A lot has been written about Google's foray into wearable computing - Google Glass over the last year since its announcement at I/O last year. This year at Google I/O, I had a chance to actually wear the Google Glass and give it a go first hand.
There has been so much hype about it around the media, that I was somehow expecting a star-trek like interface that automatically floods my vision and starts tagging everything I'm seeing. Sadly, it's not as cool as that. Google Glass creates the illusion of a display, about the size of a TV some 10
feet in front of you. The resolution of the display isn't very high, even though it appears really big. It can really fit only about 6-7 rows of text, so it feels like a really old-school menu system, rather than a rich, high-res display. The right side of Glass is touch sensitive, so you can swipe through menus and select commands.
The coolest thing, though, was that the display is transparent, which means you can simultaneously look at what's on the display and see through it as well. This could lead to lots of cool interfaces, like automatically tagging everyone you're meeting with meta data like what their name is and when you met last, which would be great thing for absent-minded people like me.
The first problem that I ran into was that it had trouble recognizing my voice. Glass is meant to be used hands free, and depends on voice for a large part of the interaction. I don't know if it was the noisy background at the event or my accent, but Glass couldn't recognize my commands consistently.
The biggest problem, though, is that everyone looks like a dork wearing Glass. The issue is that the screen appears slightly to the right and top of your vision, so you have to "look above" without tilting your head upwards, which makes you look like you have some mental disorder while you're interacting with Glass. It was really funny to see people wearing Glass gazing upwards and walking about. It feels like they are disconnected from this world and are out in their own. It's nearly impossible to maintain eye contact with the person you're talking with and look at what's happening on the Glass display at the same time.
Overall, it seems like a cool toy. A lot will depend on the Apps that Google can get developers to build, but balancing the tricky parts of privacy and features. It has a lot of potential, and I might actually buy one if the price comes down to more reasonable levels.
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