Ask technology pundits what scuppered the Google Glass facial computer’s mass-market dreams and they will list a variety of issues, from price to style, but far and away the most frequently cited drawback came to be known as the “glasshole” problem.
It boiled down to this: wearing eyewear sporting an obvious camera in public can trigger scorn, and . People venturing into Silicon Valley coffee shops, bistros and bars while wearing Glass swiftly and signs barring their entry.
But it seems the idea of spectacles as an everyday wearable computer is too persuasive to go away; after all, glasses are already the world’s most commonplace technological augmentation of the human body.
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It was almost inevitable that successors such as would come along. It is the latest resurrection of the format, and wisely leaves the camera out of the design. Vaunt arguably offers the most appealing and normal-looking of any such glasses… they just so happen to have a Bluetooth connection to your phone and a very low-intensity laser to draw text onto your retina. No visible display, no obvious electronics, and .
Not limited for long
This is a relatively humble facial computer, with a red monochrome output showing no more than 400 by 150 pixels. A minimalist display like this is fine for showing urgent messages, useful information, even arrows and other basic images for navigation.
If this was all it could ever be, it might still be mildly disruptive to social interactions – “is this guy gazing into the distance thinking, or is he checking his messages?” – but not overly intrusive. Restrictions on use would probably be highly situational. Such devices might be banned from exams, spelling bees and pub quizzes, for example, but are unlikely to or at public events in the way Glass did.
But this reprisal won’t remain so limited for long. Intel already intends to include a microphone in a more advanced version (to enable a voice assistant like Siri or Alexa), and upcoming iterations will doubtless have better graphics. As capabilities like this are added, social issues will once again multiply.
Smart glasses that can draw full-colour images on the retina afford the ultimate in privacy. For many users, access to such images has clear utility. Once this technology becomes available, it will almost certainly be added – if not to the Vaunt, then to its competitors. This will raise issues. For example, some people will inevitably take advantage of this to gaze at lurid images and video in highly inappropriate settings.
Shrinking lenses
More critically, the absence of a camera is probably just temporary. The obtrusive camera on Google Glass has already been outclassed by harder to spot lenses on other wearable devices. Snapchat’s , sunglasses sporting a camera linked directly to the user’s Snapchat account, rely on colour highlighting and lights around the lens to make sure everyone recognises when it is recording.
But what happens when the on-board camera is more difficult, even impossible, to spot at a glance? It is hard to imagine that lenses won’t find their way to these devices. Would it be a privacy nightmare, akin to fears about Google Glass? Could it make pirate recordings of movies impossible to stop? Or to take a different cut at this issue, what might social activists and political demonstrators be able to capture with this kind of set-up? As with so many of our information technologies, the capabilities that threaten our privacy may also serve as tools of empowerment.
There’s no guarantee that the Vaunt (and its rivals) will be successful. Smart glasses may well be a futurist trope akin to flying cars – appealing in the abstract, but with real-world problems too difficult to overcome. However, if devices like these do thrive, we may be surprised by what happens next. Success based on the elimination of the camera could, in turn, make cameras on our face unstoppable. Glass started the debate about what’s acceptable, but it is far from settled.
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