5 ms·

I hope this works - and I hope its in the $300-$500 price point. I really liked google glass - but I wasn't going to pay >1k.

Waterluvian 8y ago
From your perspective, what's the killer app for glasses that phones don't do better? Is it just the way it's always immediately there?
- hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
  Yeah, from the website, "texting, navigation, calendar functionality" - I can't ever imagine wanting any of these in a pair of glasses instead of a phone. If anything, I think there is a rising sea change in that more and more people are realizing they DON'T always want to have a life full of digital distractions, and that having that beeping thing in your pocket is bad enough, but having something smack dab in front of your eyeballs is even worse.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
    Why not navigation? HUD seems like the perfect use case. Otherwise, I’d like a reading app so I don’t have to look down at my phone. If it just mirrors the phone and the phone screen becomes a touchpad, I’d consider it.
  - thenanyu 8y ago
    For consumers, navigation makes a lot of sense, especially when on foot, or on a bike. It's unsafe in many instances to use your phone, or even to wear headphones for turn-by-turn instructions. AR translation of text is already awesome but cumbersome using a smartphone. This would improve it a lot. Speech-to-text for hearing impaired folks would be really nice, as well as visual indicators of loud or dangerous sounds, with directional indicators. You could imprint someone's vocal signatures or a keyword so your friends could get your attention at distance. In professional or enthusiast settings it's also quite useful to have a heads-up display for many "live" tasks. Cooking, construction, surgery, driving, sports, policing, you can even tether to a battery pack in some instances. In short, any setting when your hands are occupied but you can benefit from some sort of data feed.
  - andyidsinga 8y ago
    I agree about texts/notifications/calendar types of stuff - might be better not to have those head-mounted in front of the eye. Navigation - yes - with the right user experience that isn't so focused on the map, but the turn-by-turn.
- blacksmith_tb 8y ago
  My take would be AR - being able to overlay info about what you are looking at would be potentially very useful (look down a street and see the addresses, see Spanish or Mandarin or ____ labels on objects in front of you, etc.) That said, having texts/Slack messages poke you in the eye seems worse not better than having them on a phone or smartwatch.
  - gpm 8y ago
    I think I'd want notifications to be an audio signal or vibration, with a display option triggered by touching the glasses. A watch does notifications as well as glasses, but no better.
- whicks 8y ago
  I'm not andyidsinga, but here's my 2c. When I think of smart glasses, I imagine the best possible version of them as an exercise in thought. It starts off with them being in a form factor that's effectively indistinguishable from "normal" glasses. After that, I imagine them having the processing power to provide full AR capabilities, as well as a battery that's able to sustain that technology for at least a day if not longer. I suppose that in turn might make you ask, "What is 'full AR'?" For the sake of this I'm going to imagine a world where there are no nefarious actors or ill-intentions. This is a fantasy world where I can just geek out over cool tech. To me, it's the ability to recognize any and all people you interact with, at a moment's notice. Think all social media networks combined, but in realtime, as soon as you lock eyes with a person. The ability to "remember" a person you met ten years ago at that one networking event is now possible. Extrapolating this into other social spheres, you could get rid of all of the traditional dating apps that exist on your cell. If you walk into a bar or [$genericSocialSetting], you can immediately see who is single, and who isn't (assuming they have this information broadcast). Dating just got significantly easier, and maybe a bit more organic since you can tell right off the bat who is looking (and maybe even see if you have something in common). Looking into other areas of use, imagine having Wikipedia at your finger tips, overlain in your field of vision. I'm not talking paragraphs of text here, but rather some sort of intuitive UI that cleverly displays the most significant bits of information about a given object, place, person, etc, within your field of vision. "That plant is poisonous." Smart glasses represent taking all of the data and information that's available on the internet, and overlaying it in the real world. The "killer app" for smart glasses is several years out, and it will take many iterations before it's perfected. They're going to augment how we function, just how smart phones have augmented us. You'll be able to record, snapshot, and replay scenes from your past just like you can do with your phone, but far more effortlessly. I can imagine a world where your smart glasses are constantly recording, but only choosing to "save" given your input (since a lot of moments we wish we could have saved happen without us having our phones out.) Again this is pretending we live in world with zero nefarious actors (Black Mirror does a good job of covering some potential negatives of tech like this). I think we're a long, long ways off from this tech. It's going to be a big culture shift in many ways, and is going to happen slowly at first. In my mind this is the sort of thing that Thalmic, Magic Leap and others are pursuing. I see companies like that as the early Ford Motor Company. These early Smart Glasses/AR companies are producing the Model T. Our smart phones are the "faster horses" in this analogy.
- gpm 8y ago
  That it's always there - without taking up a hand. Temporary dashcam, recording a lecture, ar applications to provide information (e.g. price deltas for food in a supermarket), notifications, etc.
- paul7986 8y ago
  So many ideas to implement with AR glasses like... - Night/Day View - If nighttime see what it looks like in daytime - Historical view - If im at X building or wherever how did it look years ago - Facebook/Linkedin AR - See the name of stranger your talking to I think AR glasses is the next big innovation!
  - b_b 8y ago
    The facebook/linkedin AR, personally, does not sound so exciting... feels far too dystopian to me.
  - echelon 8y ago
    These are silly and don't seem worth it to me, personally. While I think AR for applications such as in-venue / in-store navigation might be cool, smart glasses still seem like a sub-par smartphone experience.
- l4yao 8y ago
  Directions and pathfinding Any maintenance or repair of complex systems Education and training Warehouse inventory picking
  - andyidsinga 8y ago
    along the lines of warehouse use cases - imagine a memory-palace for personal use.. I would love that!
    - justinclift 8y ago
      ... and something to reverse engineer photo's-in-the-memory-palace into usable 3D CAD models for doing stuff with. :)
- orangecat 8y ago
  The ability to replace most physical screens. Ultimately I want to get rid of my 5" phone, 27" monitor, and 50" TV, and just have my glasses project a virtual display at any apparent size and distance.
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  I didn't actually play with such an app on google glass; but I imagine instructional content would be pretty good. For instance when repairing something, cooking/baking etc. I would love to be able to watch some tig welding video; drop the hood down and practice, then rewatch --without having to go back to the laptop or phone. First person perspective photos and video are, IMHO, much better than the phone - but its somewhat of a lateral move from existing head mounted action cameras.
- r00fus 8y ago
  So what did a smartphone do better than a PC of the same vintage? Hint: something to do with form factor. The IPhone is the now the most popular camera on Flickr and other photo sites. What would you think if that mantle in the future is held by a pair of smartglasses?
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  I'm in a wheelchair and I can't always safely grab my phone while in motion. At the moment, voice commands + headphones are okay, but having ever-present information would be better.
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  for me, it would be an organisational boon. My memory is terrible, so I always forget what I'm meant to be doing in terms of habits and things I need to get done for the day. With a pair of day-to-day smart glasses I could plan my day in the morning and have contextual, real-time information on what I need to do and when I need to switch onto something else. This is a use case that a phone really can't fulfil well.

Waterluvian 8y ago

From your perspective, what's the killer app for glasses that phones don't do better? Is it just the way it's always immediately there?

hn_throwaway_99 8y ago
Yeah, from the website, "texting, navigation, calendar functionality" - I can't ever imagine wanting any of these in a pair of glasses instead of a phone. If anything, I think there is a rising sea change in that more and more people are realizing they DON'T always want to have a life full of digital distractions, and that having that beeping thing in your pocket is bad enough, but having something smack dab in front of your eyeballs is even worse.
- 2muchcoffeeman 8y ago
  Why not navigation? HUD seems like the perfect use case. Otherwise, I’d like a reading app so I don’t have to look down at my phone. If it just mirrors the phone and the phone screen becomes a touchpad, I’d consider it.
- thenanyu 8y ago
  For consumers, navigation makes a lot of sense, especially when on foot, or on a bike. It's unsafe in many instances to use your phone, or even to wear headphones for turn-by-turn instructions. AR translation of text is already awesome but cumbersome using a smartphone. This would improve it a lot. Speech-to-text for hearing impaired folks would be really nice, as well as visual indicators of loud or dangerous sounds, with directional indicators. You could imprint someone's vocal signatures or a keyword so your friends could get your attention at distance. In professional or enthusiast settings it's also quite useful to have a heads-up display for many "live" tasks. Cooking, construction, surgery, driving, sports, policing, you can even tether to a battery pack in some instances. In short, any setting when your hands are occupied but you can benefit from some sort of data feed.
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  I agree about texts/notifications/calendar types of stuff - might be better not to have those head-mounted in front of the eye. Navigation - yes - with the right user experience that isn't so focused on the map, but the turn-by-turn.
blacksmith_tb 8y ago
My take would be AR - being able to overlay info about what you are looking at would be potentially very useful (look down a street and see the addresses, see Spanish or Mandarin or ____ labels on objects in front of you, etc.) That said, having texts/Slack messages poke you in the eye seems worse not better than having them on a phone or smartwatch.
- gpm 8y ago
  I think I'd want notifications to be an audio signal or vibration, with a display option triggered by touching the glasses. A watch does notifications as well as glasses, but no better.
whicks 8y ago
I'm not andyidsinga, but here's my 2c. When I think of smart glasses, I imagine the best possible version of them as an exercise in thought. It starts off with them being in a form factor that's effectively indistinguishable from "normal" glasses. After that, I imagine them having the processing power to provide full AR capabilities, as well as a battery that's able to sustain that technology for at least a day if not longer. I suppose that in turn might make you ask, "What is 'full AR'?" For the sake of this I'm going to imagine a world where there are no nefarious actors or ill-intentions. This is a fantasy world where I can just geek out over cool tech. To me, it's the ability to recognize any and all people you interact with, at a moment's notice. Think all social media networks combined, but in realtime, as soon as you lock eyes with a person. The ability to "remember" a person you met ten years ago at that one networking event is now possible. Extrapolating this into other social spheres, you could get rid of all of the traditional dating apps that exist on your cell. If you walk into a bar or [$genericSocialSetting], you can immediately see who is single, and who isn't (assuming they have this information broadcast). Dating just got significantly easier, and maybe a bit more organic since you can tell right off the bat who is looking (and maybe even see if you have something in common). Looking into other areas of use, imagine having Wikipedia at your finger tips, overlain in your field of vision. I'm not talking paragraphs of text here, but rather some sort of intuitive UI that cleverly displays the most significant bits of information about a given object, place, person, etc, within your field of vision. "That plant is poisonous." Smart glasses represent taking all of the data and information that's available on the internet, and overlaying it in the real world. The "killer app" for smart glasses is several years out, and it will take many iterations before it's perfected. They're going to augment how we function, just how smart phones have augmented us. You'll be able to record, snapshot, and replay scenes from your past just like you can do with your phone, but far more effortlessly. I can imagine a world where your smart glasses are constantly recording, but only choosing to "save" given your input (since a lot of moments we wish we could have saved happen without us having our phones out.) Again this is pretending we live in world with zero nefarious actors (Black Mirror does a good job of covering some potential negatives of tech like this). I think we're a long, long ways off from this tech. It's going to be a big culture shift in many ways, and is going to happen slowly at first. In my mind this is the sort of thing that Thalmic, Magic Leap and others are pursuing. I see companies like that as the early Ford Motor Company. These early Smart Glasses/AR companies are producing the Model T. Our smart phones are the "faster horses" in this analogy.
gpm 8y ago
That it's always there - without taking up a hand. Temporary dashcam, recording a lecture, ar applications to provide information (e.g. price deltas for food in a supermarket), notifications, etc.
paul7986 8y ago
So many ideas to implement with AR glasses like... - Night/Day View - If nighttime see what it looks like in daytime - Historical view - If im at X building or wherever how did it look years ago - Facebook/Linkedin AR - See the name of stranger your talking to I think AR glasses is the next big innovation!
- b_b 8y ago
  The facebook/linkedin AR, personally, does not sound so exciting... feels far too dystopian to me.
- echelon 8y ago
  These are silly and don't seem worth it to me, personally. While I think AR for applications such as in-venue / in-store navigation might be cool, smart glasses still seem like a sub-par smartphone experience.
l4yao 8y ago
Directions and pathfinding Any maintenance or repair of complex systems Education and training Warehouse inventory picking
- andyidsinga 8y ago
  along the lines of warehouse use cases - imagine a memory-palace for personal use.. I would love that!
  - justinclift 8y ago
    ... and something to reverse engineer photo's-in-the-memory-palace into usable 3D CAD models for doing stuff with. :)
orangecat 8y ago
The ability to replace most physical screens. Ultimately I want to get rid of my 5" phone, 27" monitor, and 50" TV, and just have my glasses project a virtual display at any apparent size and distance.
andyidsinga 8y ago
I didn't actually play with such an app on google glass; but I imagine instructional content would be pretty good. For instance when repairing something, cooking/baking etc. I would love to be able to watch some tig welding video; drop the hood down and practice, then rewatch --without having to go back to the laptop or phone. First person perspective photos and video are, IMHO, much better than the phone - but its somewhat of a lateral move from existing head mounted action cameras.
r00fus 8y ago
So what did a smartphone do better than a PC of the same vintage? Hint: something to do with form factor. The IPhone is the now the most popular camera on Flickr and other photo sites. What would you think if that mantle in the future is held by a pair of smartglasses?
voltagex_ 8y ago
I'm in a wheelchair and I can't always safely grab my phone while in motion. At the moment, voice commands + headphones are okay, but having ever-present information would be better.
beaconstudios 8y ago
for me, it would be an organisational boon. My memory is terrible, so I always forget what I'm meant to be doing in terms of habits and things I need to get done for the day. With a pair of day-to-day smart glasses I could plan my day in the morning and have contextual, real-time information on what I need to do and when I need to switch onto something else. This is a use case that a phone really can't fulfil well.