I am writing a book with Robert Scoble called Age of Context. The following is an excerpt from our Chapter on Wearable Computers.
"Right now, most of us look at the people with Google Glass like the dudes who first walked around with the big brick phones."
--Amber Naslund SideraWorks
The first two sets went to Sergei Brin and Larry Page, and then about a dozen went to Eric Schmidt and other big deals at Google. Before anyone outside the company could really get a sense of what Google Glass was all about, the hoopla and controversy had already ignited.
Google, usually tight-lipped before a product is launched, and generally conservative in publicity, started titillating the public with juicy previews. At a developer conference, nine months prior to releasing the Explorer version to developers and journalists, skydivers leaped from a plane over San Francisco, using the new wearable computing prototype’s video capability to record their downward trajectory.
A month later Project Glass, as it was called, merged with Project Runway as models paraded in the sleek devices and expensive Haute Couture at a tony Manhattan fashion show. Co-founder Brin started speaking publicly with far greater frequency and was caught riding a New York City subway wearing a set. The company released periodic videos on its YouTube property showing conceptual previews of how great the device would be.
All this happened before April 2013, when the company began parsing out Explorer versions of Google Glass to third-party developers and testers at a price of $1500 each. There were just a few thousand of them available in the first 30 days and they were doled out one-at-a-time to recipients who would pledge not to loan or give their devices to other people.
This caused a conversational explosion divided into two groups: Those who had a prototype of the device seemed to universally love them—or the promise of what they could be—and those who had not yet touched or even seen a set, who warned of the horrors Glass was about to trigger upon humanity.
The high price meant that Glass would be a device only for wealthy geeks like Brin and Page. Glass wearers would be able to record your activities in public restrooms. Privacy, as we know it, would soon end, some warned.
Five Points, a Seattle-based bar, banned them without ever seeing a set. A Congressman in West Virginia, a state that trails the nation in public education, proposed that drivers in his state be banned from wearing Glass sets. A national petition was started to prohibit Glass use as an “illegal surveillance device.” A Forbes columnist warned they would make classroom cheating rampant.
A full month before Glass was released to developers, the Urban Dictionary published a new entry: Glasshole—a person who constantly talks to his Google Glass, ignoring the outside world.
All this angst over a device that upon its release to developers did nothing a smartphone couldn’t already do. In fact it did a lot less since mobile apps were extremely limited at the outset. Glass wasn’t even the first facially worn device.
Steve Mann, a Canadian professor, had been walking around with one for years. Once, in Paris, he was dragged out of a McDonald’s and jostled on the Champs Élysées by staff who found the camera attached to his eye disturbing.
Oakley, of course had launched Airwave, its fashionable smart ski goggles for retail consumers more than seven months earlier.
So what was the big deal? Well, actually a lot, but let us switch to third-person narrative a bit so we can tell you how we got familiar with the hands-free device and what our impressions were.
Not Another Day
Robert Scoble was the 107th person to receive a Google Glass prototype. He put them on and started posting short notes on his social networks about his experience. He took them with him as he bopped over to Europe delivering speeches at tech conferences and letting hundreds of people give his Glass a quick try.
After two weeks, he posted his first review to Google+, the default social network for Google Glass users: “I’m never going to live another day without a wearable computer on my face,” he declared.
To illustrate his point, his wife photographed him in the shower wearing the device.
In the first two weeks, Scoble also produced over a thousand photos taken with Glass, as well as six videos.
Scoble is a noted lover of shiny objects. His career is built on meeting with developers of innovative technologies. He is known for both his candor and his enthusiasm.
While Scoble and his Glass whistle-stopped Europe, Israel stayed home writing Age of Context. He followed Scoble’s prolific posts, with interest and concern. The idea for the book had been generated by Google Glass and its potential as the flagship that would usher in the new age the book describes.
But he worried that Scoble may have gone overboard, overstating the case. Israel is far from the early adopter that Scoble is. While he may be early to adopt technology in terms of the mainstream, he is pretty late to the party in Silicon Valley terms. He remains concerned with privacy.
On May 1, Israel would see Glass firsthand. He was scheduled to spend the day with Scoble, starting at SRI International, the venerable and prolific independent research and development facility.
Very early in the day, he tried on Scoble’s device for about 60 seconds. His concerns evaporated. He immediately wanted one. He might never vow to wear a facial computer every day, but he knew he wanted one. In less than a minute, he understood how such a device would improve his productivity, access to information and communications capabilities. He also thought the device was more fun than any tech device he had ever fiddled with.
Still, he held back in what he shared with his co-author. He wanted to see how others perceived the devices themselves and the fact they would be interviewed by someone wearing them.
The latter issue would soon disappear. When people sat down to talk about their products, they stared at the glasses with a certain curiosity for a few minutes, the way you might do if someone you knew showed up to dinner sporting a new moustache or different colored hair. After a few minutes it faded into the background and the conversation was as natural as any other.
As the day wore on Israel started to forget about Scoble’s Glass set altogether. He noticed that his eye contact with his partner had improved, because Scoble wasn’t constantly staring and tapping on the small screen of a smartphone, as Scoble was previously so prone to do.
SRI was the easiest test. It is staffed by some of the world’s smartest—and geekiest—scientists and technologists. Many are even geekier than Scoble. Conversations started on the device. Everyone wanted to try it on. Everyone smiled at what they saw, and then the conversations naturally evolved into the business at hand.
After SRI, the two authors went to a Palo Alto restaurant where they sat at the bar and had dinner. An older man finishing a drink stared at Scoble for a minute, and then approached.
Israel anticipated a hostile situation but, instead, he politely asked to try on the device. He took the one-minute demo tour smiling as he did. “It’s the future,” he declared, handing the device back to Scoble, then walking out of the establishment nodding and smiling.
The bartender was next. He smiled through his 60-second tour, saying he wanted one as he handed it back. As they sat eating, there were a few curious looks, but the reception for Scoble and his glasses was far warmer than Mann had experienced in the Paris McDonald’s.
Following dinner, the two strolled along University Ave. Walking this street with Scoble is sort of like walking 5th Avenue in Manhattan with Michael Bloomberg. People stopped us every few minutes; some knew him; some just knew who he was, and others didn’t know him at all but they wanted to try on Glass.
It was the same every time: 60 seconds, smiles and thanks. That’s all it took to understand how to use it and more important get a sense of what it could do over the coming months and years. Everyone we encountered wanted one.
The biggest complaint was not privacy. It was price. People seemed to forget that the Glass they were seeing was not consumer ready. They were expensive prototypes, allocated mostly to developers who are likely to build a great many apps in the coming weeks and years.
Reflected Israel in a Facebook post the following morning, “[Glass] is the most immersive technology I have ever experienced. It will get a lot better and cheaper. It will change the world—but probably not mine or other aging boomers. But they will be an essential component in the worlds of my grandchildren. Their world will be better because of such facial devices.”
But this product is a catalyst, not a bolt of lightening. Some years will pass before people look back and try to understand how they could ever have lived in a world without such devices.
How long will it take? We are not sure. This chapter began with a quote from Amber Nusland describing how cell phones changed over 20 years or so. There was a freakiness to it that is now long forgotten.
But there’s an even longer view, it contains what is probably a little urban legend.
In 1940, a device was developed that allowed soldiers in the field to wirelessly talk to each other. It was first housed in a backpack and then a handset was developed.
As a soldier walked on patrol in a South Pacific Island, a native is said to have looked at him and pointed, saying in perfect pigeon English: “Walkie-Talkie.”
The name stuck and 70 years later that cumbersome device evolved into that sleek little thing in your pocket. So when you look at a facially worn device today, try to picture what it will be like in five, 10 or fifty years.
Maybe the device will be housed in a contact lens. Perhaps it will be implanted in the brain. Perhaps that tiny screen will be gone completely—replaced by holographic images that you can watch alone or share with others.
The best way to understand how far we can go from today, is to realize just how far we have come since yesterday.
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