My First Week with Google Glass (iPhone)

The first week with a new paradigm in computing was not as expected.

As soon as I walked out of my fitting appointment, I popped the sunglass attachments on Glass and headed to the train. To my surprise, not many people noticed I was wearing Glass, or if they did, didn’t overtly react to seeing me. That was a trend I noticed in the first week- wearing the sunglasses attachment (with the Charcoal color of Glass) makes it appear that you are wearing a typical pair of sunglasses from a distance. Very occasionally, someone would do a double take passing me on the street, but that was usually it.

However, without any attachments, it’s a totally different story.

I’ve found the reactions of people fall into two camps: people who are aware of what Glass is and people who aren’t. The people who are aware of what Glass is react with unbridled enthusiasm. Giving them an offer to try them on (which I try to offer as much as possible) garners a reaction something akin to Christmas morning. People generally love it right off the bat and everyone has been impressed with the technology. The people that don’t know what it is (but have the courage to ask me about) are much more reserved in their response (naturally). However, once they try it on, their reaction begins to equal that of the others. After walking them through a couple of voice/touch commands, you see people’s eyes light up.

Glass definitely has the “ooh ahh” part of new technology. It looks (fairly) exotic to some people, especially people that aren’t familiar with newer forms of technology (read: wearable computing). Almost everyone that has tried it on has seen the potential of interacting with the internet in a new form*. Some people don’t know how they would use it personally day-to-day (I can’t blame them- struggling with that myself). Luckily, I haven’t had any negative reactions to me wearing Glass in person (but the trolling on the internet has already started).

One of the reasons I was really excited about Glass was the photography aspect. Fortunately. there was a Flickr photowalk in the Mission that I took Glass to. Not only was it neat to share Glass with some of the photographers I know in the community, it was also cool to use Glass to get a different perspective. I would love to have a live Google Hangout for part of a walk in the future and it could happen thanks to Glass. It’s also not hard to shoot with my DSLR wearing them either (which is a nice plus).

That weekend I also took Glass to Malibu Putt Putt to try out the video recording aspect. I was impressed with the quality of the video: both the wide-angle of glass (even catches my hat brim!) as well as the smoothness of the video (especially considering its on my head). Here is a sample video with a few clips I threw together.

The first week I was using Glass it was tethered via Bluetooth from my iPhone 5. While I love the iPhone OS, I was beginning to have some troubles (like some of the other Explorers) with the limitations of using Glass with an non Android device. Google released a companion app called MyGlass right before the beta launch of Glass that enables you to control Glass from your phone, send SMS, and get navigation. Currently, those 3 features aren’t available outside of Android.  So, after a week, I decided to swap out the SIM card (virtually, that is) from the iPhone 5 to my (older) Galaxy Nexus. Later that day I hopped onto a plane and headed to Cleveland, Ohio. How did I fair on Android? That’s another post.

*Yes, while voice commands and screens exist today, a ‘floating screen’ controlled by touch/voice isn’t.