First 3 days as a Glass Explorer (Day 2)

Editor’s note: Read Anthony’s (@anthonyslai) full Glass adventure starting with the prologue, the week before, and Day 1 posts.

I met with Jake and Noel the next day I got the Glass.  To anyone who tried it, everyone seemed to be pleasantly surprised with  the current features.  At that time, no Twitter and Facebook integration even existed.  Just having Google search, photo taking, video recording, and GPS navigation already made it a great device.  Of course, it is still arguable whether it worth such a high price tag; on the other hand, it is all about economies of scale, and the price will go down, although probably not for this year.  To me, yes, I do think it is slightly expensive, but I think it is still worth it.

Regarding to the glass piece, the technology behind it is apparently a Google secret, as they were not willing to disclose it during the FireChat Session in Google IO.  I think this makes sense as the glass piece is probably the hardest to replicate and copy.  I just had a funny feeling as I often get asked, “Is that… Google Glasses?”  Well, technically, it is Glass, not Glasses, although I had the same misconception myself. 

The other question which I find interesting is, “Did you get it from Amazon?”  Although I answered the question seriously, maybe I should have said, “Yes, I got it from Best Buy with a promotional discount.”.  The questions I received normally ranged among the 2 extremes, either they know the technology really well, or they have no idea about what it is.    As it is not readily available to the general public, only people who are passionate about technologies would have looked into it.

Before Glass become widely available, Glass can be as an excellent ice breaker.  People were generally genuinely interested in the Glass experience, and they would approach you and they were about it.  In the afternoon, I went to Health 2.0 Refactored.  This was how I met up with couple people in the conference and get to know each other.

There were a lot of reports about Glass haters.  People mostly have privacy concerns, worried that you are taking pictures, recording videos secretly without their permission.  In this era where almost everyone are having a smartphone with a high resolution pixel camera, I do not think this is avoidable.  We will just have to live with it.

The other concern is that Glass can be used to pull up all your personal information by just looking at you.  My question would be, “Where and how do they find your information?”  Your name, maybe yes.  Social security number, probably not.  If they do know about your social security number, do they need to look at you to find it out?  As with all technologies, it can serve both good or evil.  For example, this can be useful when interviewing candidates.  Hopefully, people would have a peace of mind for now, knowing that facial recognition is banned by Google.  No more seeing the statistics of your opponent like in Dragon Z.

In my case, no one I met with dislike me wearing Glass, and my experience so far had been great and positive.