, or any other crime that requires a getaway. Police or citizens could issues statements like "We had a break-in at 9:30 at 555 Main Street. If you were in a 5 block radius of that address, click here to upload your video feed from 9:00 to 10:00."
Obviously this also has terrifying privacy concerns as well, but the extent to which this could completely transform society seems to be undersold here, doesn't it?
Seems that in the near future, there will be little need for any of this, and there will be no coercion; rather, most of us will vie for the most powerful, feature-loaded head-mounted camera.
That's not to say that such an invention can or will only be used for evil. But there's no denying that this is huge progress for anybody dreaming of global surveillance or something like it.
We will be able to deal with this, though, using appropriate laws. Europe will certainly go down that route, the US will probably follow. For example, using the camera to take pictures or videos that are stored or shared (vs. just processed by some augmented reality algorithms) could enable a small lamp on the frame of the glasses. Just like a video recorder, but without the ability to (easily!) turn it off.
Unless the video is uploaded without the user's knowledge, I think we do not have to worry about government usage of these cameras.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/04/darien-long-mall-co...
It's the /services/ that Glass secretly enable for its users that I find far more worrying than mere scrapbooking of your life. Just start thinking as sleazy as possible here, for a moment. If Glass can log conversations, it can also relay conversations to other parties to comment upon.
I just can't stop imagining things like MTurk-like services staffed with popped-collar sociopaths fresh off the set of Jersey Shore, all working with your transcripts to be your 'virtual wingman' as you work your 'game' on unsuspecting people. Ridiculous, but just sleazy enough I could see it.
I imagine if we all really just wanted to depress ourselves today, we could keep coming up with more and more ideas of how to exploit AR for social advantage/manipulation.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/08/02/sight_a_s...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Vancouver_Stanley_Cup_riot...
Imagine your hypothetical break in is in downtown Manhattan. Do you really expect law enforcement to sift through video data of the hundreds of thousands of people who fit that profile? How would they know if someone's feed was missing? Basically, there's so much noise, the signal effectively gets lost.
Granted, big data applications could be brought to bear on the problem, but then it's the same cat and mouse game criminals and police have been playing forever.
If nobody saw it (or doesn't know what they were looking at, as would usually be the case if they saw a getaway car), I still don't think there will be a firehose of data. The feed will already be geotagged and time stamped, making it easy to sift through by hand. Plus, much of this can be automated, even with the relatively rudimentary recognition software we have now.
Problem with the Glass approach is that we now require police to sit through videos, but eventually it will be easier to mine all the data with algorithms, especially if we get better at facial recognition, etc...
Personally, i don't mind a glass-pervasive society. I worry about the fact that all the data goes around a single company's infrastructure and the fact that, for this specific company, hardware is a commodity and data is what they are after.
Sure, we use a computer to compile most of this data, but imagine just peering into Google Glass, and having this compiled without moving around!
I'm not too concerned about fashion or image while out on the water. My main focus is winning, or coming close to it! I'm wearing a life jacket, and rain gear most of the time ;) I guess my point is, there is lots going on in life, not just walking around, getting coffee, and reading twitter and facebook. Wear Glass when you need it and it is applicable.
Like this: http://www.reconinstruments.com/
This review has gone a long way towards assuaging those concerns, but I wonder what they can do about anti-theft. Being pickpocketed on public transit is a very real concern in most cities with >500k people. Imagine how much easier it'd be to snatch a device you're not even holding and (hopefully) blends into your life so seamlessly you forget you have it on. It's been well-publicized that these things start at $1500.
The best thing, I think, would be for Google to offer insurance at some reasonable rate, so you can get a replacement if someone steals your device. I'd pay $50/year to protect my $1500 device.
It's kind of sad that you can steal a smart phone and get away with it.
If it's a safety device on another piece of hardware, like a GPS tracker for a bike, they can always destroy the tracker separately from the item.
[1]: http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/crime-is-up-and...
For instance, it could buffer constantly (if it doesn't already, I'm not too sure) the last 5 or 10 seconds of video. If it detects the device has been snatched this buffer is instantly dumped to the paired smartphone (and from there possibly to the cloud).
So unless the thief is very skillful, there's likely a good mugshot of him or her out there.
I mean phones have been around for ages and some people still don't feel confortable talking in them in public spaces.
Siri is another example, have you ever meet someone talking to Siri on the bus ? on the metro ? on the street ? Not me.
Do you imagine people yelling in the train "Ok glass, show me the weather" ?
I was just watching a video of Sony's newest smartwatch and how it integrated with Android. I could see myself wearing that. Glass? Probably not. I'm not even someone who is into fashion. I just want crap on my face and, my god, it looks super dorky.
Portable eye-level display is insanely useful. But if it's burdened with something that is viewed by many as a source of privacy concerns, it would just hinder the adoption. It will make the Glass banned from corporate environments, planes and basically every place that has "no cameras" signs. Like supermarkets.
Are you on the project Glass team or something? :)
Have these persons commented on the actual display quality? The resolution, the color depth and so on. There's suspiciously ZERO in-use shots of the display as seen by the wearer. Makes you wonder why.
FWIW, opaque tape over the lens is the method the NSA recommends for securing the cameras on iOS devices and laptops:
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/applemac/Apple_iOS_5_Guide.p...
http://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/factsheets/macosx_hardening_tip...
What about mobile phones then?
Something like Google Glass's eye-level form factor is made to be as convenient, discrete and available as possible.
Yes. You may be photographed or filmed not only when you are in public, but when you are in view of a photographer who is on public ground. The exception is when you are in a place where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy such as dressing rooms, restrooms, or your home.
But even awesomer would be Glass + Word Lens: http://questvisual.com/us/
(Assuming it works well, I haven't tried it)
Unless you're in one of Google's Self Driving Cars this sounds like a recipe for disaster. If these things take off I'm pretty sure wearing them while driving will be pretty quickly outlawed.
I think the danger comes from people who get text messages while they're driving and want to look at a shared photo. That should be disabled while driving, which glass can make a pretty good guess at.
Why Google Glass will fail: When normal people who didn't sign agreements discover just how positively awful the "screen" is.
Speedo/tach/fuel get overlayed on the bottom of the windshield while you're driving.
I think I read somewhere that there was some kind of touchpad on the side? But how do you enter text (like search queries) into the device? Or is this supposed to be operated from a connected smartphone?
Somehow related, I fear that this will take years until it reaches me here in Europe. Google Voice still only knows who's president of the united states if you ask it in english.
For simple, prompted, two or three work commands, it would work even more reliably.
My mind wants the sides to be the same, they should put a fake one on the other side.
Wait, what? In what sense can google's X Lab be said to be responsible for neural networks?
The accelerometer in it could be useful from a public health standpoint. Unlikne a phone in a pocket, the head is relatively stable. Glass could detect if someone collapses and then call for an ambulance.
This makes me think that the voice processing is done server-side. I wouldn't be at all surprised by this; that's how Siri does it, and I would be amazed if they managed to fit good enough voice recognition into even a phone, let alone this tiny thing.
Well, that's rather obvious.
This is starting to look at least as interesting as a piece of hardware as it is as a product. Pity I don't have a few thousand dollars lying around . . .
This scares me. I mean, notifications are already known to cause a great amount of problems, it is changing our brains, making our attentions spans shorter and more frail, I already hate even the fact I am carrying a mobile phone, it disrupts me, take away my attention from what I should be doing... SMS to me is even worse, it is very intrusive, distracting, and now that I got used in talking to girlfriends with SMS I noticed that I am getting "addicted" to devices, instead of people.
To me, Google Glass, and similar technology, is awesome, neat, interesting, but dangerous, very dangerous, it might have very serious consequences on how we work as biological beings.
As for personal issues with notifications: You can just turn them off. I only get notifications for email that my filtering system can't handle, which means the sort of stuff that I would have had to carry a pager for before the advent of the smartphone. I get maybe a half-dozen unrelated notifications a month for spam that my filter didn't catch, and that number is going down. No Facebook or Twitter. No text messages or chats. Just the important email and actual honest-to-god phone calls.
Now add in commands like, "Ok, Glass, set at-con 2 whenever I'm driving," or "whenever I'm in this building." And a person's distraction levels can be overall reduced by this device rather than expanded.
I predict there will be regulation of hudphone use, especially where the operation of vehicles is concerned. A notification pop-up sapping a person's concentration at the wrong moment could be dangerous.
its a little late for that.
but personally I liked getting a smart phone because it meant I didn't need to be around the computer and could still handle emergencies or react to opportunity. or just keep connected with people in different continents while walking through my city.
I think these devices are the gateway to getting away from the Television and a Typewriter interface. Its a way to get back to being present but still getting the advantages of being connected.
(No doubt someone already has proposed it as an "If I had Glass proposal.)
Is there a way for Glass to determine whose voice is the owner's?
I got into stereoscopic photography lately, you know, with two cameras. I'll probably be willing to try Google Glass, but I sure would like a version that captured stereoscopic images. We have two eyeballs, we should capture two image streams.
That said, you could do digital stabilization on head bobbing and probably get a pretty good result by jacking up the size of the stabilization window, although you'd lose frame size.
For examples, see http://www.cogsci.nl/blog/bird-brains-and-fish-eyes/177-stab...
