Are most new technology products just fashion items?
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Release time：2014-02-26
Browse：6152
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Will products like Google Glass be the the future of personal computing?A recent encounter I had with Google Glass was not, I must say, very convincing.You will no doubt have heard about Glass, the computer in a pair of spectacles. It's an attempt to focus on the next wave of computing: the wearable, immersive stuff they were getting all excited about at the vast Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at the start of the year.My encounter with Glass was not a showcase event, but real life. I tried it out round a boozy south London dinner table.An unfair test because nobody was concentrating on using it properly, but fair because random use is when consumer electronics get interesting.You put on the glasses, adjust them a bit - which is fiddly because you can't quite see what you're doing - and then marvel at the clarity of the tiny screen picture in front of you.It adds information culled from the internet to your field of view; tech people call this augmenting reality. But to do that interfacing properly (and hands free) you have to either have your brain waves wired into the machine, or be able to talk to it.At that fairly fundamental threshold, Glass became hugely frustrating. Simple verbal commands addressed to Glass failed to register or were misunderstood.One or two round-the-table photos were eventually taken, and transferred to people's smartphones. Cute, clever, and clunky. And very frustrating.'Prophetic failure'Now it is wrong to judge technology by its first iteration. The Apple Newton palmtop computer was a miserable bust 20 years ago, but it turns out to have been a very significant advance in the way people use computers, long before the smartphone, which it kind of heralded.Now they call it a "prophetic failure". Then they laughed at its feeble attempts to recognise the user's handwriting.
The tech early adopters who are plonking down $1,500 (£900) for a Google Glass device are not ordinary consumers, of course. They want to see how a new interface is going to change the way we use the internet.They want to start devising apps that will turn Glass and the new interactive watches (and their competitors) into must-have products, because you will be able to do so much with the applications they enable.They will probably start as highly specialised responses to working in difficult circumstances which demand hands-free communications... in hospital operating theatres and tricky industrial surroundings, for example.Fun and games and personal communications will come later. But the voice recognition has to work pretty seamlessly to make it all happen.I don't doubt that at some stage Google Glass or something similar will become part of the ubiquity of computing, the point at which the internet as the electronic nervous system of the world begins to merge with the human nervous system in a very intimate way. But not yet, and maybe not using this sort of display and interaction at all.Fly-by-night fadsMy Glass-eyed encounter got me thinking about technology advances in general. Everybody says that change is getting ever faster and that tech is at the heart of economic and social advanceEranet International Ltd (www.eranet.com)pls contact usSkype: Partner EranetEmail:support@eranet.comMSN:cs@eranet.comTel:852-39995400WhatsApp: (852) 96008286
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