Google opened up a sort of pre-order contest for civilians (i.e., non-developers) this week for its new augmented reality headgear that should ship before the end of 2013 for $1,500 (for those with a clever enough idea.) The other significant news is that both CNET?and The Verge?report that ?Glass will be able to connect via Bluetooth to both?Android phones?and the iPhone. Glass can pull down data from wifi or use the 3G or 4G feed from a connected phone, but it won?t have its own cellular radio.?
It?s nice to see that Google is not escalating the platform wars by locking iOS out of the Glass ecosystem. In truth, that would not have been in Google?s best interest. The whole point of Google?s strategy is to increase the flow of information as many ways as possible. Also, as with the rumored iWatch, squeezing a cellular radio (and another data plan) into the device doesn?t make much sense, especially since the entire target audience already has a smart phone.
The bigger question with Glass, for me, is how users will manage?and to what extent they will be allowed to manage?the huge potential torrent of data that this device will collect. The Verge?s Joshua Topolsky had a hands-on (or face-on!) with Glass at Google?s NYC HQ (and a local Starbucks) and found it very easy to?acclimate to. ?The privacy issue is going to be a big hurdle for Google with Glass,? he writes. ?Almost as big as the hurdle it has to jump over to convince normal people to wear something as alien and unfashionable as Glass seems right now.?
I don?t think fashionability is going to be an issue, boundaries will be.?Glass, product director Steve Lee tells Topolsky,??It?s a very intimate device. We?d like to better understand how other people are going to use it. We think they?ll have a great opportunity to influence and shape the opportunity of Glass by not only giving us feedback on the product, but by helping us develop social norms as well.?
Topolsky asks about ?Glass etiquette,? and wonders how ?to answer questions about what?s right and wrong to do with a camera that doesn?t need to be held up to take a photo, and often won?t even be noticed by its owner?s subjects. Will people get comfortable with that? Are they supposed to??
He hits on what is the most radical thing about Glass, the ability to record what is right in front of you, unobtrusively, in real time. Glass will so completely remove the friction from this process that we are all bound to record?and be recorded?without even thinking about it. This is great from a data flow perspective, and remarkable in terms of social science and, of course, marketing. But it places us smack in the middle of the user experience paradox of Glass.
Lee and lead industrial designer for Glass, Isabelle Olsson, told Topolsky about the questions that led them through the product development process. ?What if we brought technology closer to your senses?? Lee asks ?Would that allow you to more quickly get information and connect with other people but do so in a way?with a design?that gets out of your way when you?re not interacting with technology?? So this is supposed to make us more present than the hunched over masses staring at their smart phones.??I don?t want to do that, you know? I don?t want to be that person,? says Olsson.
But if the technology is so close to our sense so as to become prosthetic?a great outcome in terms of design?how do we maintain appropriate boundaries? This is the great experiment of Glass and really for the entire ?connected world.? In this way, Google is much farther ahead than Apple with its supposed iWatch. Glass?s technology is even closer to us physically, even closer (it seems) in coming to market and more active. The iWatch, like most Apple mobile products, will be more about consuming than creating content. Glass, in contrast, will be a documentary studio in an eyeglass case!
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