I drink mine right out the bottle!!!
Posted on 01/16/2015 9:19:42 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Just the other night I was watching a rerun of the Big Bang Theory episode, The Cruciferous Vegetable Amplification, in which Sheldon bemoans the fact that he won’t live long enough to have his intellect fully uploaded into a robot and creates a Mobile Virtual Presence Device. It now looks like Sheldon will have to rely on his robotic doppelganger a bit longer because the days of useful android options have been pushed back even further. Ladies and gentlemen… Google Glass is dead.
The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but will stop producing Glass in its present form. Instead it will focus on “future versions of Glass” with work carried out by a different division to before.
The Explorer programme, which gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 (£990) will close. The programme was launched in the United States in 2013. It was then opened up to anyone and was launched in the UK last summer. It had been expected that it would be followed reasonably quickly by a full consumer launch.
From next week, the search firm will stop taking orders for the product but it says it will continue to support companies that are using Glass.
The company obviously doesn’t want to use any words like failure and insists that the project is just looking for a new home, but BBC technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones isn’t buying it.
Google has tried to present this announcement as just another step in the evolution of an amazing innovation. But make no mistake – Google Glass is dead, at least in its present form.
As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects – in particular the camera. There is however one huge disadvantage – it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience.
But Google will now have to deal with a disgruntled community of Explorers who paid a large sum for a device which they must have believed would eventually evolve into something more useful.
Not to take anything away from Rory, but I think there was more amiss with Glass than just making the users look daft. Google Glass was just plain creepy. If you were wearing something like that around in the privacy of your own home, it would essentially be nothing more than a much fancier combination of a remote control, wearable laptop, cell phone and smart TV. Nobody would bat an eye. But the device’s omniscient capabilities made it a very different beast when you took it out in the public square. Nobody knew when you were recording them, checking into their background, finding their personal details or plotting some devious plan. Was any of it illegal? Probably not, but that doesn’t do anything to ameliorate the creepiness factor.
It was disturbing enough that bars and restaurants were banning users from their establishments. Employers expressed even more alarm, particularly the ones who don’t even want workers bringing cell phones onto the premises. Let’s face it, even for a society which is jumping by leaps and bounds into the cyberactive world of the 21st century, Glass was a huge step too far and too fast.
This technology is coming and I’m pretty sure that nothing is going to stop it. Eventually. I’m guessing it will probably take a full generation of those annoying millennials and their likely even more annoying offspring before rank and file citizens are ready to fully embrace the jump into anything that close to Terminator status. But if you can come up with a feasible, wrist bone mounted, mind-machine interface controlled laser, sign us up.
The money quote:
“Google Glass was just plain creepy.”
duh.
I worked on a military base and one of the contractors was wearing them as part of a test project. He got in a lot of trouble. It surprised everyone but me.
Something happened on facebook that really gave me the creeps a few months ago. I posted a picture and it didn’t just ask me if I wanted to tag people. It accurately guessed who they were. Imagine Google glass telling me who everyone around me is as I walk down the street. I can then do all sorts of searches on all of them as I walk by.
I used to say that technology changes as much in five years as it used to change in five generations, but it is moving exponentially faster.
Where does that leave mere men when it is changing that much in five minutes? Can any human culture survive? Amd when will that breaking point come?
We will need Angels surrounding us.
Yesterday the whitehouse posted a photo of the cockpit of Marine 1 in flight. I can’t help but wonder how much security info was freely given to the world with that photo.
Well this iteration is dead. Because this iteration kind of sucked. Being nothing more than an additional interface for the cellphone just is not the killer app. Add the fact that it couldn’t be coupled with real glasses, and the non-hinged earpiece and what you’ve here is a bad product.
Somebody will fix that though. There will (at some point) be a version that IS the cellphone, and goes with real glasses. It’s an inevitable development.
Not to worry – Cupertino will refine the concept & release a robotic presence, whereupon it will receive universal acclaim ......
Yes, FB has had integrated facial recognition technology for sometime.
Iirc they bought it COTS from an Israeli company. And the Israelis are, for obvious reasons, on the bleeding edge of that tech.
The platform may be dead but the concept certainly is not. If anything it will get smaller and less easy to spot. You have a cellphone sticking up out of your pocket and maybe a wristwatch repeater and an earbud, and with the right app you’re good to go. No dorky glasses involved. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, I’m saying it’s an inevitable thing.
facial recognition technology is pretty stunning
I once interviewed for a company that was making a cool project in Buffalo, NY- i was amazed at what they could do with it
They could pick out a face in the crowd at an airport - and this was almost 10 years ago
“Imagine Google glass telling me who everyone around me is as I walk down the street. I can then do all sorts of searches on all of them as I walk by.”
You know what is scarier than that?
NYC already has networked all their surveillance cameras together with pattern recognition software. Right now they can already track people around the city in this system by license plate, but soon enough, they will be able to do the same with facial recognition.
But the software is getting so good I'm gonna need to get the dark lens version
10 years from now a large percentage of people will be wearing such devices.
Google glass as it is today will look like a 1995 mobile phone to us.
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It’s one reason I’m kinda glad my state requires only a front plate. Not that that helps all that much...
Yeah, and killer drones the size of insects, released by the thousands. It is really going to get interesting.
????
vehicle front license plate.
Oh, I’m under the impression that some camera enforcement depends on a front plate. I could be wrong though. I know most of it is rear plate enforceable.
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