My wife and I sitting in the lobby outside of Google's demo stations on the 8th floor of the Chelsea Market here in NYC.[/caption]Immediate positives:
1) Glass is very cool. This platform, as expected, has a LOT of potential. Currently, it feels like much of the world is right there, waiting for your eyeball. Though, sadly, it's not as easy as it should be to get at it.
2) It's the Wild West in here--everything is rough around the edges and harder to use than the smart phones we're all comfortable with now. This makes it more cumbersome to use Glass than a smart phone, but it's also much more exciting to use it. I feel like anything is possible it's like living on the frontier.
3) Glass is super-comfy to wear. As of Day 1, I had no problem wearing it for hours. I had no headaches, no dizziness, and no discomfort at all.
4) It works well with Dropbox--but only when I connect it to my Mac. Strangely, Glass doesn't mount like removable media and my Win7 netbook refuses to see it or my Android phone or my DSLR because the MTP drivers won't load. The latter isn't the fault of Glass, however.
5) While the battery life doesn't weather Google+ Hangouts very well, it does recharge pretty fast. It's first recharge took just a few hours.
6) It was super-cool to watch a video from CNN on Glass. It was like the news was breaking on my face.
Immediate problems:
[caption id="attachment_13117195674" align="alignright" width="224"]
The moment of truth! (It does look pretty Apple-influenced, doesn't it?)[/caption]1) When you enable services like Tumblr or Twitter for Glass, any content they serve you ends up mixed in with everything else in your timeline. In other words, you have to sift through all of your social networking content to find your photos, videos, texts and emails. Not practical AT ALL.2) When new content is pushed to Glass, you hear a chime. That's it. You then have to tap the touchpad on the side of Glass to see the latest text, email, or other content. To see any content that might have come previously (the chime of which you may have ignored) you then have to swipe to see it. To me, this is more effort than expected. I wanted all my Tweets and breaking news stories to be served directly to my eyeball, but Glass doesn't do this currently. I'll refine this critique in a future post.
3) I think it's a major waste of resources to not allow for easy installation and use of traditional mobile apps. The reliance on live Internet connections by apps from Google and other companies and developers limits how useful any device can be when on the subway, in rural areas or anywhere after a major storm or other disaster may have disabled ISPs but not the phone lines. Hell, if the servers the Glass "apps" reside on go down for any reason you won't see your Tweets even if Twitter and your ISP are both fine.
4) I don't understand why they didn't make Glass more like glasses. Storing Glass is a real PitA. Glass came with a bag, but Glass doesn't fit in the bag if you have either of the snap-in lenses on it. In real life, I take off my sunglasses and put them back on, depending on where I am and where the sun is. The same should be possible with Glass.
5) The BCT (Bone Conducting Technology--I think that's what it's called) that is used instead of a speaker is cool, but might as well just be a speaker since anyone around you in a quiet room can hear it.
6) Voice recognition isn't great and there's no way, currently, to proofread texts or emails before you send them. This must change, I would think.
7) The casing for Glass overheats quickly during Google Hangouts. Not even long Hangouts--like ten minute Hangouts.
[caption id="attachment_13117195675" align="alignright" width="224"]
Since they didn't allow video inside the "trying on-ing" area, my wife snapped the pictures in this animated gif (she took all the photos of me in this post). Strangely, Google+ automatically assembled this gif without me even asking it to--somehow it just knew. O_O[/caption]TheDay 1 Details
Wednesday, June 26, 2013 was the day I got Glass. That’s how Google seems to want us to refer to it, by the way. Not “my Glass” but just "Glass." Like "I blew my nose with Kleenex" not with "MY Kleenex" or with "a Kleenex." I think it’s a questionable strategy, but I’m biased--I put “the” in front of almost everything I do, so what do I theknow?
I do know how I feel about TheGoogle. Very mixed. Even before the recent NSA/Prism/Big-Brothery stuff going on, I felt really irksome about their drive for "real names" on Google+, their interest in unifying all Google services under one account (I am still annoyed I can't use "thepete" on YouTube). I was glad to see Google Buzz go, but also sad to see Google Wave so misunderstood/mishandled. I will always miss Google Notes and don't like all the "Play" oriented stuff they've done to the Android platform. It makes zero branding sense to me.
The point is that I'm not a Google fanboy in the least. I'm not even a Glass fanboy. To clarify, I believe in the form factor, not necessarily the device, itself. I've been looking forward to such a device since I was a child and even included something very similar to Glass in a novel I wrote back in 2009. Because of this, I felt enthusiastically obligated to support the first major attempt at the form factor. I also wanted to use the thing and getting the very first version would be an awesome thing to do--first, from a gadget-freak's perspective, and second, because I've already imagined all the cool things that are possible with a Glass-like device.
After my first day with Glass, however, I realized that very few of those things are actually possible yet. The UI is really rudimentary and the voice recognition is less than perfect.
I'm not going to go into the specific experience of picking up my Glass because there are plenty of other "Glass Explorers" who have accounted for their experiences online. Suffice it to say that it was like going to an Apple Store with just one product for sale.
Oh, and there was beer. They even had my favorite stout, Shiner Bock.
[caption id="attachment_13117195677" align="aligncenter" width="224"]
It's true--beer tastes better with Glass.[/caption]I should also probably mention than in learning the basics (how to take a photo, shoot video, reply to texts and emails, how to Google for things and how to do Google+ Hangouts) I managed to run the battery down pretty far. It was only at around 80% when I turned it on for the first time, but was down to 20% by the time I was at lunch not two hours later. I suspect that most of the drainage came from doing the Hangout (think video Skyping) with my Mom there at the Google (she was at home and logged into the Hangout on her iPhone and laptop ^_^). The video I shot on the way down the elevator probably helped run the battery down, too. By the time I got to the subway after lunch, Glass wouldn't even turn on.
My First Ever Video with Glass (which is pretty much the same video everyone shoots at Chelsea Market).
Vague Camaraderie
The other thing I should mention is the sudden, if vague, camaraderie I've found with other Glass users (Glassers? Glaciers?). On the way out of the elevator at Chelsea Market (Google has offices above the market, itself) my wife happened to notice Newt Gingrich waiting for one of the other elevators. He was one of the most high-profile winners of the same Glass contest I won. I didn't have a conversation with Newt about Glass or anything else, but it was pretty bizarre that he and I have something in common aside from both being Earthlings.
That night, I noticed a couple of the Instagram photos of myself wearing Glass had "likes" on them from people I didn't know. One of which was a young woman who had also gotten her Glass the same day as I had and was even in the building at the same time as me. I figured this out when I noticed the time and GPS stamps on a photo she had Instagrammed. I commented, asking if she had seen Newt Gingrich. She replied that he was right next to her while she got her Glass.
Before I even got home from Google, I was waiting for my train when I noticed a women sitting on a bench on the subway platform across the tracks from me. She was making these little swiping motions on the side of glasses she was wearing. Obviously, those were not glasses--it was Glass. After a few moments of me staring at her she glanced over at me and I held up my "GLASS" bag and smiled. She smiled back.
My first multi-minute video with Glass.
[caption id="attachment_13117195679" align="alignright" width="300"]
My first photo with Glass. Well, EVERYONE'S first photo with Glass--well, everyone who picked up their Glass at the Chelsea Market, anyway.[/caption]Hot Enough to Fry Tiny Eggs on It
Upon getting home, I decided to do a Google+ Hangout with the folks in my "Glassies" Circle. Unfortunately only a couple of them were available, but that was fine since the Hangout didn't last long. After about ten minutes, I happened to touch my finger to the touchpad of Glass and found it to be incredibly hot. Touching the titanium band that does the bulk of the work keeping Glass on your face actually stung my flesh. It didn't leave a mark, but it did cause pain. So, I politely ended the Hangout and haven't done another since (I'm writing this on Day 5 of my life with Glass).
Glass Apps (Glapps?)
That night I tried "installing" some "apps" that are available for Glass. I include the quotes because there's really no "installation" and there are also no "apps." It's more like subscribing to a service. You do this one of two ways. You can subscribe to Google-sanctioned "apps" by going to glass.google.com/myglass and enabling the "apps." You can also go to third party sites that use Google's Glass API (called "Mirror"--get it? Glass? Mirror?) and authorize those services to access your Glass's timeline. This is much like how you authorize mobile apps to access your Twitter or Facebook account on your smart phone or tablet. Then you go back to you’re myglass page and enable them. The important part to note here is that you don't install anything on your Glass. It's all done in a browser.
There is a way to install apps as you might on an Android phone but I haven't learned how yet. It's much more complicated and requires that you know how to compile APKs, which are the actual apps that run on Android phones.
I'll go into more of the specifics in a future post. For now, I wanted to just go through what the day, itself, was like and describe my initial impressions of Glass. Feel free to ask me any questions about Glass either in the comments of this post or by following me on Twitter or Google+.
Stay tuned for more entries in TheGGlog! Thanks for reading!
[caption id="attachment_13117195680" align="aligncenter" width="300"]
Seriously, I have no idea why people think Glass makes you look stupid. This is actually a pretty slick-looking piece of tech.[/caption]Special thanks to Sarah at Google who did a great job teaching us how to use Glass. Specialer thanks to my wife for coming along to play photographer! See more of her photos (and my own) in my Google Glass Flickrset.
[...] easily impressed. I’m not and wrote about the thing I hate most about Glass last week (You can read my initial impressions of Google Glass, good and bad, as well). It’s definitely easy enough to see the potential of the form factor, but the ONLY thing [...]
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