There's a growing feeling within the tech community that the current iteration of the Google Glass AR specs, set for a public launch in early 2014, is more of a jumping off point than anything else.
Yes,
the head-mounted device is innovative, epochal, game-changing,
exciting, concerning, worrying and all of that good stuff, but what
we've seen so far, from both a hardware and software point of view,
seems like just the beginning – a mere hint of what's to come.
This
got us thinking: how will Google Glass will look at the end of the
decade? Will everyone be wearing one and if they are, what will they be
wearing? How powerful can Augmented Reality become? How could it
potentially change the way we work, study and consume? How do we adjust
to a world where your every utterance could be recorded on the DL, and
what will it mean for citizen journalism?
To find out we delved into the old contacts book and called upon those at the forefront of the wearable tech revolution. Google's first demo of Glass was a sky dive"This
is the just infancy of wearable displays," says Brent Blum, who leads
wearable device research at Accenture Technology Labs. "I imagine we'll
look back in 2020 and pick up Glass and it'll be like the time you or I
saw our first smartphone, car phone or laptop and thought 'huh, that could be useful' but I think we've turned the corner."
Saving Lives
One
of the most intriguing, future thinking concepts for Glass came from
Accenture's recent experiment with Philips' medical division to create
an app for medical professionals, the results of which you can see in
the video below.
"The exciting thing about the Philips video is that we were
actually able to integrate with a medical device and display that
patient data, in real time, within the physician's field of view. That's
a situation where seconds matter and we're saving lives, the physician
no longer has to turn his head or turn away just to check vital signs."
The
tech isn't there yet (there are no plans yet to take the concept to the
production of a real app), but it will be, and it will save lives,
according to Blum.
"I think as an industry, we'll certainly see those kinds of applications emerge in the coming years," he said.
"Certainly,
if you're looking as far out as 2020, I don't think we'll see an
operating room where a surgeon isn't using a wearable device to aid them
with the procedure. It'll be as common as microscopic cameras."
'Real' Augmented Reality experiences
While
it presents a huge opportunity for the sector, believe it or not, the
Augmented Reality community has a little bit of a beef with Google
Glass' billing as 'AR Specs'
"When talking about Glass I always
want to give a fundamental definition of real Augmented Reality," Mike
Cohen VP of Operations, North America for Total Immersion – the world's
first commercial AR company.
"There been so much excitement about
AR especially around Google Glass, but very little understanding of what
Augmented Reality really is and what it requires. I would describe it
as mixing real and virtual on a screen in real time. Just having a video
overlay like Google Glass is not Augmented Reality." Is Google Glass AR? Layar doesn't think soLayar,
the makers of the pioneering AR smartphone app by the same name,
agrees. "No, true augmented reality is not possible on Glass at the
moment," the company wrote on a recent blog.
But don't despair, in
the years to come, these fully immersive, true AR experiences will
come. One of the key's to unlocking them, according to TI's Cohen is the
miniaturisation and implementation of depth cameras such as the one
that sits within Xbox Kinect and the increased computing power to fully
realise the potential of AR.
"For example, if you had a depth
camera attached to Google glass you could, for example, virtually try a
ring on your finger by just looking at it. If you had enough computing
power to make that happen, you can do it with Google glass right now."
Cohen said.
Another challenge that lies between reaching 'true'
AR nirvana is the need for fully immersive experiences that would exist
somewhere between the current Google Glass and the Oculus Rift virtual
reality gaming headset.
Microsoft, another big mover in the
sector, has already filed a patent for the so-called 'Kinect shades'
that would recognise the faces of other gamers in real-life
environments, take voice commands, track eye movements and respond to
gestures. Microsoft is also looking into AR glasses"Glass
now is a very small screen in the top right of your field of vision,"
Maarten Lens Fitzgerald, Layar's Co-founder and US general manager told
us. "The AR dream is that it's immersive like Oculus rift but then with
see-through glasses. For Glass its up to Google to create this. When AR
is possible with Glass and when anyone can get it, we will find and know
the lasting value of the technology. We have a lot of ideas but the
users will determine what works."
Cohen agrees: "How real is the
experience? Well, that's a question that needs to be answered further
down the road. You get into a much more robust world of possibilities,
you're talking about being able to return a much broader range of
information that can insert things into your environment with a much
greater amount of accuracy."
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