Naturally, I’m inclined to
say no.
As a Glass Explorer I have spent
my own time and money testing the beta eyewear for a year and a half and
researching wearables. There is no failure in this learning opportunity for me
or, I’m sure, for Google and others in the wearables market.
What worked
Having information suspended
in front of your eyes feels more futuristic than holding a smartphone
in your hand or wearing a band on your wrist. I like the fact that Glass
tethers to multiple branded phones, not only Google or Android phones. What
really fells different is being hands-free.
I certainly don’t know if
Google will make a wide consumer release of Glass. But I am sure the company
has learned from all the input about how people use and develop applications for
wearables.
What didn’t work
The “killer app” for consumer
acceptance evades us, except perhaps eyewitness video—photographing your baby’s
first steps or a first-person view of an extreme sport attempt. Google offered
the means for developers and users to
come up with applications for real life. Some interesting ideas emerged. I’m
not counting games that require you to move like a bobble-head.
The hands-free advantage of
Google Glass almost disappeared as more smartphones recognized voice
instructions and talked back. A phone-as-personal-assistant seems friendly, or at least not as unnerving as the person next to you
wearing Glass. Besides, snooping via Glass is harder to ignore at this point than
surveillance cameras or surreptitious phone cameras. Google continues to explore, with some success, the use of
Glass in niche business markets where hands-free is useful.
The initial audio interface
didn’t achieve what I’d hoped. Transmitting sound through bone vibration just
didn’t work on different-shaped heads. Given the input choice of speaking to
air or tapping the side of Glass, I usually end up tapping.
Why I did it
What could wearables do for future improvement of employee communication? Here was a
chance to test a promising technology, just in case I didn’t live long
enough to see wearables change lives for the better. I remember testing the
Internet, even before the World Wide Web, and piecing together ideas for interconnected
networks for average workers. Yet it took decades to evolve into intranets.
Wearables will take a while
to evolve as well, and probably into a form that will make Google Glass, as
cyborg nouveau, seem primitive. Let’s keep gazing further in 2015.
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