Pricey device makes wearer feel like everyone’s staring.
NEW YORK – Shaped like a lopsided headband, Google Glass is an unassuming piece of technology when you’re holding it in your hands. Putting it on, though, is another story.
Once you do, this Internet-connected eyewear takes on a life of its own. You become “The Person Wearing Google Glass” and all the assumptions that brings with it — about your wealth, boorishness or curiosity. Such is the fate of early adopters. Google calls the people who wear Glass “explorers,” because the device is not yet available to the general public.
With its $1,500 price tag, the device is far from having mass appeal. At the South By Southwest Interactive tech jamboree in Austin last week, I counted less than a dozen people wearing it, including technology blogger Robert Scoble, who isn’t shy about posting pictures of himself in the shower, red-faced, water running, wearing the device.
Google, like most successful technology companies, dreamers and inventors, likes to take a long view on things. It calls some of its most outlandish projects “moonshots.” Besides Glass, these include its driverless car, balloons that deliver Internet service to remote parts of the world and contact lenses that monitor glucose levels in diabetics.
Ten years from now, we may look back at Google Glass as one of those short-lived bridges that takes us from one technological breakthrough to the next, just as pagers, MP3 players and personal digital assistants paved the way for the era of the smartphone.
In its current, early version, Google Glass feels bulky, and when I look in the mirror I see a futuristic telemarketer looking back at me. If Google is aiming for mass appeal, the next versions of Glass have to be much smaller and less conspicuous.
Specs in place for the first time, I walked out of Google’s Manhattan showroom on a recent Friday afternoon with a sense of unease. Why is everyone looking at me? Should I be looking at them? Should I have chosen the orange Glass instead of charcoal?
Ideally, Google Glass lets you do many of the things we now do with our smartphones, such as taking photos, reading news headlines or talking to our mothers on Sunday evenings — hands-free. But it comes with a bit of baggage.
Glass feels heavier when I’m out in public or in a group where I’m the only person wearing it. The device has been described to me as “the scarlet letter of technology” by a friend.
But that’s just one side of wearing Google Glass.
The other side is exhilarating. Glass is getting some bad press lately. Some bars and coffee shops in Silicon Valley and Seattle have banned Google Glass, for example, and federal authorities in Ohio interrogated a man earlier this year after he was suspected of recording a movie with the device. Last month, Google put out a Glass etiquette guide that includes the appeal “don’t be creepy or rude.”
But the truth is that it’s a groundbreaking device, even if it doesn’t take off, even if it evolves into something completely different, even if we laugh at it 10 years from now while driving our flying cars in the skies of Manhattan.
I strolled around for a few hours, happily snapping photos. With a mere wink, I captured snowy Lower Manhattan streetscapes and my reflection in the grimy subway-car windows.
source: www.news-sentinel.com
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