A Restrospective on Google Glass

When my little white box arrived at my door, my anticipation grew to excitement. I quickly opened the box to find my Borg like replacement for my current glasses, Google Glass. Stock quotes, directions, emails streamed across my eyes, and my giddiness overtook me as I played with my new toy. At first it was a great talking piece. "Watch me take a video.", I'd say to show off this cool feature. As the novelty wore off, glass left me wanting more and also wanting less.

More Connectivity

Glass will improve the as the wearable market matures and more devices hit the market. Glass can benefit from connecting to watches, fitness trackers and other devices by either allowing these devices to control Glass or have devices feed information to Glass. More connectivity to other devices. The benefit of glass is notifications and information is right there when you need it. Device makers will need to decide feed notifications and information to a watch and when to feed it to Glass. This will drive how we control our wearables. I wanted a wristwatch or a remote control on my phone flip through live cards or assist in controlling what glass does. User controls with Glass need improvement.

Better User Controls

The most frustrating thing for me was swiping. Sometimes I would swipe my glass three of four times to no avail. I must have looked like an idiot to the casual observer as I would swipe over and over expecting a different result only to end up in frustration if glass didn't respond as expected. Voice was navigating around glass, but voice had it limits at conferences where I wanted to show one of my applications running on glass. Voice actions need connectivity and that can be a problem where people are sucking up bandwidth over WiFi or chewing through connectivity of nearby cell towers. I see potential synergy with watches to make gesturing and controlling glass easier.

More Augmented Applications

I also thought that Google Glass would be a great platform for augmented reality games, and Google did not leverage the Ingress augmented reality game on Glass or many other augmented reality concept. There were some good apps that showed the potential of Glass that displayed my speed or allowed me to race against myself. I also found it useful to watch how to videos since Glass essentially offers me a second screen in front of my eyes. /field service and emergency management have created some great use cases with maps, service walkthroughs, and emergency notifications. There also opportunities in fitness and health for virtual racing and other fitness related activities. It would be great to see steps, heart rate and other data in real time as you run, and Glass is a great lightweight interface to keep a runner focused on the road. Gaming is another industry where Glass my find another niche by sending games real time notifications directly to their heads up display.

Less Intrusive

There are a lot of things I would like to see, but let's face it, Glass isn't fashionable. It's intrusive, and it makes some people very uncomfortable. What made glass a talking point was the fact people noticed you were wearing it. It instantly set you apart in a crowd as a gear head, but the intrigue of glass also became it's annoyance as people started to use the term glassholes for those of us fortunate few who owned a pair. People didn't like that they couldn't tell if they were videoed by a glasshole, and the heads up display made glassholes stand out in a crowd. Even if you were a polite glass user, it was easy to see peoples' discomfort when walking around with Glass. Plain and simple, future Glass needs to be less intrusive.

Conclusion

I'm glad to see Google is continuing development of Glass, but I hope it has a less intrusive and more integrated to the look and feel as well as providing better controls and gestures. The next version of Glass will need to bring new innovations to compete with emerging wearables, but Glass could benefit from tighter integration with other wearables for controlling glass as well as communicating between devices. If Google can refine the overall user experience, Glass may move from a conversational piece to a part of our everyday lives. Maybe the future of Glass 2.0 will be so bright, I'll have to wear shades. As for now, I'll stick to my prescription glasses.