Living with Google Glass – not quite useful enough to overcome the dork-factor

My colleagues and I are lucky enough to have been in possession of Google Glass for a few months, and have been using it to explore what it can do for our clients. In all that time, none of us had borrowed a set for a few days or a weekend to try using it as part of daily life. I took the plunge.

Google Glass is not what you think ...

I’ve run into a surprising amount of misconception and myth about Glass. Some think it’s an augmented reality device that overlays visuals on the world in real time. Others imagine facial recognition technology is built-in and that the wearer gets a constant feed of info about the people around them. Yet more believe it streams video constantly, uploading a real-time stream to YouTube for anyone to watch.

While these sorts of things are surely going to feature in future generations of Glass, as well as in other wearable technologies, Glass does none of them in its current incarnation. A reductive description would be that it simply provides a cut-down version of what your smartphone can already do in a different form. It takes pictures, searches the web, navigates streets, sends and receives emails, texts and tweets – and even acts as a (not very good) Bluetooth headset for your phone.

...but it's surprisingly powerful 

When I had to hand Glass back I felt disconnected and disempowered

Simon Dring

What surprised me was how powerful and useful the notifications offered by Glass actually were. I very quickly got used to hearing a simple, subtle chime indicating that an email had arrived – or that a calendar reminder had come due, or that an important message had been tweeted by my train company – without ever having to reach into my pocket, pull out my phone and prod a screen.  I could choose whether I paid attention to the notification or ignored it. I could even read a brief summary of the notification with a flick of my head, which was a sufficiently small interruption that I could maintain focus on whatever else I had been doing at the time.

Hands-free, voice-activated web search was also very useful, delivering just enough information to deal with most queries. On foot, navigation was similarly helpful, the screen being blank most of the time but directions popping up and being read in my ear as I approached a junction.

These seem like trivially small benefits when I write about them now (that I didn’t have to reach into my pocket and press a few buttons, that I could retrieve search results 15 seconds quicker) but when I had to hand Glass back I felt disconnected and disempowered.

I felt like an 'uber-dork'

I continually felt self-conscious wearing Glass in public

Simon Dring

But I wouldn’t buy a set. Yet. I continually felt self-conscious wearing Glass in public. It marked me out as an uber-dork. Hardly anyone gawped and stared or talked to me about Glass (with the notable exception of the friendly baristas in the local coffee shop) but I never really felt comfortable wearing it on the train or on the street.  So there is still a significant social barrier to adoption.

Despite this, my prediction is that Glass, or something very similar, will see significant adoption in relatively short order. In a reversal of the current “consumerisation of IT” trend – where the quality of technology services we receive in our personal life exerts substantial pressure on corporate IT functions to get slicker – I predict Glass will start to be used in businesses first.

Businesses will use Glass first

As when mobile phones first started to get used, businesses will take advantage of the obvious benefits for specific roles and activities

Imagine a nurse in a remote area using Glass to have a doctor watch over his shoulder, the remote doctor able to see everything the nurse can see and provide the benefit of her expertise. Or a utilities engineer using a head-mounted camera to prove that they had installed the smart meter correctly.

In effect, businesses will require their employees to overcome any inhibitions about wearing Glass. And from that adoption in the business world, we’ll start to see an adoption in the consumer world as it becomes increasingly common to see, for example, telecoms engineers with head-mounted displays.

When this happens, and 10% of the people on the street have Glass on their head, I’ll very happily join them.

Simon Dring is a digital solutions expert at PA Consulting Group