When Google set out to create Glass, it was looking for the next big platform for communications and computing, he said in a talk at the Hot Chips engineering conference at Stanford.The first prototype was not impressive. Smartphones weigh around 135 grams, but the first Glass prototype required a backpack and weighed 3,350 grams — 7.4 pounds.
Glass is a sophisticated computing platform in that it takes pictures and videos, recognizes your speech commands, and delivers sound to you via a bone conduction method. It has a dual-core processor running at more than a 1Ghz. And it has a three-axis gyroscope, a three-axis accelerometer, a magnetometer, and global positioning system location information. These devices give sensor information on your location and Indoor Positioning System.
The device is not symmetric, with two Glass elements covering both eyes, because it’s much more complex. It doubles the weight, increases power consumption, and distracts your other eye from the real world.“Comfort is very important because we want people to wear it the whole day,” Parviz said.
The device can transfer data via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi radios. At the moment, there is no plan to add cellphone service or a data modem. If there is an overriding mission of Glass, it’s to deliver information fast.“As I talk to you, this is how fast I can access the computer,” he said. “The camera sees the world through my eyes. It lives with me as I live my life. This device is intimately aware of what I see.”
One of the advantages of the form factor is that you can use it to perform tasks much more quickly than even if you were pushing buttons on your smartphone. It responds to touches or to voice commands, and it delivers sound directly to the bone in your head, rather than into your ears.Google Glass can also be more immersive, as the screen can be closer to your eye and make you feel like you are immersed in a computing environment. Smartphone screens can do that, but they are already getting too big.
“This is possible now because of you guys and what you enable in the electronics industry,” Parviz said. “We have also take advantage of the smartphone and the infrastructure it created.He noted smartphone camera resolution has risen from virtually nothing in 2002 to more than 16 megapixels today. That’s a huge leap that paved the way for Glass.
“It produces a beautiful image, and it costs a few dollars,” he said. “That is mind-boggling, and it is an example of why this device was not possible 15 years ago.”As to why Google embarked on this task in the first place, Parviz noted how it is the next logical step in the expansion of knowledge.“This device significantly expands my knowledge base,” Parviz said. “This is why we created Google Glass. The answers are just a question away.”
Today, the company is selling its first Google Glass units for $1,500. Over time, that price will come down. Parviz described it as an interesting first step.“As we released it to a number of Hands free access, and they tested it; it was amazing to experience their lives through their eyes,” he said. “We noticed if you have an electronics device all day, it should not impede any of your other senses.” His eyes and ears are still open and hands are free. ”That was very important,” he said. “You can get very rapid access to technology when you need it.”
Parviz said, “Now you use a huge amount of computing power for a fraction of a second. You ask a question, and it gets back to you.On the road ahead, Parviz wants technology to disappear. That’s why he likes Microsoft’s Kinect motion-sensing system. You don’t even know it’s there.“It should be the least intrusive,” he said.He said this will require advances in optics, photonics, miniaturization, transducers, computing power, and ultralow power designs. Since the device is on your body, it can’t generate much heat. That puts a lot of constraints on design.
“We are very excited about this platform, potentially as the major next thing in computing and communication,” Parviz said.He said the team takes security very seriously. Everything is pushed from the cloud, and an app cannot be installed and run on the device itself. That might change in future versions, and that will introduce implications for security.
Asked what he thought of the privacy issues as Glass technology becomes more invisible in the future, Parviz said, “That’s already an issue with smartphones. Back in the 1880s, when the first camera came out, and it became possible for someone to take a picture of you, it made people uncomfortable. It took some time for society to figure it out. The trajectory for a device like this is something similar.”
TasksEveryDay promised just such a service for around $10 an hour, which is about half the rate I'd have had to pay a personal assistant in my area. Looking at the site now, I see things that should have clued me in to the possibility that the rates weren't low just because of global labour arbitrage. It's rife with clip art, its marketing copy is riddled with not-quite-correct punctuation and capitalisation, and customer testimonials bear more than a passing resemblance to hostage videos. But in my stupor I was blind to these flaws. What's more, my negotiations with the company's sales representative went smoothly. The woman on the phone was polite, spoke English fluently, and expertly soothed my fears about how the site's assistants would handle my personal data. In addition to a non-disclosure agreement, the company constantly monitors its workers' online activities, its call centre is outfitted with surveillance cameras, and assistants aren't allowed to install any storage devices (like USB disks) into their computers. I was sold.
Things started promisingly. The saleswoman introduced me to my assistant, a young man I'll call Mr F. He sent me an email with his picture - big, slicked-back hair, a boyish face, Bible-salesman suit - and a promise to "put in my best efforts to ensure that all your tasks are executed 100 per cent efficiently".
At 9 am the next day, I shared my Google Calendar and Gmail accounts with Mr F, and I gave him his first task. I needed a flight from San Francisco to Minneapolis. I gave him my dates. I wanted times and prices. Once he'd found an ideal flight, I planned to give him my credit card number so he could book it for me.
But after sending him my request, I heard nothing. After 40 minutes, I sent him a follow-up to make sure he'd received the task. About 40 minutes after that, he responded: "Yes I have received your email and I have started working on it."
Huh. This task should have taken him about 10 minutes; why was he just getting started after a nearly an hour and a half? Around noon - about three hours (and $30) after I'd assigned the task - Mr F finally sent me an email to say he was done. Now I saw why he'd taken so long: Instead of looking for the best two or three flights that conformed to my calendar, he'd created a spreadsheet listing all the details of 10 flights. This was madness: I could have got a similar list myself in 30 seconds on any travel site. What I needed was someone to help me narrow down my options, not replicate a web search. And why did he think I'd need an Excel version? Why didn't he just send me a link to his search?
I chalked it up to first-day troubles. The weekend was coming up, and I didn't need Mr F on Monday morning. I told him to be ready to work on Tuesday. But on Tuesday I heard nothing. Not on Wednesday either. The whole week passed. Then another week. If I had a personal assistant, I would have had him call up TasksEveryDay to find out what kind of two-bit operation they were running. But I had no such help, so the task of calling up the firm to complain was added to a dozen other low-priority tasks on my to-do list. I did revoke Mr F's access to my Gmail and calendar.
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