Google Glass: Are You Ready? - Laurie Aines

Are you ready for Google Glass?

Recently, on a 7 hour road trip, I plugged my iPhone into the rental car USB, told Siri to give me directions to my destination and turned on iTunes.  Listening to all of my favorite songs, the phone muted as I received directions, then of course continued playing my music.  When I received phone calls, iTunes muted again as the caller’s voice resonated through the car speakers via Bluetooth.  Upon hanging up, my beloved iTunes resumed.

I know this is status quo to many of you today, but I was thinking about a conference I attended 13 years ago.  Several of us had state-of-the-art palm pilots, and we were all talking about the future.  One day there would be phones that give you directions, allow you to pay for items, take photos, and exactly what phones do today.  It seemed so…..futuristic!  And now it is just status quo.

So in spite of all the talk and anticipation of Google Glass today, it will be the status quo tomorrow.

If you are not yet aware of Google Glass, they are almost what they sound like; non-prescription eyeglasses (1 style, 5 color choices) that enable you to take photos, get directions, view schedules,  view and send texts, and more by using your voice or a touch panel by your temple.

Google made a brilliant move by introducing a limited number of glasses to the market.  At its hefty $1500 price, they were scarfed up by early adopters, developers and companies wishing to provide input and develop their own apps to sell or provide to consumers.  So prior to a mass introduction, the glasses will have many more uses than even Google imagined, or at least developed.

Recently, Fidelity Investments announced an app for the glasses to enable consumers to view stock prices and customers to access account information.

Mutualink, a security firm, announced an app for police to access security camera footage, building schematics and other helpful data on-the-spot during criminal pursuits.  A logical next step in this area is police traffic stop videos.  Expect them to migrate away from current dash-cam technology to this type of interactive optical glass technology, where suspects will be seen and imaged in the same way the police see them – face to face.  No longer will police court video just show the back of a driver’s head filmed from 20 feet behind, you’ll see it as a point of view (POV) event.  The officer, in turn, will get license and warrant checks displayed in his goggles, and he will not have to walk back to his car to check his computer.

InSight is another app that allows you to recognize a person in a crowd.  At this time, the technology allows the recognition based on clothing.  So take a photo of your children prior to arriving at the airport, for example, and you will be able to find them in a crowd, should they get lost.

A navigation app is being developed by Mercedes-Benz so their customers can look straight ahead and get door-to-door directions to their destinations, while cruising in luxury!

Clearly, many companies are preparing for Google Glass to become as mainstream as the Smartphones of today.

Not everyone is going to be in love with Google Glass however.  Many prisons, bars and strip clubs have taken steps to prohibit Google Glass already.  As the technology settles out and becomes more widely understood, expect Google Glass to be banned in any place that basically doesn’t allow you to shoot video today, including concerts and movie theaters.  In addition, there are the usual traditionalists, technophobes and various other Luddites who will never embrace this technology.  Privacy advocates and people who took the Borg episodes of Star Trek way too seriously will also be squeamish, if not outright hostile, towards people approaching them looking through alien-like lenses.

And finally there is the linguistic awkwardness issue.  The name “Google Glass” does not exactly semantically roll trippingly off the tongue.  Expect everyone in America to just call these things Google glasses just to satisfy the inner English teacher within themselves, and much to Google’s annoyance and frustration I am sure.

In the end though, this device is stage 1 of a whole new genre of devices, much like 3D printing is experiencing now.

Are you ready?

To get a feel for Google Glass, watch the Google’s YouTube video.