Bob CollinsGoogle wowed developers with cool today and, judging from early reviews of the company’s Project Glass, it worked.
“Seeing the Google Project Glass video streaming technology in action was nothing short of breathtaking,” Mashable proclaimed, after Google co-founder Sergey Brin appeared at the Google I/O conference and talked live with a group of skyjumpers, who were broadcasting and communicating their jump live with their Google glasses.
Then Brin unveiled the pricetag for the glasses — $1,500 — which will ship in limited numbers to developers some time next year.
A solution to a problem? Or a solution searching for a problem?
Christopher Mims, of MIT’S Technology Review, says it’s “like signing up for a mental illness.”
Let’s take all those distractions and put them on our face. Directly in our line of sight. I don’t know about you, but when I want to avoid distractions, I often have to physically avoid them. Out of sight, out of mind isn’t just a cliché — it’s a commentary on the narrow spotlight of human attention and the limits of our ability to manage the cognitive load of having something ever-present in our field of view.
Google Glass is a camera, headphones and a display all in one. Do you find it unnerving when the person standing next to you at the grocery store is having a conversation with him or herself, and at first you don’t realize it’s because they’re speaking into a phone headset? Now imagine they’re also having full-blown visual hallucinations. And that you no longer know whether or not someone is taking your picture, because, hey man! it’s just glasses!
