A sceptic’s week with Google Glass
With some tipping Google Glass to further evolve change our day-to-day experiences, creative technologist and Glass sceptic Tim Devine found some surprising results after a week with the device.
In a kind of tribute to Steve Mann, the father of wearable computing, and so that I might have at least something of an informed opinion on the subject, I wore Google Glass for a week — everywhere, all the time. For thirty years Mann has worn far less sophisticated versions, so I figured it couldn’t be that onerous, and if I was to give Mann and Glass proper shrift nothing less than full immersion would do.
Aside from my Mann crush, as a creative technologist and practicing media artist my work has at times suffered from crushes on various technologies. There is something wonderful about expectations for a new technology — beyond the new toy anticipation the potential for a leap to occur, even if only in the imagination, is sufficient to begin all manner of feverish speculation.
Devine models Glass
gross tech
facebook was bad enough, this is gonna throw our privacy out the window. boyfriend reckons you can fuck up google glass with infrared LED lights, or a well aimed pen-laser if you want to do some real damage to the lens.
keep your perve camera out of my face.
Well done, Jen. You captured a point that was precisely made in the article:
“…maybe we need a new type of necklace that emits powerful infrared light visible only to Glass and not the human eye, blowing out all photos taken with Glass, like a kind of urban camo! Tech, counter tech.”
95% of the words in this article are superfluous, the other 5% we’re great though! Thanks.
Regarding Jen’s comment above:
1st, you seem to be forgetting smart phone cameras are hidden in plain sight. 2nd, go to the app story and search for “spy cam” and see how many apps for taking secret photos and video you find (hint: quite a few). 3rd, if you go out in public, you are in PUBLIC, you have left your PRIVATE home. 4th, while I can’t speak for other countries, but if yours is anything like mine or the UK, there are security and/or police cameras all over the place and, at least here in the US, the NSA has been recording nearly every digital move we make for years now. Hell, I bet the NSA might be sucking up what everyone does on the Internet, around the world. It would be a huge amount of data, but the USG has done crazier things.
FWIW – The term “sousveillance”, was coined by Steve Mann and denotes the bringing of the camera down to human level either physically or hierarchically — ordinary people doing the watching, rather than higher authorities or architectures doing the watching. Sousveillance of a state by its citizens has been credited with addressing many problems such as election fraud or electoral misdeeds, as well as providing good governance. For example, mobile phones were used in Sierra Leone and Ghana in 2007 for checking malpractices and intimidation during elections.
Every time I read or hear anything about Google Glass, it reminds me of the excellent “Flare Time” by Larry Niven, a SF short story I read before the internet existed (yes, I’m old.).
Read it if you can find it. If you dont think “Ooooh” when you’ve finished reading it, I’d be surprised.
(This old skool page > http://www.rjballard.net/larryniven.htm is a great intro to Larry’s body of work if you don’t know of him.)
love it