I spy
"Men seldom make passes | At girls who wear glasses," Dorothy Parker incorrectly observed in 1937. (How would she know? She didn't wear any). You have to wonder what she could have made of Google Goggles which, despite the marketing-friendly alliterative name, are neither a product (yet) nor a new idea.
I first experienced the world according to a heads-up display in 1997 during a three-day conference (TXT) on wearable computing at MIT ($). The eyes-on demonstration was a game of pool with the headset augmenting my visual field with overlays showing cuing angles. (Could be the next level of Olympic testing: checking athletes for contraband contract lenses and earpieces for those in sports where coaching is not allowed.)
At that conference, a lot of ideas were discussed and demonstrated: temperature-controlling T-shirts, garments that could send back details of a fallen soldier's condition, and so on. Much in evidence were folks like Thad Starner, who scanned my business card and handed it back to me and whose friends commented on the way he'd shift his eyes to his email mid-conversation, and Steve Mann, who turned himself into a cyborg experiment as long ago as the 1980s. Checking their respective Web pages, I see that Mann hasn't updated the evolution of wearables graphic since the late 1990s, by which time the headset looked like an ordinary pair of sunglasses; in 2002, when airport security forced him to divest his gear, he had trouble adjusting to life without it. Starner is on leave to work at...Project Glass, the home of Google Goggles.
The problem when a technological dream spans decades is that between conception and prototype things change. In 1997, that conference seemed to think wearable computing - keyboards embroidered in conductive thread, garments made of cloth woven from copper-covered strands, souped-up eyeglasses, communications-enabled watches, and shoes providing from the energy generated in walking - surely was a decade or less away.
The assumptions were not particularly contentious. People wear wrist watches and jewelry, right? So they'll wear things with the same fashion consciousness, but functional. Like, it measures and displays your heart rhythms (a woman danced wearing a light-flashing pendant that sped up with her heart rate), or your moods (high-tech mood rings), or acts as the controller for your personal area network.
Today, a lot of people don't *wear* wrist watches any more.
For wearable guys, it's good progress. The functionality that required 12 pounds of machinery draped about your person - I see from my pieces linked above and my contemporaneous notes, that the rig I tried felt like wearing a very heavy, inflexible sandwich board - is an iPhone or Android. Even my old Palm Centro comes close. As Jack Schofield writes in the Guardian, the headset is really all that's left that we don't have. And Google has a lot of competition.
What interests me is let's say these things do take off in a big way. What then? Where will the information come from to display on those headsets? Who will be the gatekeepers? If we - some of us - want to see every building decorated with outsized female nudes, will we have to opt in for porn?
My speculation here is surely not going to be futuristic enough, because like most people I'm locked into current trends. But let's say that glasses bolt onto the mobile/Internet ecologies we have in place. It is easy to imagine that, if augmented reality glasses do take off, they will be an important gateway to the next generation of information services. Because if all the glasses are is a different way of viewing your mobile phone, then they're essentially today's ear pieces - surely not sufficient motivation for people with good vision to wear glasses. So, will Apple glasses require an iTunes account and an iOS device to gain access to a choice of overlays to turn on and off that you receive from the iTunes store in real time? Similarly, Google/Android/Android marketplace. And Microsoft/Windows Mobile/Bing or something. And whoever.
So my questions are things like: will the hardware and software be interoperable? Will the dedicated augmented reality consumer need to have several pairs? Will it be like, "Today I'm going mountain climbing. I've subscribed to the Ordnance Survey premium service and they have their own proprietary glasses, so I'll need those. And then I need the Google set with the GPS enhancement to get me there in the car and find a decent restaurant afterwards." And then your kids are like, "No, the restaurants are crap on Google. Take the Facebook pair, so we can ask our friends." (Well, not Facebook, because the kids will be saying, "Facebook is for *old* people." Some cool, new replacement that adds gaming.)
What's that you say? These things are going to collapse in price so everyone can afford 12 pairs? Not sure. Prescription glasses just go on getting more expensive. I blame the involvement of fashion designers branding frames, but the fact is that people are fussy about what they wear on their faces.
In short, will augmented reality - overlays on the real world - be a new commons or a series of proprietary, necessarily limited, world views?
Wendy M. Grossman's Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music, and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series.