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I’m never going to live another day without a wearable computer on my face.
- tech evangelist Robert Scoble
Although Scoble enthusiastically announced his allegiance to Google Glass a mere two weeks after living with one of the prototypes, many feel otherwise about the glasses-mounted computer you wear on your face. So much so, that Google recently announced they will no longer sell Glass until they can tweak the design substantially over the next few years. And this announcement brought forth a disconcerting amount of I-told-you-so from much of the press that reports on tech.
Who would have thought a pair of funky/techy looking glasses could generate enough animosity to give rise to its own Urban Dictionary term, Glassholes?
Now granted, I've been guilty of Glass-bashing, but mostly because I've never liked the design. But when you analyze the verbiage devoted to Glass's supposed shortcomings, what becomes clear is that the reasons for Glass-hate seem to be a roiling swirl of confusion more than anything, mostly around the question of "What exactly do those weirdass things do?"
Meaning Glass's supposed undesirability is a PR problem rather than one of questionable functionality. And functionality is where the future is to be found.
Take the bikini above made from nylon beads. So 60s, no? No. Not when you consider the fact it was actually printed out in 3-D using small nylon beads as the "ink" and then fitted using a CAD-scan of the wearer's body. "However spooky in terms of the technology that produced it," notes cyber-fiction author William Gibson, "doesn't strike us, on sight, as particularly futuristic." Essentially, what separates the "futuristic" from the actual future is function. The former tends to focus on the outlandish for its own sake - which does have a certain artistic merit, more along the lines of telling us about how we see ourselves right now - while the latter reflects breakthroughs in technology.
Because opinions are like a certain body part - everyone has one - the place, I think, to look for insights about Glass functionality is not the confused, Google-Glass'less mass. Rather, the people to ask are the "explorers" like Scoble who had a chance to live with a Glass prototype and experience firsthand how it integrated into their lives and added to it.
And even people who enjoyed only a brief encounter with the device.
Like the "older man" that approached a Glass-wearing Scoble and his co-author, Israel Shel, in the restaurant where they were having dinner. "Israel anticipated a hostile situation but, instead, he politely asked to try on the device," note Scoble and Israel. "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." Following dinner, the duo took a stroll along Palo Alto's main drag, University Ave. "People stopped us every few minutes...all 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." (image)
Interestingly, it wasn't the imagined (and perhaps justified) fears about Glass's privacy-killing characteristics that bothered folk who experienced Glass, but the prototype's hefty $1500 price tag.
While Israel may not be as puppy-love about Glass as Scoble, who even wore his in the shower, he is certainly impressed with the possibilities of this immersive technology. “It will get a lot better and cheaper," he notes. "It will change the world." Maybe not in the next 5 years, but time moves differently in the world of scientific exploration. As Thomas Kuhn explained in The Structure of Scientific Exploration, it is the anomalies and out-of-left-field "Eureka!" moments that shift paradigms. Which the orthodox scientific method of observe-and-report then catches up to. (image)
For the magic is to be found not in the method of investigation and details of the actual technology, but hopping onto an interesting line of inquiry to begin with. “If I had an hour to solve a problem," Albert Einstein once observed, "I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” When viewed as "the problem", the implications of Glass and facial wearable-computers becomes far more intriguing. For the wear-it-on-your face element is now a given. So now where do we go? The signs obviously point to implants. Perhaps as envisioned by William Gibson in Neuromancer (1984) in the form of the mercenary cyborg Molly Millions (top) and her vision-enhancing eyewear.
He realized that the glasses were surgically inset, sealing her sockets. The silver lenses seemed to grow from smooth pale skin above her cheekbones, framed by dark hair cut in a rough shag.
- Lesley Scott
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NOTE: Embracing the future - from technology to traditional gender roles - with a desire to make it fashionable and timely is a signature of the Futurenetic Fashion Tribe. For more of my posts and podcasts about this tribe, CLICK HERE. To learn more about each of fashion's four mega-tribes that I track, START HERE.
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