Just watched a demo of Google Glass, which provides a close view of the experience of using Google Glass in daily life.
Check out the video here:
http://youtu.be/V6Tsrg_EQMw
After watching the video, I found glass behaves a little bit different to my previously understanding, it is could be a disadvantage of Google Glass, and will hurt the experience a lot!
Current design of the display on the Glass is to project the digital image on your right eye from a very close distance, which works like you have a transparent display near you right eye.
Since the display it so close to you eye, so the digital image will fall out of focus when you are looking around. When you really want to read something from the Glass, you need to ask your eye to focus on the image, on that time, the world around falls out of your focus!
According to the video, what Google is purchasing is a technology that can interact with user without any distraction, reads, bring the user out of the world. In this point of view, Google Glass is huge improvement comparing to classic digital devices, but is still not perfect!
From the distraction view, this little disadvantage isn’t really hurt the experience of Google Glass, if you feel happy that moving your eyeball on the top right of your view very often. But form enhanced reality point of view, it is a breaking blocker!
The most basic requirement of Enhanced Reality is to overlap the digital image contains descriptive information on the optical view of real world. But for Google Glass, it doesn’t provide a way for people to see the digital view and real world, but it is not simultaneously! Because you cannot see the digital view and surrounding world clearly simultaneously, then it is impossible for Google Glass to overlap the digital image over the optical image.
That’s what I means that Google Glass isn’t really an Enhanced Reality Device as a lot of people imagined and expected!
Here are 2 images that explain the idea:
View when you look around
The view around is clear, but the map is blur
View when you read Glass
The map become clear, but the view around is blur
To solve this problem, it requires device to detect the focus point of human eye, then adjust the image accordingly in real time. But still now, we don’t have mature technology that can detect the eye focus point and compact enough to built into a wearable device.
But any way, I still believe that Google Glass is an exciting milestone of purchasing real Enhanced Reality technology in human history! It must evolve and incubate a lot of future technologies!