Scanlyze

Glass, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Glass, the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Good:

1. Heads up display is readable and clear if finicky to get it set right. Even with my prescription lenses. Despite being nearsighted and able to read up close, I can’t read anything on glass without my glasses. Glorious indeed compared to all previous efforts I have seen (probably not including some military HUDs). There is this little 640×480 screen floating in your field of view up toward the top. Rearview mirrror territory which is one more reason not to drive with this thing on.

2. Sound quality is fine on earbuds, so-so too soft on built in bone conduction speaker.

3. Interface is understandable. It is a timeline. Each event is a card, and it has certain functions associated with the card type. This is very much work in progress. You can port an android app to it, or even debian/ubuntu packages, but its up to you to make them work. A wireless keyboard and mouse will be a necessity until someone makes a workable virtual keyboard. Then the glassheads will be walking down the street like sleepwalkers. Well, typing, so sleep typers. Will see if I can get one of my Logitech 850s and Logitech MX mouse working.

4. Killer app. Make a broad wink and take a picture. Picture quality is very good compared to my nexus 4.

5. The motion, orientation and acceleration sensors’ potential is barely scratched. The potential exists for fully virtual worlds, or “enhanced reality” that changes with your headmotion and field of view.

6. Getting live video of breaking news from CNN is cool.

7. Voice recognition and speech synthesis are scary good, HAL 9000 quality or better.

Neutral:

1. What if people updated shots of their location to google maps and did google street map full surround environments everywhere all the time. Like Open Street Map or OS Opendata but so much more.

Bad:

1. Web browser is limited to google search, which almost always takes you to wikipedia. Selecting a link and going there is difficult and of course entering text without a keyboard is currently impossible.

2. Gmail integration is barely there. You can only see messages as they come in, and reply to them. That’s it.

3. SMS is useful but a picture a friend sms’ed to me ended up in my gmail, but I didnt get paged about it on the glass so I had no way to retrieve it.

4. Battery life is nowhere near the claimed 24 hours. More like 1.5 to 2 hours as I use the thing.

5. They seem to be trying to make this a standalone device. That’s a mistake. For one thing people need to stay near where they can charge it either a plug or a computer or laptop. Also most of the time people are going to have it tethered to their phone for calls, sms and often for wifi bridging also. There is your mouse and keyboard device if google would get a clue and enable that synergy.

Ugly:

1. MAJOR COMPLAINT They make you enable location for every app. They make you enable google plus, even if you earlier cancelled your account. This is not good for the user, it is merely to try to use this to make a walled garden where customers will buy all their media and game content through google play. Of course, the open source nature of android goes totally against this, but they are building a legal bulwark and I can see android being “delinuxized” as VMware was in a couple years and becoming fully proprietary and closed. The money men are winning at Google and something beautiful is being destroyed there.

Copyright © 2014 Henry Edward Hardy

23 June, 2014 Posted by scanlyze | scanlyze | bad, Glass, good, Google, hud, media, review, scanlyze, technology, ugly, vr | 1 Comment