Google Glass and the war on old people

by philg

I tried Google Glass for the first time today. I was in the midst of a group of young people enthusiastically trying out this technological wonder. When it was my turn I could never get the screen to look quite right. The apparent distance of the Google Glass projection is about eight feet. That is a pretty good match for the top of my progressive lenses but a terrible match for the lower portion, used for reading. As the screen position is readily disturbable/adjustable I’m not sure how easily this problem can be solved.

What’s Google’s message to the over-40s? Get a Large Print Edition of the Galaxy Note.

4 thoughts on “Google Glass and the war on old people”

  2. Har! Outlook meeting reminders kill me, the font for the conf. line and conf. id is about size 6 and there is no spacing in the numbers! Argggg! Most of the folks I work with have to be near 40 or over, not sure how they do it. I always have to cut and paste the numbers into word doc and re-size the font, add spacing and then call in. Guess I am getting old. Looking forward to your review of oculus rift.

  3. This is likely just a temporary restriction based on the current technology of Google Glass. It will most certainly not remain a static thing any more than our smartphones have done so.

    In the short term, we can certainly expect that the nature of the display will quickly accommodate people with glasses, even bifocals. It may just be as simple as changing the focal length of the display or moving the display so that it appears below your line of sight rather than slightly above it.

    In the longer term, we may see the images “painted” on our retinas by a low power laser (already being tested in some universities) which eliminates the question of focus entirely. The apparatus looks similar to the existing Google Glass, but instead of the transparent cube of the display, it has a small mirror to reflect the laser into the eye. Resolution and color are limited at the moment, but that is expected to change.

    Alternatively, other universities are investigating putting the display itself on contact lenses which again eliminate the issue of focal length (it is already built in). Low resolution versions of this have already been worn by human testers.

    And, for those who think of things like Google Glass as a war on old people, what about the advantages that such technology or extensions of it might offer. It’s built-in maps would make it easier to have assistance in getting back to your car in crowded parking lots. Reminders appear unobtrusively in a corner of your vision for any of the recurring needs of older people. Small or distant real-world text could be read to the Glass user on demand. Facial recognition, though currently off the table by Google fiat, could prove a godsend to the elderly in the early stages of Alzheimer’s reminding them of little seen friends or family when they appear.

    This isn’t an “either or” issue that we are facing in the immediate future. This is a wait for it technology that will one day bloom into a great diversity of devices that will continue to influence society for decades to come.

  4. Steve Mann, who’s been experimenting with such things for 35 years, explained back in March that the (current generation) Google Glass optics are just wrong. Their main flaw is in using a fixed-focus display, which forces the right eye to frequently focus at a different distance than the left, causing all sorts of trouble. Reputedly, the US Army’s “Nett Warrior” (formerly Land Warrior) eyepiece had the same fixed-focus design flaw, and testers hated it because of that. Mann says he encountered many such problems in his own designs and solved them with his “aremac”.

    http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/steve-mann-my-augmediated-life

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