10 ms·

Build your own Google Glass

77 points by dave1010uk 14y ago

vitovito 14y ago
Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up (and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date. This is the common wearable computing utility argument, but in practice, it doesn't seem to pan out. Gordon Bell digitized much of his life, and everything for the past ten or twenty years. Phone calls, emails, a photo every sixty seconds, more when his heart rate increased. He hardly ever went back to it. Revisiting it was so rare as to be a notable event in and of itself. Rather, he found people with whom he had conversations would go to him and use him as a reference library. Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent was an Emacs thing which actively indexed and cross-referenced anything you were typing with things you had written before. He's working on Glass now, afaik: http://www.remem.org/ http://www.remem.org/ It isn't a generally useful solution because it requires that you live inside of Emacs. Today you'd need something that could index across multiple devices, multiple independent cloud storage systems, multiple independent accounts, etc.; or something that was locked into a single ecosystem and you lived entirely there, but then you'd develop "blind spots" for things that occurred elsewhere, like how you stop hanging out with certain friends because the only way they communicate with you is via Facebook but you turned off all of Facebook's notifications. There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software, something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece. The essay was about an article he was writing during which the software brought up a saved article and a note he had written, and forgotten about, in a creepily timely and seemingly prescient moment. He wondered at what point the software needs to get credit for providing the research and the associations. "Forgetting" is a key part of human existence that most wearable applications tend to ignore. "You were last here with [your ex]" says Foursquare. "You haven't talked with [your ex] in a while, make her day by leaving a message on her wall" says Facebook. Using someone's precise words against them can be emotionally cruel. Legally, you're expected to forget all of the specific details of things like trade secrets and company processes when you leave a job; how is that to be reconciled with your perfect, digital memory? None of these things are being actively explored. We already hit the "second generation" of applications as described by the author; it's the third generation that interests me.
- kentlyons 14y ago
  I wouldn't be surprised if something akin to the Remembrance Agent ends up on Glass. For his PhD thesis, Brad generalized the ideas of the Remembrance Agent to the broader notion of JITIR - Just-In-Time Information Retrieval. He built a web sidebar in that work, but that probably isn't the right app either. However the idea of doing a continuous search based on what you're doing would fit it well. Before it was just searching your own stuff, but now they'd hook in more generally to Google's search. Couple that with something Siri like where the speech recognition is feed as input for a proactive search. I'm still not sure this is a compelling application for a wide audience, but for several of the early everyday users of wearable computers (including myself) it had a lot of appeal.
  - vitovito 14y ago
    I had forgotten about what ended up in his thesis. It's linked to from the Remembrance Agent site if anyone else is interested: http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/rhodes-phd-JITIR.pdf http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/rhodes-phd-JITIR.pdf (PDF) "Implicit query" is another term for it. On the desktop side, one of the most realized solutions was the Dashboard prototype: http://nat.org/dashboard/ http://nat.org/dashboard/ I've long argued that designing multi-modal interfaces is where applications need to go. We're seeing this now with desktop, web and mobile apps all running against the same APIs, but what it really means is you're more likely to be able to also design a UI that's really an audio-only interface, whispering to you continuously via a Bluetooth headset, or a wrist-mounted UI, or... etc. It also means you can design and build something useful for desktop users, and then mobile users, and then scaled even further down for wearable users. Real-time continuous Google searching as a desktop sidebar, or rendered on an iPad or iPod Touch display linked to desktop input as a second screen, would be a start.
- sigkill 14y ago
  Your post actually fires up quite a lot of my neurons. I'm thinking about a perfect text to speech system which transcribes whatever you say into pure text files. Maybe it'll generate a new file every ten minutes, every half an hour or possibly even every six hours. That'll leave you with tons of text with respect to what you said. Now integrate that with some kind of a keylogger on all your devices (like a computer, tablet, and phone) which can track states and applications. Also, by virtue of having a current generation smart phone you can also tag locations and timestamps, at least to cell tower triangulation accuracy if not GPS accuracy. This would run transparent to the user. At the end of the day, he'll have pure text files that can be searched. Implementing a google-like algorithm modified to work on flat files would be great. It'd be basically like the Remembrance Agent but more advanced. I don't know how I'd feel about using such a system, but I'm reasonably sure that we're on the way there indirectly. Heck, most of us voluntarily not only record our lives, but also post it publicly. What's wrong with recording all our life (right from that websearch on the tablet, to what you're ordering at the restaurant whose name you forgot but you visited it on the day right after your best friend got married) if it's going to make it life easier. As such, I've noticed personally that I have stopped storing information in my head unless I use it regularly, but instead I store pointers to the location of the information, like whether I did a search {if yes, then what were the keywords, and what was the result's position}, or did I look it up on a forum or maybe even a real book. /thinking-out-loud
jacquesm 14y ago
When you can remember everything with 100% perfection there is no distinction anymore between the food you're eating and the food you ate 20 years ago. Between the people you're with and the people you knew long ago. And so on. In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end up not using it. Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than good enough as it is. The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.
- vitovito 14y ago
  The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area. Yes, some research shows that reviewing the things an Alzheimer's patient did that day, along with other pertinent facts, slows the degeneration. I've long wondered if memory loss behaves similar to traditional forgetting of facts, if you could do training similar to spaced repetition to combat it long-term, or if it only works in early stages. For the last several years, I've been considering the greatest beneficiaries of a perfect digital memory may not be ourselves at all, but our descendants: I am also aware that I will not care about every minute of footage in 20 years. The problem is, I don’t have the foggiest idea which minutes I’ll care about, and I am not ready to let go of any of it yet. http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/08/backup#comment-6385 http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomar... You have no idea what your children will find interesting or important, and to presume to edit your life down or to not record it at all, while entirely within your right, might perhaps be considered negligent in the future. We all have crazy uncles and adventuring grandfathers whose stories we have only heard fragments of, which we'd love to know more about. Wearable computing and lifelogging may be an answer to that, a way to enable that sort of generational storytelling.
  - jacquesm 14y ago
    This is my life and I get to do with it what I want. If my descendants want to have interesting lives they'll have to go and make their own, not piggy-back on mine. And if they truly believe I've been negligent they're welcome to pass their inheritance to their siblings.
zemanel 14y ago
i'm actually interested in the "augmented reality" aspect of this (as opposed to seeing new e-mail notifications, video calls, location info and whatever). Imagine being able to create content only visible either through an app's camera or these kind of glasses. Like "Second Life"but on the real world. "Placing" notes, pictures, videos for your friends or public at certain places; 2/3D objects like arrows pointing at that awesome coffee shop. Actually thought hard at implementing a prototype (for Android) but my current skills are under par.
- waterlesscloud 14y ago
  I've been re-reading William Gibson novels in order, currently on All Tomorrow's Parties. Anyway, when I re-read Idoru, I wondered why we don't really have anything like its proto-cyberspace. With its Walled City, a distributed common virtual world. I can see why the matrix of Neuromancer doesn't really make sense, but having played enough mmos in the intervening years, I'm a little surprised Walled City or something like Snowcrash's Metaverse isn't a thing. It seems like if the infrastructure for it existed, the Reddit crowd et al would build it out in no time. We've got half-assed things like Second Life, and I think a lot of Minecraft's appeal is from that same strain. But nothing that really works properly. It just seems like something that would actually happen eventually, it seems like the demand is there.
  - zemanel 14y ago
    I see. In theory, like any idea, sounds cool. I've actually taken real world pictures around my building to mockup a possible UI sometime. The issue is that, as far as i know, geo-location (GPS at least) has a +-10 meter precision, so placing content at a specific spot is, fuzzy. ps.: by placing content at a specific spot, i mean grabbing the latitude/longitude/height and possibly direction from the device and allowing anyone around it to see it by pointing a device (smartphone/tablet/glasses) there. edit: of course, the precision is really an issue depending on what your'e "tagging". If you're adding stuff to a town square, +- 10 meters don't make any difference :-)
    - 14y ago
jmount 14y ago
Can't wait to see all Google Glassers stumbling around addled by pop up advertisements.
- pptm 14y ago
  I can't wait to rewire Google Glasses and run the entire thing off of a local server.
- drivebyacct2 14y ago
  Good god I'm so tired of this stupid inaccurate meme implying that Android comes with ads. It is the stupidest thing I continue to see here.
- Permit 14y ago
  Just like all those pop-up advertisements Google has put elsewhere, correct?
  - jmount 14y ago
    GMail is pretty infested with ads.
alexqgb 14y ago
Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future. Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is preferable to others. In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future. As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger. I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.
- vitovito 14y ago
  As someone with a degree in geography, this is a bit hyperbolic, and a bit of a one-sided, urban, first world, view of cartography that might be nice for advertisers in big cities with pervasive 4G or wifi, but will also be ignored everywhere else. Mapping is traditionally about sensemaking and placemaking. Precision and accuracy are two different things, and both are entirely context dependent. There's a famous book, How to Lie with Maps, all about it. Maps are how we take things from others by drawing a line in a different place, or how we explore boundaries by drawing what we know and wondering what's everywhere else. They are stories on paper that sometimes have legal or royal or personal meaning, but they are always still stories. Geography is a social science, and cartography is as much art as it is evidence. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton tells a story about maps, where your Google Glass example breaks down: Imagine that you were kayaking off the coast of Greenland, and needed a chart to find your way. You might have a paper chart, but you will probably have trouble unfolding it with your mittens on, and in any case, it will probably get soaked in the process and become unreadable. From the urban perspective, an alternative solution might be to go to your PC and use a mapping program on the internet... However, there is a minor problem here, too. You don't have your PC with you in the arctic, much less in your kayak. We all know about internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs--they might provide another alternative. Why not jump on the internet using your cell phone, and get the map that way? But here is the problem. You probably can't get cellular service where you are in your kayak. And even if you can, your battery is probably dead because it is so cold. Or, your phone won't work because it is wet. Even if your mobile phone does work, and you have service, you probably can't operate it because you can't do so without taking your mittens off, and it is too cold to do so. Now let's look at a third approach, one that the Inuit have used... This shows two tactile maps of the coastline, carved out of wood. They can be carried inside your mittens, so your hands stay warm. They have infinite battery life, and can be read, even in the six months of the year that it is dark. And, if they are accidentally dropped in the water, they float. What you and I might see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is appropriate for their particular environment. There are entire cultures where your Euro-centric view of mapping does not compute, so much so that researchers at my alma mater would go into jungles and teach third world tribes how the usurping white man views their world so they can make maps that you, the outsider, can understand what they had previously only expressed emotionally. There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine.
sp332 14y ago
It might be instructive to get the, er, perspective of someone who has used augmented vision for several years already. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-smart-glasses-might-not-make-you-smarter http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-sm...
mrbill 14y ago
Nobody's yet mentioned Charlie Stross' "Accelerando"? One of the main characters is basically crippled when he's mugged and his smart-glasses are stolen.
pptm 14y ago
Does Google Glass comprise of only a micro display? I assumed the technology was a little bit more sophisticated than that.
- rfurlan 14y ago
  Here is what is currently known about Glass: - Transparent microdisplay, front-facing camera, touch-sensitive controls, audio I/O, internals "equivalent to a Galaxy Nexus", IMU, WiFi

77 points by dave1010uk 14y ago

Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up (and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date. This is the common wearable computing utility argument, but in practice, it doesn't seem to pan out. Gordon Bell digitized much of his life, and everything for the past ten or twenty years. Phone calls, emails, a photo every sixty seconds, more when his heart rate increased. He hardly ever went back to it. Revisiting it was so rare as to be a notable event in and of itself. Rather, he found people with whom he had conversations would go to him and use him as a reference library. Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent was an Emacs thing which actively indexed and cross-referenced anything you were typing with things you had written before. He's working on Glass now, afaik: http://www.remem.org/ http://www.remem.org/ It isn't a generally useful solution because it requires that you live inside of Emacs. Today you'd need something that could index across multiple devices, multiple independent cloud storage systems, multiple independent accounts, etc.; or something that was locked into a single ecosystem and you lived entirely there, but then you'd develop "blind spots" for things that occurred elsewhere, like how you stop hanging out with certain friends because the only way they communicate with you is via Facebook but you turned off all of Facebook's notifications. There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software, something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece. The essay was about an article he was writing during which the software brought up a saved article and a note he had written, and forgotten about, in a creepily timely and seemingly prescient moment. He wondered at what point the software needs to get credit for providing the research and the associations. "Forgetting" is a key part of human existence that most wearable applications tend to ignore. "You were last here with [your ex]" says Foursquare. "You haven't talked with [your ex] in a while, make her day by leaving a message on her wall" says Facebook. Using someone's precise words against them can be emotionally cruel. Legally, you're expected to forget all of the specific details of things like trade secrets and company processes when you leave a job; how is that to be reconciled with your perfect, digital memory? None of these things are being actively explored. We already hit the "second generation" of applications as described by the author; it's the third generation that interests me.

kentlyons 14y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if something akin to the Remembrance Agent ends up on Glass. For his PhD thesis, Brad generalized the ideas of the Remembrance Agent to the broader notion of JITIR - Just-In-Time Information Retrieval. He built a web sidebar in that work, but that probably isn't the right app either. However the idea of doing a continuous search based on what you're doing would fit it well. Before it was just searching your own stuff, but now they'd hook in more generally to Google's search. Couple that with something Siri like where the speech recognition is feed as input for a proactive search. I'm still not sure this is a compelling application for a wide audience, but for several of the early everyday users of wearable computers (including myself) it had a lot of appeal.
- vitovito 14y ago
  I had forgotten about what ended up in his thesis. It's linked to from the Remembrance Agent site if anyone else is interested: http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/rhodes-phd-JITIR.pdf http://www.bradleyrhodes.com/Papers/rhodes-phd-JITIR.pdf (PDF) "Implicit query" is another term for it. On the desktop side, one of the most realized solutions was the Dashboard prototype: http://nat.org/dashboard/ http://nat.org/dashboard/ I've long argued that designing multi-modal interfaces is where applications need to go. We're seeing this now with desktop, web and mobile apps all running against the same APIs, but what it really means is you're more likely to be able to also design a UI that's really an audio-only interface, whispering to you continuously via a Bluetooth headset, or a wrist-mounted UI, or... etc. It also means you can design and build something useful for desktop users, and then mobile users, and then scaled even further down for wearable users. Real-time continuous Google searching as a desktop sidebar, or rendered on an iPad or iPod Touch display linked to desktop input as a second screen, would be a start.
sigkill 14y ago
Your post actually fires up quite a lot of my neurons. I'm thinking about a perfect text to speech system which transcribes whatever you say into pure text files. Maybe it'll generate a new file every ten minutes, every half an hour or possibly even every six hours. That'll leave you with tons of text with respect to what you said. Now integrate that with some kind of a keylogger on all your devices (like a computer, tablet, and phone) which can track states and applications. Also, by virtue of having a current generation smart phone you can also tag locations and timestamps, at least to cell tower triangulation accuracy if not GPS accuracy. This would run transparent to the user. At the end of the day, he'll have pure text files that can be searched. Implementing a google-like algorithm modified to work on flat files would be great. It'd be basically like the Remembrance Agent but more advanced. I don't know how I'd feel about using such a system, but I'm reasonably sure that we're on the way there indirectly. Heck, most of us voluntarily not only record our lives, but also post it publicly. What's wrong with recording all our life (right from that websearch on the tablet, to what you're ordering at the restaurant whose name you forgot but you visited it on the day right after your best friend got married) if it's going to make it life easier. As such, I've noticed personally that I have stopped storing information in my head unless I use it regularly, but instead I store pointers to the location of the information, like whether I did a search {if yes, then what were the keywords, and what was the result's position}, or did I look it up on a forum or maybe even a real book. /thinking-out-loud

jacquesm 14y ago

When you can remember everything with 100% perfection there is no distinction anymore between the food you're eating and the food you ate 20 years ago. Between the people you're with and the people you knew long ago. And so on. In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end up not using it. Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than good enough as it is. The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area.

vitovito 14y ago
The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat people with deficiencies in this area. Yes, some research shows that reviewing the things an Alzheimer's patient did that day, along with other pertinent facts, slows the degeneration. I've long wondered if memory loss behaves similar to traditional forgetting of facts, if you could do training similar to spaced repetition to combat it long-term, or if it only works in early stages. For the last several years, I've been considering the greatest beneficiaries of a perfect digital memory may not be ourselves at all, but our descendants: I am also aware that I will not care about every minute of footage in 20 years. The problem is, I don’t have the foggiest idea which minutes I’ll care about, and I am not ready to let go of any of it yet. http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/08/backup#comment-6385 http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomar... You have no idea what your children will find interesting or important, and to presume to edit your life down or to not record it at all, while entirely within your right, might perhaps be considered negligent in the future. We all have crazy uncles and adventuring grandfathers whose stories we have only heard fragments of, which we'd love to know more about. Wearable computing and lifelogging may be an answer to that, a way to enable that sort of generational storytelling.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  This is my life and I get to do with it what I want. If my descendants want to have interesting lives they'll have to go and make their own, not piggy-back on mine. And if they truly believe I've been negligent they're welcome to pass their inheritance to their siblings.

zemanel 14y ago

i'm actually interested in the "augmented reality" aspect of this (as opposed to seeing new e-mail notifications, video calls, location info and whatever). Imagine being able to create content only visible either through an app's camera or these kind of glasses. Like "Second Life"but on the real world. "Placing" notes, pictures, videos for your friends or public at certain places; 2/3D objects like arrows pointing at that awesome coffee shop. Actually thought hard at implementing a prototype (for Android) but my current skills are under par.

waterlesscloud 14y ago
I've been re-reading William Gibson novels in order, currently on All Tomorrow's Parties. Anyway, when I re-read Idoru, I wondered why we don't really have anything like its proto-cyberspace. With its Walled City, a distributed common virtual world. I can see why the matrix of Neuromancer doesn't really make sense, but having played enough mmos in the intervening years, I'm a little surprised Walled City or something like Snowcrash's Metaverse isn't a thing. It seems like if the infrastructure for it existed, the Reddit crowd et al would build it out in no time. We've got half-assed things like Second Life, and I think a lot of Minecraft's appeal is from that same strain. But nothing that really works properly. It just seems like something that would actually happen eventually, it seems like the demand is there.
- zemanel 14y ago
  I see. In theory, like any idea, sounds cool. I've actually taken real world pictures around my building to mockup a possible UI sometime. The issue is that, as far as i know, geo-location (GPS at least) has a +-10 meter precision, so placing content at a specific spot is, fuzzy. ps.: by placing content at a specific spot, i mean grabbing the latitude/longitude/height and possibly direction from the device and allowing anyone around it to see it by pointing a device (smartphone/tablet/glasses) there. edit: of course, the precision is really an issue depending on what your'e "tagging". If you're adding stuff to a town square, +- 10 meters don't make any difference :-)
  - 14y ago

jmount 14y ago

Can't wait to see all Google Glassers stumbling around addled by pop up advertisements.

pptm 14y ago
I can't wait to rewire Google Glasses and run the entire thing off of a local server.
drivebyacct2 14y ago
Good god I'm so tired of this stupid inaccurate meme implying that Android comes with ads. It is the stupidest thing I continue to see here.
Permit 14y ago
Just like all those pop-up advertisements Google has put elsewhere, correct?
- jmount 14y ago
  GMail is pretty infested with ads.

alexqgb 14y ago

Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future. Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is preferable to others. In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors. The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed. Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can guide our plans for the future. As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision, and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger. I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.

vitovito 14y ago
As someone with a degree in geography, this is a bit hyperbolic, and a bit of a one-sided, urban, first world, view of cartography that might be nice for advertisers in big cities with pervasive 4G or wifi, but will also be ignored everywhere else. Mapping is traditionally about sensemaking and placemaking. Precision and accuracy are two different things, and both are entirely context dependent. There's a famous book, How to Lie with Maps, all about it. Maps are how we take things from others by drawing a line in a different place, or how we explore boundaries by drawing what we know and wondering what's everywhere else. They are stories on paper that sometimes have legal or royal or personal meaning, but they are always still stories. Geography is a social science, and cartography is as much art as it is evidence. In Sketching User Experiences, Bill Buxton tells a story about maps, where your Google Glass example breaks down: Imagine that you were kayaking off the coast of Greenland, and needed a chart to find your way. You might have a paper chart, but you will probably have trouble unfolding it with your mittens on, and in any case, it will probably get soaked in the process and become unreadable. From the urban perspective, an alternative solution might be to go to your PC and use a mapping program on the internet... However, there is a minor problem here, too. You don't have your PC with you in the arctic, much less in your kayak. We all know about internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs--they might provide another alternative. Why not jump on the internet using your cell phone, and get the map that way? But here is the problem. You probably can't get cellular service where you are in your kayak. And even if you can, your battery is probably dead because it is so cold. Or, your phone won't work because it is wet. Even if your mobile phone does work, and you have service, you probably can't operate it because you can't do so without taking your mittens off, and it is too cold to do so. Now let's look at a third approach, one that the Inuit have used... This shows two tactile maps of the coastline, carved out of wood. They can be carried inside your mittens, so your hands stay warm. They have infinite battery life, and can be read, even in the six months of the year that it is dark. And, if they are accidentally dropped in the water, they float. What you and I might see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is appropriate for their particular environment. There are entire cultures where your Euro-centric view of mapping does not compute, so much so that researchers at my alma mater would go into jungles and teach third world tribes how the usurping white man views their world so they can make maps that you, the outsider, can understand what they had previously only expressed emotionally. There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away than you imagine.

sp332 14y ago

It might be instructive to get the, er, perspective of someone who has used augmented vision for several years already. http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-smart-glasses-might-not-make-you-smarter http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-sm...

mrbill 14y ago

Nobody's yet mentioned Charlie Stross' "Accelerando"? One of the main characters is basically crippled when he's mugged and his smart-glasses are stolen.

pptm 14y ago

Does Google Glass comprise of only a micro display? I assumed the technology was a little bit more sophisticated than that.

rfurlan 14y ago
Here is what is currently known about Glass: - Transparent microdisplay, front-facing camera, touch-sensitive controls, audio I/O, internals "equivalent to a Galaxy Nexus", IMU, WiFi