Posted on 04/05/2012 10:40:42 AM PDT by BenLurkin
Larry Page and Sergey Brin have long had the dream of a hands-free, mobile Google, where search was a seamless process as you moved around the world. As the years progressed the vision did, too, expanding beyond search to persistent connections with the people in your lives.
In other words, Google’s view of the world now has the social side fully baked into it.
Today, Google is revealing that it is taking concrete steps towards that vision with ProjectGlass, an augmented reality system that will give users the full range of activities performed with a smart phone — without the smart phone. Instead, you wear some sort of geeky prosthetic (one of those pictured is reminiscent of the visor that Geordi La Forge wore on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” but Google has also been experimenting with a version that piggybacks on regular spectacles.)
On top of your field of vision, you get icons, alerts, directional arrows, and other visual cues that inform, warn, or beg response.
And all of a sudden, the world becomes dickish — as in Philip K.
Glass is the second big project out of Google (x), the company’s Mountain View skunkworks devoted to long-term projects. Since Larry Page reassumed the role of CEO (exactly one year ago today), his fellow co-founder Sergey Brin has focused on Google (x) and Glass is apparently the project Brin promised news of almost a year ago at Google’s I/O conclave. Glass has been in the works for years, with key input from Babak Amir Parviz, a Google (x) employee who is still listed as the McMorrow Innovation Associate Professor at the University of Washington.
Parviz is one of three co-signers of the Google+ post announcing the project. His research specialties make him sound like a character in a Michael Crichton novel: Bio- nanotechnology, Self-Assembly, Nanofabrication, MEMS. Before coming to Google he co-authored a paper entitled, “Self-assembled crystalline semiconductor optoelectronics on glass and plastic.” All of this indicates that Google has made some advances in science behind projecting computer visuals that hang in your field of vision.
The second author on the Google+ post is Steve Lee, known previously as a Google location manager. I once saw Lee in action before Google’s Privacy Council, successfully defending a set of features in Google Latitude that, with the user’s permission, registered and stored a complete history of one’s peregrinations. It was clear that Lee was excited about the possibilities that come from exploiting location services in new ways. Obviously, location — giving directions, providing information about nearby services, and pegging the whereabouts of friends — is going to be a big part of this new initiative.
I hate Google, but I can see the day where the glasses use the Street View from Google Maps so we can actually see arrows on the streets and sidewalks telling us where to go, and bright glowing borders as we cross municipal and state boundaries.
Don’t forget the ads that pop up.
Why limit ads to the computer when they can just pipe them straight into your contact lenses?
The only thing better than that would be the ability to fire burger king commercials right into your subconscious.
Isn’t the future going to be kick ass?
I saw a movie in which the anti-Christ used this system to apply the mark of the beast.
Trying to remember the name of the movie ........
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