A pure ingenious effort to turn humans into cyborg by adding the 4th dimension of computing to their lives in a non intrusive and seamless way. I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular given that wearable tech like watches and fitness band is catching up so quickly.
Random people hate being watched, or at least they hate knowing they are being watched by another person.
That being said, like someone else mentioned, Glass and AR-type products are very successful as productivity boosters in people who assemble products. We use Pupil Labs' glasses at our business to do gaze tracking. There's a lot of good use cases for this technology, but it's not cheap and it's pretty specific at this time.
It's not entirely clear what you're saying here. Does your business use these solutions as a way to enrich the information needed used by someone assembling your products, or do you use them to ensure everyone's eyes are looking in the correct direction while on the assembly line?
What I specifically remember about Google Glass is endless reports of people getting assaulted for wearing them because people were thought they were being recorded.
Google Glass is actively produced and successful in the enterprise space. The consumer market wasn't the ideal demographic, but it pivoted and continued development.
Wearing another pair of glasses is pretty intrusive. The value added (if any) by Google Glass clearly wasn't enough over the phone for how much more intrusive it was.
Have you seen Focals? They seem to be a spiritual successor to glass, though focused more on the form factor (looking like a normal pair of glasses) than matching all the features glass had (as part of the Google ecosystem). North only has a few stores so not many people have actually tried them out.
I think down the line we'll see wireless Google Lens, as in contact lense(s), that provide all kinds of information to the wearer, unbeknownst to all others. Maybe power will be generated by harnessing eyeball movement. Maybe a see-through camera. Maybe...
> I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular
Nobody could make it popular after that infamous shower photo. Products need certain coolness to gain traction and Scoble made it go the other way (I live in non-English speaking country and I use that shot to explain the word "nerd").
I think the combination of the actually-not-that-discreet camcorder and the fact it didn't really have a reputation for being able to do much else interesting at launch was the perfect storm
I'm not really that bothered by people holding phones in a way that might be surreptitiously recording me, because I expect they're actually using them for something else.
Oculus and other VR headset. VR as a technology is fascinating and almost Sci-Fi when it came in but people quickly realized that there are still no practical applications for the technology other than mild gaming and entertainment purposes. Companies invested heavily in VR but the ROI is poor till today. VR is mostly a one time experience for people and not something they spend time with everyday.
It's because most people are only associating it with gaming. And media outlets measure its success by checking if it is capturing the gaming market. But VR has applications beyond that.
I mean, there is a new art form that let you paint in mid air. How are artists not all over this?
There's a huge barrier to entry for any of the possible applications that most people just don't want to risk. For art, it costs $10 to download photoshop, but it costs an average person $500+ (computer hardware and headset) to get into VR. There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.
I'm only seeing good things about VR gaming, though. It's definitely becoming more popular there. Lots of people seem excited for the Steam Index.
> There's also no well-known VR artists to get people excited about it.
I would say Goro Fujita is a well-known artist for his illustration work and he's now doing almost only VR pieces. https://www.instagram.com/goro.fujita/
I wouldn’t call it luck. Sure, the money is good, but their company is now essentially dead and should never be trusted to do anything good (just like every single thing Facebook does ends up having nefarious goals behind it).
I still wouldn’t call it luck. Their company and product is now dead, and any good use they envisioned for the product is now forgotten in favour of nasty and user-hostile use-cases.
Weapons are the reason there is peace in the world after WW2. Countries with no lethal weapons like Syria are facing war as of now while North korea doesn't.
Firstly, this peace has no guarantees, secondly, the potential destruction is only increasing with the time. Do you think that every country will have nukes in the future? Do you think it is the smartest of all possibilities?
Nuclear weapons could make irreversible changes on the Earth. It is much dangerous than any war.
Perfect article. High time people dismiss the self proclaimed heroic version of western history and know the reality. A person with noble prize deserved to be hanged till death in an Indian jail.
I prefer moulded ear inserts and wearing actual hearing protection headsets. It gets the message across to your co-workers that their noise is bothering you when you put those on.
Have a look at the temporary containers add-on which does just that. It is completely usable. I just create a permanent container for sites where I want persistent cookies.
I have been living in Bangalore for 5 years and this is completely exaggerated opinion.
- In no situation it will take 2 hours for a km unless there is a natural disaster period.
- Bangalore is one of lesser polluted cities in India. Pollution index is mostly green. SFO is much better though in terms of particulate matter index.
- Nightlife, i haven't experienced in SFO so will not comment.
You can justify a move from SFO to BLR if you want a multitude cheaper place to live without losing out too much on the tech community. I live an above average lifestyle for less than 500$.
It's nowhere exaggerated. What part of Banglore do you live in? Try traveling in Bellandur at around 5 - 6 PM and see by yourselves. In most places it's almost impossible to predict whether you can cover as low as 10km - 15km even if you have 2 hours to spare[1]. Banglore is over populated with people everywhere. You should travel to west for a vactaion so that you know how bad a place is Banglore compared to western cities. It changed my persepctive when I did that. I also used to think Banglore was a place to settle. Not anymore.
Pollution masks are almost a necessity if you are in Banglore and care about your lungs[2]. There are traffic everywhere. Also have you seen Bellandur and other lakes of Banglore recently? Bellandur lake is the most polluted lake in India[3]. I dont even want to start on water scarcity.
> You can justify a move from SFO to BLR if you want a multitude cheaper place to live without losing out too much on the tech community.
He would be also be making an order of magnitude less. After working for some years and going back to US he would be having peanuts as savings. The tech community is also not anywhere good as SFO. What you see in SFO today you can expect to see in Banglore after a few years rebranded in a diffrent name.
And the nightlife and quality of life is just terrible when you compare to SFO. I don't understand why will anyone who is on their senses will move to Banglore from SFO.
