Going Glassy

Introduction

Last Tuesday I got my hand on Google Glasses, this journal is about going glassy.

First Impressions

My first impression was a bit of a disappointment. I guess I had an idea of falling down the rabbit hole and into a completely new world when putting them on. Not quite, for one thing it really takes some time getting used to looking *that* major geeky, and being a software developer I'm kind of used to a lot of geeky stuff.


Secondly I had this idea of filling my complete field of vision with information from the glasses, again not so what you get is a small screen on your upper right eye which you need to focus on to get the information from the screen.

After recovery from the first impressions and after getting a little more familiar with the device I think I can summarize my experience as.

• This is not a commercial product.  This is really Iphone -2 if you get my drift. I believe it will have a great impact but not at it's current version. 
• Its clumsy to wear, not uncomfortable but it will need to be a bit more discreet.
• Battery lifetime is to low. No chance of lasting a day with normal usage.
• The visualization needs to be better. Preferably giving a complete HUD experience, or perhaps not I'm finding myself more and more in doubt if HUD is to prefer or not .

So it definitely has a lot of potential but its not there yet, which is ok with me since my intended usage is  about figuring the opportunities and limitations in a longer perspective.

In all fairness once you use it for some time you will get used to it and you will appreciate the idea of going on with your normal business and shifting your focus to the upper right field of vision when you would like to interact with the glasses.
Probably most of this was a result of artistic freedom (see below) and therefore getting rid of incumbent ideas and opening up to the true potential took some time. 

Beware of Artistic Freedom

 I guess that you have seen a lot of truly amazing stuff being shown on YouTube or other venues being done with glasses. I' afraid that a lot of these suffer from a large extent of artistic freedom and have been made by people who have never seen or used glasses, or if they have desired to make something with glasses as they imagined them to be.

If you are considering doing something in this field your best bet would be to contact somebody with glasses who have no interest in selling you a lot of pricy services to tap their brain. Even better would be to arrange to be able to use the glasses even for a few minutes since this will give you a fair idea of whats bogus and whats for real here.

Make no mistake: You can do absolutely amazing stuff and provide a fantastic value in may fields using this technology, but it will not be the stuff you find on YouTube in most cases.