
Build your own Google Glass - dave1010uk
http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/hands-on/build-your-own-google-glass
======
jacquesm
When you can remember everything with 100% perfection there is no distinction
anymore between the food you're eating and the food you ate 20 years ago.
Between the people you're with and the people you knew long ago. And so on.

In one of Aldous Huxley's books (island) there is the Minah bird, whose main
role in life is to remind people to live 'here and now'. This is the opposite
of that. Either you'll end up re-living the past all the time or you will end
up not using it.

Either way I don't see the benefit. I'd rather live here and now and
eventually forget than to be addicted to my own past, my memory is more than
good enough as it is.

The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat
people with deficiencies in this area.

~~~
vitovito
_The one place where this sort of thing could be a real plus is to help treat
people with deficiencies in this area._

Yes, some research shows that reviewing the things an Alzheimer's patient did
that day, along with other pertinent facts, slows the degeneration. I've long
wondered if memory loss behaves similar to traditional forgetting of facts, if
you could do training similar to spaced repetition to combat it long-term, or
if it only works in early stages.

For the last several years, I've been considering the greatest beneficiaries
of a perfect digital memory may not be ourselves at all, but our descendants:
_I am also aware that I will not care about every minute of footage in 20
years. The problem is, I don’t have the foggiest idea which minutes I’ll care
about, and I am not ready to let go of any of it yet._
[http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomar...](http://web.archive.org/web/20100529070919/http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/05/08/backup#comment-6385)

You have no idea what your children will find interesting or important, and to
presume to edit your life down or to not record it at all, while entirely
within your right, might perhaps be considered negligent in the future. We all
have crazy uncles and adventuring grandfathers whose stories we have only
heard fragments of, which we'd love to know more about. Wearable computing and
lifelogging may be an answer to that, a way to enable that sort of
generational storytelling.

~~~
jacquesm
This is my life and I get to do with it what I want. If my descendants want to
have interesting lives they'll have to go and make their own, not piggy-back
on mine.

And if they truly believe I've been negligent they're welcome to pass their
inheritance to their siblings.

~~~
vitovito
In the PDF deck I linked to about my work, I describe storytelling like this:

 _Storytelling is sensemaking and placemaking of the: past (genealogy),
present (diaries and journals) and future (personal [digital] archives)._

At PDA2012, there had to have been half a dozen personal storytelling
startups, most with a genealogy hook.

You have all the time in the world to scan photos, to write in your diary, but
you're running out of time to ask your grandmother how she got that scar, or
your grandfather why his hair turned white in the war.

Perhaps you've never been curious about your forebears, but to discount the
possibility entirely out of fear that your children's children will enjoy pop-
pop's stories so much they'll forget to live their own lives seems churlish to
me.

~~~
jacquesm
I've read my grandmothers diary. It was extremely interesting, especially
because I got a first persons account of world war II, and the way it affected
her and the rest of the family.

But I don't feel like I have some kind of right to know anything beyond what
she chose to tell and I hope my kids will have the good grace to look at me in
a similar way. By the looks of it that won't be a problem.

It's one thing to be interested about ones forebears, another to be obsessed
by it. When my mom went all out on some genealogy site and put all of my
details in there as well as those of my spouse, kids and so on we asked her to
please stop doing that.

Besides the obvious privacy angles I don't think kids that can't stand up for
their rights should be included in the documentation that others place online,
by the same token my kids and their descendants don't have an automatic right
to any level of detail about me.

I remember that one of the dictators (Kim Yong-Il iirc) of NK had a film crew
following him making a documentary about his life. The guy was batshit insane,
and I feel that anybody that wants to document their live to that extent has
an overgrown feeling of self importance.

~~~
vitovito
Thanks for the detailed response!

I think this is a great illustration of the privacy (and thus related legal)
issues that simply aren't being addressed in the research and
commercialization efforts thus far. We saw a little of this with Instagram's
photomap, that people's locations were being "outed" because they were tagged
in someone else's photo and that person chose to make their locations public,
but it's going to get more complicated before it makes more sense.

------
zemanel
i'm actually interested in the "augmented reality" aspect of this (as opposed
to seeing new e-mail notifications, video calls, location info and whatever).

Imagine being able to create content only visible either through an app's
camera or these kind of glasses. Like "Second Life"but on the real world.

"Placing" notes, pictures, videos for your friends or public at certain
places; 2/3D objects like arrows pointing at that awesome coffee shop.

Actually thought hard at implementing a prototype (for Android) but my current
skills are under par.

~~~
waterlesscloud
I've been re-reading William Gibson novels in order, currently on All
Tomorrow's Parties.

Anyway, when I re-read Idoru, I wondered why we don't really have anything
like its proto-cyberspace. With its Walled City, a distributed common virtual
world. I can see why the matrix of Neuromancer doesn't really make sense, but
having played enough mmos in the intervening years, I'm a little surprised
Walled City or something like Snowcrash's Metaverse isn't a thing.

It seems like if the infrastructure for it existed, the Reddit crowd et al
would build it out in no time.

We've got half-assed things like Second Life, and I think a lot of Minecraft's
appeal is from that same strain. But nothing that really works properly.

It just seems like something that would actually happen eventually, it seems
like the demand is there.

~~~
zemanel
I see. In theory, like any idea, sounds cool. I've actually taken real world
pictures around my building to mockup a possible UI sometime.

The issue is that, as far as i know, geo-location (GPS at least) has a +-10
meter precision, so placing content at a specific spot is, fuzzy.

ps.: by placing content at a specific spot, i mean grabbing the
latitude/longitude/height and possibly direction from the device and allowing
anyone around it to see it by pointing a device (smartphone/tablet/glasses)
there.

edit: of course, the precision is really an issue depending on what your'e
"tagging". If you're adding stuff to a town square, +- 10 meters don't make
any difference :-)

~~~
vitovito
For what it's worth, there are many, many smartphone apps that enable this,
both using augmented reality and not, and many other research-level prototypes
in the literature.

If you've never heard of any of them, perhaps that's because in practice it's
not as great an idea as it sounds.

~~~
zemanel
Good to know, thanks! (one less vaporware i have to worry about)

------
vitovito
_Instead, the greatest value will be in second-generation applications that
provide total recall and augmented cognition. Imagine being able to call up
(and share) everything you have ever seen, or read the transcripts for every
conversation you ever had, alongside the names and faces of everyone you ever
met. Imagine having supplemental contextual information relayed to you
automatically so you could win any argument or impress your date._

This is the common wearable computing utility argument, but in practice, it
doesn't seem to pan out.

Gordon Bell digitized much of his life, and everything for the past ten or
twenty years. Phone calls, emails, a photo every sixty seconds, more when his
heart rate increased. He hardly ever went back to it. Revisiting it was so
rare as to be a notable event in and of itself. Rather, he found people with
whom he had conversations would go to him and use him as a reference library.

Bradley Rhodes' Remembrance Agent was an Emacs thing which actively indexed
and cross-referenced anything you were typing with things you had written
before. He's working on Glass now, afaik: <http://www.remem.org/> It isn't a
generally useful solution because it requires that you live inside of Emacs.
Today you'd need something that could index across multiple devices, multiple
independent cloud storage systems, multiple independent accounts, etc.; or
something that was locked into a single ecosystem and you lived entirely
there, but then you'd develop "blind spots" for things that occurred
elsewhere, like how you stop hanging out with certain friends because the only
way they communicate with you is via Facebook but you turned off all of
Facebook's notifications.

There was an essay a long time ago, a writer had been filing every link and
every note into a pre-Evernote piece of notetaking/hyperlinking/PIM software,
something with an X or a Z in the name, but I can't recall it or the piece.
The essay was about an article he was writing during which the software
brought up a saved article and a note he had written, and forgotten about, in
a creepily timely and seemingly prescient moment. He wondered at what point
the software needs to get credit for providing the research and the
associations.

"Forgetting" is a key part of human existence that most wearable applications
tend to ignore. "You were last here with [your ex]" says Foursquare. "You
haven't talked with [your ex] in a while, make her day by leaving a message on
her wall" says Facebook. Using someone's precise words against them can be
emotionally cruel. Legally, you're expected to forget all of the specific
details of things like trade secrets and company processes when you leave a
job; how is that to be reconciled with your perfect, digital memory? None of
these things are being actively explored.

We already hit the "second generation" of applications as described by the
author; it's the third generation that interests me.

~~~
npsimons
Excellent comment! But I take issue with a few points.

I think that recording everything is _almost_ useless, without a good filter
(approaching AI levels). The real power, I think, comes in recall and
referencing. Just as an example, I've been reading "The Stars my Destination"
and two words came up that I didn't recognize (epileptoid and asthenic -
funny, FF doesn't recognize them either!), and it would have been handy to
just look them up quickly.

As to "forgetting", people already abuse current mnemonic devices (such as
photos) to "hold on" too long, and using people's words against them is a
problem with or without perfect recall.

For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does:
recording/transmitting devices left at the door, outside, and simply accept
the crippling that comes from lack of instant access to information.

Also, what's wrong with living inside Emacs? ;P

Edit to followup: Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein include
"The Final Cut" (even with the poor execution) and "Strange Days"; anyone have
any recommendations along these lines?

~~~
vitovito
> _using people's words against them is a problem with or without perfect
> recall_

Yes, it is! But one thing I've learned in managing online communities is that
you don't give people the ability to do something you don't want them to do. I
don't feel having perfect electronic recall should be a feature without more
context sensitivity.

> _For trade secrets, etc, you do what any high security facility does_

Except for the Steve Mann argument: it's a prosthesis. When you take the
hardware away from him, you're disabling him. He becomes disoriented and
cannot function as well. It's like taking away a wheelchair, or crutches, or a
hearing aid. And when more and more of your potential employees rely on these
devices 18 hours a day, more and more will be negatively impacted. No, I think
it's something that has to be fixed in the legal system or fixed in the entire
design of a wearable system.

> _Works of fiction I've found interesting in this vein_

The novel "Snow Crash" has wearable computing used only by a subset of wired
individuals derisively called "gargoyles." Everyone else still uses
workstations.

The "Old Man's War" series of books has soldiers with embedded computers,
including a subset of soldiers who have them embedded since birth.

The novel "Permanence" also has them, but used for pervasive IP rights
enforcement.

The novel "Signal to Noise" has an elite intellectual class with implants that
work with pervasive wireless sensors and fully immersive workstations.

The film "Stranger Than Fiction" has AR-style overlays at least during the
opening sequences.

The short film "Sight" touches on AR and behavorial control a bit:
<http://vimeo.com/46304267>

This kottke.org piece covers a few other shorts: <http://kottke.org/12/04/the-
real-google-glasses>

------
alexqgb
Mapping has traditionally focused not on the past, but on the future.
Specifically, in considering courses of action. The Olympian perspective maps
provide allow people to account for far more information than they can derive
from their immediate surroundings in that particular moment. Having visualized
a potential course of action, maps then lead back to the here and now, and
indicate where the first step should fall. In other words, they're about
identifying the optimal path from this moment into a future moment that is
preferable to others.

In carrying out this process, there have always been four limiting factors.
The first results from the precision and accuracy of the map itself. The
second results from how well people can locate themselves in the map, and
accordingly, how much confidence they can place in the plans they derive from
it. The third, has to do with how swiftly people can toggle back and forth
between the cartographic view (outside the bubble looking in) and the ground
view (inside the bubble looking out). For example, 18th Century mariners using
the lunar distance method for determining longitude at sea may need hours to
gather raw information from the relative positions of the horizon, stars and
moon then run the calculations to correctly position themselves on a map in
order to determine the precise compass bearing they should follow, which is
something we can no derive in realtime. The final limit has to do with the
kinds of information that can be mapped, and how swiftly it can be refreshed.
Once, we could only map coastlines. Now we can map the clouds above them. At
the extent of the mappable expands, so does the range of factors that can
guide our plans for the future.

As far as humans go, the first three factors have absolute theoretical limits
while the fourth is theoretically unlimited. Google Glass represents a
development in which all three of the theoretical limits are reached
simultaneously, while the fourth has the lid taken off. Thanks to our survey
instruments, we can expect to map the entire globe with millimeter precision,
and locate any object within similar precision. Tools like Glass provided a
realtime overlay of information that could, at one stage, only be gotten by
consulting a map and plotting a course. And with billions of sensors on Earth
and in Space feeding data to enormously powerful processing centers, the range
of inputs for cartographic overlays just gets bigger and bigger.

I've become firmly convinced that our arrival at this points represents a
seminal moment in human development, one that will stand out in the history of
our species for centuries, if not millennia to come.

~~~
vitovito
As someone with a degree in geography, this is a bit hyperbolic, and a bit of
a one-sided, urban, first world, view of cartography that might be nice for
advertisers in big cities with pervasive 4G or wifi, but will also be ignored
everywhere else.

Mapping is _traditionally_ about sensemaking and placemaking. Precision and
accuracy are two different things, and both are entirely context dependent.
There's a famous book, _How to Lie with Maps,_ all about it. Maps are how we
take things from others by drawing a line in a different place, or how we
explore boundaries by drawing what we know and wondering what's everywhere
else. They are stories on paper that sometimes have legal or royal or personal
meaning, but they are always still stories. Geography is a social science, and
cartography is as much art as it is evidence.

In _Sketching User Experiences,_ Bill Buxton tells a story about maps, where
your Google Glass example breaks down:

 _Imagine that you were kayaking off the coast of Greenland, and needed a
chart to find your way. You might have a paper chart, but you will probably
have trouble unfolding it with your mittens on, and in any case, it will
probably get soaked in the process and become unreadable. From the urban
perspective, an alternative solution might be to go to your PC and use a
mapping program on the internet... However, there is a minor problem here,
too. You don't have your PC with you in the arctic, much less in your kayak.
We all know about internet-enabled cell phones and PDAs--they might provide
another alternative. Why not jump on the internet using your cell phone, and
get the map that way?

But here is the problem. You probably can't get cellular service where you are
in your kayak. And even if you can, your battery is probably dead because it
is so cold. Or, your phone won't work because it is wet. Even if your mobile
phone does work, and you have service, you probably can't operate it because
you can't do so without taking your mittens off, and it is too cold to do so.

Now let's look at a third approach, one that the Inuit have used... This shows
two tactile maps of the coastline, carved out of wood. They can be carried
inside your mittens, so your hands stay warm. They have infinite battery life,
and can be read, even in the six months of the year that it is dark. And, if
they are accidentally dropped in the water, they float. What you and I might
see as a stick, for the Inuit can be an elegant design solution that is
appropriate for their particular environment._

There are entire cultures where your Euro-centric view of mapping does not
compute, so much so that researchers at my alma mater would go into jungles
and teach third world tribes how the usurping white man views their world so
they can make maps that you, the outsider, can understand what they had
previously only expressed emotionally. There are entire continents where your
"Mirror World" cannot _accurately_ represent _anything,_ and I feel that puts
your seminal moment much further away than you imagine.

~~~
alexqgb
"There are entire continents where your "Mirror World" cannot accurately
represent anything, and I feel that puts your seminal moment much further away
than you imagine."

Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?

For what it's worth, I am acutely aware of non-western cartographic
traditions. One of my own teachers is among the world's foremost experts in
Chinese mapping, which (as you know) is astonishingly different from its
European counterpart. I have also studied the cartographic traditions of the
South Pacific, India, and Arabia, all of which combine different interests
with different ways of thinking about them, and have resulted in wildly
distinct senses of the world.

None of this changes the fact that the model now proliferating with GPS
enables smartphones is, at heart, the Western one. And if you really think
these things are limited to the rich world, you are simply unaware of what's
actually happing all around us. By 2016 there will be more of these things on
the planet that people, and not because everyone in the rich world owns half a
dozen.

Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into
this framework is the thing I find fascinating. Even if they don't, the sheer
scale of the economic changes wrought by the presently-unfolding geospatial
revolution will secure this moment's place in history for ages to come. That's
the thing about studying the world's cartographic traditions; you reach a
point when you can recognize a big deal when you see one.

~~~
vitovito
> _Really? Entire continents? Nothing whatsoever? Not even a coastline?_

As I said, accuracy is context-dependent. Satellites in space can tell you
that sacred temple moves every time it is rebuilt, but everyone on the ground
will tell you it has been the same temple in the same place for a thousand
years. Which is accurate? Which matters? To whom? For what purpose?

> _Whether or not the perspectives developed elsewhere can find their way into
> this framework is the thing I find fascinating._

To say that GPS and Western conceits about mapping are going to take over the
world whether cultures with different concepts of place and time like it or
not -- they can adapt or not -- has a lot of manifest destiny behind it, and I
find it pretty professionally offensive. I think we lose a lot when you're
expected to make a map so the souls of the dead can find their way using
ArcGIS.

~~~
alexqgb
You, sir, have raised pedantry to a level I've never seen before on HN. But
I'm not afraid to be servicy, so let me retroactively preface my remarks with
the qualification that they apply only to members of the living, and not
members of the dead and / or other residents of any spirit world currently
known, or waiting to be discovered in this universe or any other.

Separately, I don't know why you're interpreting remarks about people around
the world who are buying tools that improve their lots in life with "manifest
destiny" which was a religious justification for the genocide of Native
Americans in the 19th Century. For a guy so concerned about the meanings of
precision and accuracy, this interpretation is hilariously devoid of either.

But please, feel free to elaborate.

~~~
vitovito
Pedantry? No, geography. A traditional use of maps is for the living to draw
the locations with emotional significance to the deceased (and then you'd post
them in their tomb). Chinese and Japanese maps both were more concerned with
political and emotional importance than absolute scale.

So it is with many tribal cultures. Map-making as Westerners understand it may
be completely foreign. Certainly it was for the Native Americans, and you see
maps in tribal cultures reference landmarks and geographies that you simply
can't see or understand without a deep understanding of the flora and fauna,
with (what we would call) "distortions" applied to emphasize danger, or
emotional meaning, or cultural import.

Except they're not distortions. They're accurate _to the user of the map._
They're just not accurate to your GPS system. Absolute scale is the only thing
GPS is concerned with, but being able to define anything absolutely is an
incredibly modern thing.

I don't see it as "people around the world who are buying tools that improve
their lots in life." I think you are expressing a very imperialist mindset
with the words you are using. A GPS system which cannot _innately apply
emotional or cultural distortions to match the worldview of the user_ is, by
that very nature, imposing the worldview of the GPS creator on it.

So, yes, I think manifest destiny is exactly what you're advocating for in
your comments here.

~~~
alexqgb
Did it ever occur to you that cartographic paradigms are like languages? In
the same way you can learn French without giving up Italian, did you know you
can learn to see the world through a new lens without abandoning one that's
very different?

I'm asking because you note that "Chinese and Japanese maps both were more
concerned with political and emotional importance than absolute scale." Like I
said before, this isn't news to me. I've spent a fair amount of time with
traditional Chinese cartography. I understand (and greatly appreciate) how
fluidly it's related to Chinese poetry and literature, incorporating them in
ways that are largely alien to the western map-making tradition.

But I'm also aware that China is launching its own GPS system, and that people
in China do, in fact, use GPS to find their way around. Indeed, they're
investing in it heavily. I'm sorry, but "choosing to invest in a technology"
is just not the same as "being murdered en masse by foreigners claiming divine
justification."

~~~
vitovito
While I'm sure there are lots of people who use geo-aware devices to improve
their lives, being both a geographer by education and a UX designer by
profession means I'm also sure lots of them would prefer to use a geo-aware
device which takes their cultural preferences into account.

While a culture doesn't "have" to abandon its old ways, when a militarily
superior presence arrives and says "we own all of this now because this GPS-
made map says so" and you have no way of representing your territorial
boundaries except in terms of "that sacred land on the third loop of this
animal's migratory trail" and "twelve generations of reconstructing this holy
temple in the same spot which moves because it's on the shore of a river that
changes course and width and breadth constantly," and your kids who were
previously happy hunting in the forest by day and smoking around a campfire by
night now want guns and jeans and Nintendos because they're novel, it's hard
to reconcile the two. Now you have to figure out French without anyone wanting
to teach it to you, because then they don't get to pave over your Italian land
if you figure out how to explain that it's yours in French, and also stop your
kids from becoming indentured French servants just to spite you. It's a
technology that's been forced upon you; you haven't been given the choice to
"invest" in it on your own terms.

These are real things that happen. This is not a contrived example. This is
what geographers at my alma mater dealt with, teaching non-first-world peoples
how to use GPS against encroaching developers and governments, and how to
translate between their native cultural "distortions" and the emotionlessness,
meaninglessness, absolutism of GPS and GIS.

~~~
alexqgb
Right, that's about as many reversals as I can handle in one thread. Good luck
with the job hunt.

------
sp332
It might be instructive to get the, er, perspective of someone who has used
augmented vision for several years already.
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-
sm...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/why-smart-
glasses-might-not-make-you-smarter)

------
jmount
Can't wait to see all Google Glassers stumbling around addled by pop up
advertisements.

~~~
Permit
Just like all those pop-up advertisements Google has put elsewhere, correct?

~~~
jmount
GMail is pretty infested with ads.

------
pptm
Does Google Glass comprise of only a micro display? I assumed the technology
was a little bit more sophisticated than that.

~~~
rfurlan
Here is what is currently known about Glass:

\- Transparent microdisplay, front-facing camera, touch-sensitive controls,
audio I/O, internals "equivalent to a Galaxy Nexus", IMU, WiFi

