April 6, 2012 Google Glasses Are A Horrible Idea

The Google Glasses also known as Google Glass made its debut this week to much geeky fanfare. I was not one of those cheering this technological marvel, I feared the destruction that is going to come with it. I love technology gadgets and can get excited about many cool things, this isn't one of them.

Google Glass is basically eyeglasses that has a small screen that projects/distracts to your eye tidbits of information. From the demo videos out there we can see you can get the weather, calendar updates for meetings, even chat messages. The device has a microphone so you can interact with it using your voice and it even has a camera. All neat cool things tucked into a device that is the ultimate distraction machine.

Just from the physical logistics and how the human eye's lenses work, you need to refocus your eye away from what's infront of you to have your brain process whatever the glasses are projecting. People have a hard enough time looking up from their phones, can you imagine in their eyesight is now partially blocked? There are some people that will use this new toy to the max and use it well, responsibly, and respectfully. The majority of the living world are not respectful, responsible and continually prove that they can't multitask. Now this comes along. Handsfree, voice controlled, with vision impairment. I pray that this thing is not made 4G ready and sticking to Wi-Fi only, it would defeat the purpose of the true mobility if you had to wear these things in a Wi-Fi hotspot, but you know that if people can't stop texting they would wear this thing and you might as well drive with a hood over your head.

Technologically this is an amazing project and shows what an awesome company Google is. However, there needs to be restraint on how this is applied to the normal world. All this information flow is making for an amazing time to be alive. I believe there is a limit to how much convenience we can add to our world. Adding too much will continue to remove the need for people to think logically, critically, creatively, organizationally, structurally... why would they, the gadget will do it for me and I will follow it, even if that means driving my car into a lake because the GPS said to go that way but didn't have the new road updated to it's map set yet.

As a technology lover I hope this gadget remains an experiment and doesn't make it to the mass market. There are far too many social, safety, and personal issues I can see with this focus sucking approach. For a screen that small, put it on a watch, a flexible OLED screen you can strap to your arm, a film to put on your TV, anything but projecting images to your primary visual focus area. The mass market world are just not knowledgeable or disciplined enough to handle something like this.

End of Line.

Posted in: Google,Technology