Will Google Try the Google Glass Again
The hall erupted in whoops and applause as Sergey Brin bounded onto the stage. Already, the audition at Google'due south 2012 I/O developer conference had been treated to piecemeal company announcements about Android software improvements and search algorithm breakthroughs. What the company's co-founder was about to show them, though, was entirely unexpected: Google'south first attempt at developing a pair of smart glasses. Brin'due south effort to demonstrate the device'southward potential, however, would involve around a dozen parachutists dissemination their jump from an airship downwardly to the convention centre. "This can get wrong in about 500 dissimilar means," warned Brin.
Thankfully, Google's first public demonstration of its smart glasses didn't result in whatsoever high-velocity accidents. The product'due south release a year after, still, proved a slow-movement disaster. Criticism from privacy advocates came thick and fast, with many claiming that the device insufficiently alerted passers-by to when they were existence recorded. A public backlash ensued. One user, journalist Mat Honan, keenly observed how uncomfortable people became around the glasses. "I'm not wearing my $1,500 face computer on public transit, where there'south a good chance information technology might be yanked from my face," he wrote in an essay for Wired. Two months subsequently, some other user would record this happening to her in a bar in San Francisco.
It could accept been that the Google Glass folks but did non anticipate the privacy backlash.
Apu Kapadia, Indiana University
"It could have been that the Google Glass folks just did not conceptualize the privacy backlash," says Apu Kapadia, a computer science professor at Indiana University and an expert on smart glasses. After all, from a designer'southward perspective, the fact that the product's brandish above the user's right eye is clearly on while recording should found enough alarm for sensitive passers-by. Fifty-fifty so, that wasn't something non-users were used to. "Absent that physical action of bringing a camera to your face, it was not clear that recording had started," says Kapadia, "even though, technically, you lot could stare at the person and maybe figure it out."
Sales of Google Glass proved lacklustre, seemingly dooming the concept of consumer-friendly smart glasses for a generation. In recent months, still, several other tech companies have gambled on precisely the opposite. Last September saw Facebook announce its partnership with Ray-Ban to launch 'Stories,' a pair of smart spectacles retailing at $299 that would allow the user not but to stream videos, but also receive phone calls. The news came amid a flurry of other releases that year, including Oppo's Air Glass and TCL'south NXTWEAR One thousand glasses. Such devices have been seen equally the harbingers of the 'metaverse,' a (contested) vision of the future wherein individuals will be able to immerse themselves in virtual worlds anchored in the concrete, all with the aid of augmented reality software.
There were even rumours that Google itself was contemplating a return to the globe of smart glasses, this time with a device that incorporated AR software. The search behemothic may accept been encouraged by the curious afterlife of its pioneering spectacles. Fifty-fifty afterward the consumer version was discontinued in 2015, Google Glass has continued to notice uses in sectors including logistics and healthcare, where the hands-gratuitous nature of the devices is advantageous for staff working for long hours on complex, repetitive tasks.
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Proponents of smart glasses also argue that new technologies at present encounter the privacy challenges that doomed earlier products. Facial recognition algorithms, for case, tin be used to automatically block unknown faces in frame, while visual AI systems are capable of spotting clues that the user has walked into a bathroom or a private home, and turn the camera off.
Due south.A. Applin is skeptical. The anthropologist, who has spent her career analysing the impact of algorithms and automation on homo social club, is concerned that such technologies may have unforeseen limitations. "People take bureau," says Applin, "and are able to exercise things that may not have been considered by those creating the privacy protections, thus making them less constructive."
Adult in partnership with Facebook, Ray-Ban Stories are amidst the latest generation of smart glasses to hitting the market. (Photograph by cavebear42/Wikimedia Eatables)
Protecting privacy
Much of Google and Facebook's business organisation model rests on the premise that customers are searching for platforms from which to share data about their lives, careers and businesses and learn most others. Information technology is also true that the hardware used to achieve this – namely, laptops and phones – hasn't changed much. Smart glasses, meanwhile, provide added mobility and new perspectives that allow novel formats for photos and video. Their easily-gratuitous nature may also entreatment to those keen on maintaining some measure of social distancing in the wake of the pandemic, as Applin and her co-author, Dr. Catherine Flick, noted in a recent newspaper.
Only the concerns of those who feel uncomfortable at the prospect of being surreptitiously recorded past a smart glasses user haven't disappeared – especially given how much more than advanced these products are compared to their antecedents. Ray-Ban Stories, for example, take been criticised for how easy it is to accidentally have photos, and seem to be the showtime salvo in Meta'due south effort to create AR spectacles that can only work past collecting vast amounts of mapping and location data (with some exceptions.) While it might be argued that about people are used to beingness recorded all the time past other people's phones and CCTV cameras, these devices arguably benefit from a concept that researcher Helen Nissenbaum dubbed 'contextual integrity.' For example, when we walk through an airport, almost people volition have that they are being recorded; similarly, the few seconds when someone takes their phone out of their pocket and lifts it to heart level indicate that a recording is about to take place.
Smart glasses, by contrast, lack many obvious visual and contextual clues in their employ. While newer models accept incorporated bright lights to indicate that recording is in progress, some have argued that it'due south still not easy for someone to tell when the user has hit record. Additionally, the reactions of the public to a new generation of consumer smart glasses – whether they're wearing them, or observing those that do – is unpredictable, says Applin, simply because concepts of privacy vary from culture to civilisation. "It is many things to many cultures," she says, "and every bit nosotros alluded to in our paper, technologists must take into account cultural differences when designing and deploying any new engineering."
However, there is show to suggest attitudes toward smart glasses take softened since 2014. Social media has exploded in popularity during that time, which Kapadia argues has coincided with a generational shift in attitudes toward personal privacy. Plain, Gen Zers are much more used to existence photographed and filmed by mobile phones than their elders. "As each generation becomes, in some sense, more open to newer technology and the photo medium, maybe – maybe – the tech companies run into an opportunity," says Kapadia.
Even so, it'south a mistake to recall that privacy is a not-issue for teenagers. Evidence from interviews with young people by Kapadia and several of his colleagues near their attitudes toward privacy suggest that teenagers consistently modify their behaviours in settings where footage is expected to be taken with the intent to publish on social media. One interviewee, for example, remarked that they were less inclined to take part in underage drinking at firm parties because of the run a risk their parents might run across a photograph on social media.
One would expect this behaviour to exist accentuated if smart glasses go the chief vehicle for capturing and disseminating images and video on social media. "That'due south perhaps sad, in a manner," says Kapadia. It could be argued, though, that that sectionalisation of personae isn't and then different from the conduct of older generations on Facebook as opposed to LinkedIn. Rather, "each generation changes the fashion they bear and and so has a new bar for privacy" as engineering advances, explains Kapadia.
Applied science has too sufficiently advanced since 2014 to protect the privacy of those who feel uncomfortable beingness filmed or photographed by smart glasses, say their proponents. Facial recognition systems, for example, could block out unknown faces, while visual AI software could interpret contextual clues in the local environs and switch off the in-congenital camera whenever the user walks into a family home or a public bathroom.
Critics argue that such technologies are not sufficiently advanced nonetheless. Another major concern, says Kapadia, is cybersecurity. The horror stories of voyeuristic hackers switching on laptop cameras while keeping the recording light off are well-known. The (very minor) silver lining in these tales is that such criminals are usually only afforded a express vantage point. Hacking smart spectacles, however, could potentially allow 3rd parties an uninterrupted view of how we conduct our daily lives.
A printing factory using Vuzix'due south M400 smart spectacles. Enterprise applications for these types of devices accept grown markedly in recent years. (Photo courtesy of Vuzix)
Smart glasses, smart workplace
Despite the hype around Facebook and Ray Ban's collaboration, consumer smart glasses still only form a pocket-size part of the overall market compared to business organization applications. It will be that way for a piffling while yet, says Paul Travers. "The broader markets are harder to solve a problem for," explains the CEO of Vuzix, ane of the world's leading smart glasses developers. This means that the popularity of smart spectacles is dependent on whether they're stylish. "And the tech right now is non small enough to make way-forrard products."
The tech right now is not small enough to make fashion-frontwards products.
Paul Travers, Vuzix
It is small enough, still, for the workplace. Vuzix is one of several companies around the world developing smart glasses for enterprise applications. Travers is particularly proud of the M400, which carries an eight-core processor and 4K streaming video cameras while only weighing two.8 ounces (most normal eyeglasses counterbalance simply nether an ounce.) Vuzix sells approximately 15,000-twenty,000 of these glasses and others similar it every twelvemonth, Travers claims. Their chief selling indicate, he explains, is their usefulness in streamlining training regimes, giving instructors a alive caput-top view of everything that the student is doing and allowing the learner to superimpose schematics and other visual aids on their environs.
One particularly profitable segment for Vuzix has been warehousing, where supervisors take been using its glasses to remotely railroad train new staff. "A brand-new person, who'south never packed a pallet before, is told, step-by-step as he's scanning the goods, where it needs to become," explains Travers. Healthcare is another fruitful area, where smart spectacles accept been used to plan and assistance in numerous surgeries.
More than controversially, these devices have also been seen resting on the noses of security personnel. In recent years, reports have emerged of smart glasses loaded with facial recognition software being used by both Russian and Chinese police force. Vuzix itself has too collaborated with software companies to adjust facial recognition software for its glasses, most notably in 2019 when information technology partnered with developers NNTC to produce pairs for security personnel in the UAE.
The utilise of facial recognition services past constabulary enforcement has already proven controversial. A logical next step for its integration in smart spectacles might be the power of police force officers to instantly view additional data related to a facial match, like a doubtable's home address. This touches on wider ethical questions about what kinds of data smart glass users should exist able to pull upwardly nigh other individuals. There is a danger, says Kapadia, of smart glass developers trying to apply visual AI to quantify subjective aspects of a person'southward identity; their race, perhaps, or their gender.
For his role, Travers is convinced that information technology is justifiable for law enforcement to use smart glasses inside certain spaces where the necessity for active surveillance is necessarily high (the same spaces where, he adds, Vuzix smart glasses might be encountered.) "Anybody who thinks they're walking through a border crossing and they're non going to have their face scanned is smoking crack," he says. When it comes to police using them outside of those confined circumstances, however, Travers is wary. "I will say, though, in a lot of countries, people merely live with it. In America, information technology'due south a little different."
Whether or non US constabulary departments will be outfitted with smart glasses remains to exist seen. What is articulate is that regulatory provisions specific to these types of devices are few and far between (although theoretical safeguards practice exist in existing privacy and human rights statutes.) Any future rules on smart glasses have to exist carefully adapted to market realities, explains Applin.
"Maybe we tin eventually hold big manufacturers to regulations," she says. Nevertheless, regulators also need to be aware of the possibility of a cottage industry emerging of developers looking to sell their own versions of smart spectacles to the public. "People are going to exist 3D press these in their garages and writing their own software," says Applin. "And those spectacles are going to be taking pictures."
Source: https://techmonitor.ai/technology/emerging-technology/smart-glasses-making-comeback-have-they-got-smarter
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