5 ms·

I'm always amazed at how much anti-Glass sentiment I see in the tech community. I personally think it's going to be amazing. The best analogy I can think of is

I'm always amazed at how much anti-Glass sentiment I see in the tech community. I personally think it's going to be amazing. The best analogy I can think of is the heads-up display (HUD) in video games. The current use cases shown (texting, weather, pictures, etc.) are insignificant in comparison to the potential for combining with other wearable computing devices such as Fitbits, Fuelbands, Thalmic MYO's, etc. Of course, this is an early iteration of the concept, but I see it as a game changer. Imagine removing the HUD from all of your video games. That experience sucks. Now imagine a world where we can combine quantified-self computing, augmented reality, and new interface devices such as Thalmic MYO with the Glass...that future is a future I very much want to live in.

mjn 13y ago
Maybe that's the fundamental disagreement, because that's a future I don't really want to live in. I don't like HUDs in videogames for the most part. And I don't want a bunch of shallow behaviorism everywhere, whether it's called gamification or quantified-self or life-as-an-A/B-test. The actual device itself I don't have any particular aversion to. However so far all that does seem pretty easy to avoid, at least in your personal life, so I'm not extremely worried about it (gamification in the workplace may be harder to avoid, depending on your job and job options).
- gknoy 13y ago
  I find your perspective to be refreshingly different than my own. I love the idea of a HUD - even it it's something I don't use often. What I had not thought about was the privacy implications, and the more I think about it, the less happy I feel about people with it on all the time. Part of me feels this fear is irrational, as I don't have a problem with people taking video with their cell phones. However, this deep-seated aversion to it seems more due to the it-might-always-be-on aspect -- similar to how most of us are OK with the idea of wiretaps when warranted, yet flip out about the recent intelligence news. Penny Arcade and some other articles I've read have really reinforced the perspective that people will want to punch me in the face for using Glass. I think Glass's biggest hurdle will not be the prospect of looking silly, but of all of your friends saying "Turn that damn thing off before I break it".
  - nrivadeneira 13y ago
    I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I don't really care if people have Glass on around me. People have cameras with them at all times these days due to smartphones. The fact that it's not attached to their head is not what's stopping them from taking photos and video at inappropriate times. I don't see myself beginning to take unsolicited photos any more than I would have with my phone (aka never) just because I have Glass on. I imagine the same goes for most people you have any sort of meaningful interaction with.
lnanek2 13y ago
As a developer, writing for an expensive accessory like Glass is already a crap shoot. Writing for people who have two expensive accessories? There's almost no point.
angersock 13y ago
Here, let's go the other way (maybe they even go together!): Let's imagine a world where you sign up for discounts on certain goods in exchange for allowing your Glass to randomly take pictures throughout the day. This data is mined and tagged and sorted, until one day the .gov or .mil or some hacker decides to pull it and use it for nefarious purposes. The fact is that the nerd fantasy of getting a HUD (to track what, exactly? Ammo? Health? Some numbers in a database you've been trained to equate with self-worth?) is not worth the societal cost of losing privacy. "But we've already got smartphones with cameras!" doesn't work--the camera is there, and likely just a change of app policy away from being always on. This is such a shortsighted idea.
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it." There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.
  - angersock 13y ago
    The telephone example is near exactly Google Voice, right? Massive voice database for the cost of some subsidized VoIP and storage? "...cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data..." You do realize that this is exactly the Google and Facebook business model, right? Targeted advertising using user-generated content? "The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant" Over a billion people have signed up for Facebook, giving up their own social graph data and (as we've seen recently) address books, and that's just for a free shitty profile page whose design changes on a whim. Add a burger to that, and you've got a deal. There's no slippery-slope here--at this point, the dataset is large and obvious enough that if you aren't blinded by the magical nerd future you'll see very reasonable concerns over what might happen.

mjn 13y ago

Maybe that's the fundamental disagreement, because that's a future I don't really want to live in. I don't like HUDs in videogames for the most part. And I don't want a bunch of shallow behaviorism everywhere, whether it's called gamification or quantified-self or life-as-an-A/B-test. The actual device itself I don't have any particular aversion to. However so far all that does seem pretty easy to avoid, at least in your personal life, so I'm not extremely worried about it (gamification in the workplace may be harder to avoid, depending on your job and job options).

gknoy 13y ago
I find your perspective to be refreshingly different than my own. I love the idea of a HUD - even it it's something I don't use often. What I had not thought about was the privacy implications, and the more I think about it, the less happy I feel about people with it on all the time. Part of me feels this fear is irrational, as I don't have a problem with people taking video with their cell phones. However, this deep-seated aversion to it seems more due to the it-might-always-be-on aspect -- similar to how most of us are OK with the idea of wiretaps when warranted, yet flip out about the recent intelligence news. Penny Arcade and some other articles I've read have really reinforced the perspective that people will want to punch me in the face for using Glass. I think Glass's biggest hurdle will not be the prospect of looking silly, but of all of your friends saying "Turn that damn thing off before I break it".
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I don't really care if people have Glass on around me. People have cameras with them at all times these days due to smartphones. The fact that it's not attached to their head is not what's stopping them from taking photos and video at inappropriate times. I don't see myself beginning to take unsolicited photos any more than I would have with my phone (aka never) just because I have Glass on. I imagine the same goes for most people you have any sort of meaningful interaction with.

lnanek2 13y ago

As a developer, writing for an expensive accessory like Glass is already a crap shoot. Writing for people who have two expensive accessories? There's almost no point.

angersock 13y ago

Here, let's go the other way (maybe they even go together!): Let's imagine a world where you sign up for discounts on certain goods in exchange for allowing your Glass to randomly take pictures throughout the day. This data is mined and tagged and sorted, until one day the .gov or .mil or some hacker decides to pull it and use it for nefarious purposes. The fact is that the nerd fantasy of getting a HUD (to track what, exactly? Ammo? Health? Some numbers in a database you've been trained to equate with self-worth?) is not worth the societal cost of losing privacy. "But we've already got smartphones with cameras!" doesn't work--the camera is there, and likely just a change of app policy away from being always on. This is such a shortsighted idea.

nrivadeneira 13y ago
What a ridiculous slippery-slope assertion. The same argument could be said for the telephone - "Inevitably some company will offer discounts in exchange for random recordings of your phone calls. Everyone will sign up for that and then a hacker will take advantage of it." There are at least two reasons stuff like that doesn't occur: 1) The cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data far outweighs any sort of tangential benefit a company may get from such a policy. That's on top of the massive PR risk. 2) The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant as to not constitute any sort of grand 'societal loss of privacy'.
- angersock 13y ago
  The telephone example is near exactly Google Voice, right? Massive voice database for the cost of some subsidized VoIP and storage? "...cost of recording, storing, parsing, and analyzing all that data..." You do realize that this is exactly the Google and Facebook business model, right? Targeted advertising using user-generated content? "The number of people that might sign up for privacy invasion in the interest of a 2 for 1 Big Mac would be so insignificant" Over a billion people have signed up for Facebook, giving up their own social graph data and (as we've seen recently) address books, and that's just for a free shitty profile page whose design changes on a whim. Add a burger to that, and you've got a deal. There's no slippery-slope here--at this point, the dataset is large and obvious enough that if you aren't blinded by the magical nerd future you'll see very reasonable concerns over what might happen.