Glass
Reactions to Google Glass, and ideas about how it can be used and the apps that can be developed.
Glass and Social Media
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/12/2013 - 06:32I've been writing a lot about the potential of Glass and things that could be developed for it, and a lot of my focus has been on Glass as the prototype for future wearable computing and Glass for special niches. Yet you can do a lot with Glass as is, particularly in terms of social media. However, even in this area, there is work to be done.
I now wear Google Glass most of the time that I'm awake. I've run into issues, from time to time, with it not posting to Twitter or Facebook. It needs to be a bit more reliable in this way. I haven't really used the voice to text to add captions. I just don't trust voice to text, or "Gotham boys two text", as my friends like to call it, enough for tweeting.
Yet as a social media manager, tweeting for many accounts, I wish I could easily select a Twitter account to send the pictures two. The same thing applies to Facebook. I'd like to be able to post a picture to a page.
Google+ has even more issues. Currently, I'm following about two thousand people on Google+. With Glass and Ingress, my use of Google+ has been picking up and we'll see what the latest changes result in. I've also made copious use of Circles to organizes things, so, when I try to share a picture, I'm given about sixty different choices of who to share things with on Google+ as well as one for Twitter, a couple for Facebook, and a few for random other apps that I've been testing.
Ideally, when I select share, I should be able to select the platform next, and then within the platform be able to select the specifics for the Platform. For example, tap on the picture, and get the Share or Delete option. Tap on Share, and get Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Path or Google+. Tap on Google Plus and then get my sixty choices.
On top of that, ever since Google+ came out, I have been calling for hierarchical circles. I have circles for Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, and a few other states. Within Connecticut, I have circles for Woodbridge, New Haven, and a couple other towns. It would be nice if I could set up Woodbridge as a subset of Connecticut. If I add someone to Woodbridge, I also want them in my Connecticut circle.
This could also be used to help people with lots of circles organize them better. For example, my circle hierarchy might be something like Locations, and Topics. Within Locations, I would have Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, etc. Within Connecticut, I would have Woodbridge, New Haven, etc. Within Topics, I would have technology, healthcare, games, and others. Within technology, I would have Glass, Ingress, Drupal and so on.
To share a picture with just my friends in Woodbridge, I'd tap on Share, Google+, Location, Connecticut, Woodbridge. Yes, that would be five taps, but would be much easier than scrolling back and forth amount over sixty different cards. Glass could be configured to make hierarchical selections an option for those people with much smaller numbers of circles.
In terms of getting the news on Glass, there is plenty to work with. For me, the high priority tweets, direct messages and Gmail messages seem about right for me. CNN news is pretty good. It comes up with a picture and a headline. If I drill down, I can share the story. The New York Times does not fair as well. They take up most of their screen with their logo, and only have small pictures and no text about the stories. When you drill down, I've not been able to find an option to share the stories. Generally speaking, I don't look at the Times on Glass and I'm thinking of removing them from my timeline.
As a camera, I'm getting to like Glass, but have some concerns. I'm never sure exactly what I'm aiming at, so sometimes my pictures come out off center. Mostly, however, I like the way photography works, especially being able to hit the shutter button, and tap on the side of my glass a couple times to get a pictures online.
A friend has gotten Glass and is apparently considering returning it. It doesn't do much that you can't already do with a cellphone. I'd take that a bit further. Everything I can do with Glass, I can do much better with a laptop and a DSLR. I just can't do it as quickly, easily, or seamlessly.
In terms of my use of Glass and Social Media yesterday, several photos I shared were retweeted. One person asked if my photo of Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman is the first portrait of a Lt. Gov. that has been shared via Glass. So far, I haven't found any others.
That's my Glass and Social Media recap for right now. What are you finding?
#Glass Discussions
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 07/11/2013 - 06:30Glass Discussions
I'm active in several discussions about Glass online and recently a couple questions came up where I shared fairly long comments. To try and keep together some of what I'm writing about Glass in one place, I'm adding them here.
The first question was from a UK firm that asked where people saw Glass going in healthcare.
I wrote:
I work for a Community Health Center in the United States and have recently gotten Google Glass. We've been having lots of discussions about how we hope to use Google Glass.
Enhancing our Telemedicine program
(See http://quality.chc1.com/echo/ for more information about our Telemedicine program)Making our EHRs available to our medical providers via Glass, including improved ways to do screenings and enter information into our EHR system.
Using Glass as an advocacy tool to help people recognize the social determinants of health around them.
The second question asked what markets were likely to be largest for Glass, did people think it would be law enforcement? I replied:
My father-in-law is a retired Federal agent. He is very excited about Glass from a law enforcement perspective. I work in health care, and I'm very excited about it from that perspective. Friends work in marketing and creative services and are very excited about it from that angle.
I think it is way to early to try and guess which market will be biggest. If I were guessing, I might go with health care, because it is such a large market. As a nation we spend a lot more on health care than we do on law enforcement, unless you include the full defense budget.
I also think it is useful to look beyond the current Glass prototype. Where do you see this going? I tend to think of Glass in terms of wearable computing. If we add devices like Fitbit and Pebbles into the same class and ask where this class of devices is going, the question gets even more interesting.
To sum it up, I'd take an old saying and twist it around for Glass, Follow your interests and the market will follow.
What are your thoughts?
Glass as Sensor
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 07/06/2013 - 23:02Yesterday, I blogged about my plans to get together with a friend to talk about Glass development. I went on to share some initial thoughts, which mostly revolved around Glass as a device used to retrieve information. Yet much of today's discussion focused on a different aspect of Glass, Glass as a sensor, used to transmit information.
I touch on the Glass as sensor a little bit, at the end of yesterday's blog post, when I talked about using it in fitness, along the lines of Fitbit. Yet my friend, an MIT engineering graduate, and son of a retired MIT professor, with strong ties back to his alma mater encouraged me to think more about Glass as sensor.
In the past, we had worked together on complex event processing projects and developed code for analyzing complex data using Matlab. We talked a lot about various sensor related projects at MIT, so this shift of discussion wasn't a surprise.
What information is Glass capable of gathering right now? Images. Sounds. Location. Can it gather fine motions? Temperature? Other data? What might one be able to do if one could take this information and use it to trigger events?
How can this information be accessed? It looks like location information can be subscribed to with the Mirror API, but other information may need some sort of special Android App for Glass to be developed.
So, I'm starting to explore a little bit more working with the Mirror Api. I've sent messages to my Google Glass from the sample apps as well as from the playground. Next step will be to create something on my server.
Now, I've spoken with a few different people about developing for Glass. It will be interesting to see who comes up with what.
Thinking about Glass Development
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 07/05/2013 - 02:00This weekend, I'm getting together with a long time friend and software developer with whom I've worked on many interesting projects. We'll spend some time thinking and talking about what could be done using Google Glass.
I've commented to people that Glass is still a prototype and there isn't a lot out there for it yet. You can send pictures and videos to Google+ Twitter, Facebook, Evernote and probably a few other locations. You can get limited notifications from Twitter, Gmail, CNN and the New York Times. You can search information and get directions. I did find a fitness app being developed which I tested once and should test more when I get a chance.
Currently, I've been using an app called FieldTrip on my Android phone. When I am near a location of interest, a message pops up on the phone about the location. This would be a nice app on Glass, especially if you could select different topics your interested in having pop up. My understanding is that Ingress uses the FieldTrip framework, so getting Glass to send me a pop up message when I'm near an Ingress Portal would be very nice. Adding filters, so it would only pop up if the portal was a certain level or controlled by a certain faction would also be nice. Advanced features might be to look for specific portal owners, mods, etc., sort of like some of the stuff in Ingress Intel Total Conversion.
There is a development platform, which on first glance appears somewhat limited, but has potential. One of the things I'm particularly interested in building frameworks. I've worked a lot in Drupal over the years, so I'm interested in a Drupal module that would allow for the easy access of nodes via Glass. I'm also interested in some sort of Wiki for Glass. At work, we use Microsoft's Sharepoint as well as Microsoft's Analysis Services, Cubes. A framework for accessing Sharepoint or Cubes would also be very nice.
Making it so the Drupal nodes, the Wiki entries or Sharepoint pages could be geotagged and pop up in a FieldTrip like App would be really nice. Ideally, a FieldTrip app, or something related, which could pop up messages from any selected set of sources would be particularly cool. For work, my interest in data in the cube is not particularly geocoded. However, I did some experimenting with PostGIS a while ago and having a Postgres, or other database that could have geocoded data and pop up messages from that data could be very interesting. For example, MySQL with OpenGIS extensions support a distance calculations. For a starting point on this, I looked at New UDF for MySQL 5.1 provides GIS functions distance_sphere() and distance_spheroid()
Imagine census data, population health data, or health disparity data in a geocoded database. When you enter an area where some data point meets a certain criteria, a popup shows up on Glass.
"Woodbridge, CT: Zip 06525, 2010 Population 8,990 41.9% Graduate or Professional Degree, 22.4% Italien"
For that matter, a Fact Finder Google Glass App would be very interesting.
I suspect a lot of this stuff would be fairly easy to develop using the existing Mirror API. As an aside, I should really spend a little time getting up to speed in Go and Google's App Engine.
However, there are lots of other aspects of Glass that I'd love to see developed, which probably go beyond what you can do with the Mirror API. I don't know how much computing power is available on Glass, but I'd be very interested in seeing if Glass could do Eulerian Video Magnification. The health care applications would be fascinating.
I also like to think of Glass in terms of the larger set of technologies I'll refer to as wearable computing. I include things like the Pebble Watch and Fitbit. Imagine the capabilities of Glass, Pebble, and Fitbit combined into one device. You could go for a run, see your course, distance, speed and splits. You could add in information, like for a race course, how far you are to the next water stop, or how your doing against other people using the same device. It could monitor your heartbeat, perhaps even your blood oxygen levels, and give you warnings if you are over exerting yourself, or perhaps encouragement to push harder if you aren't exerting yourself as much as you should.
There's plenty more to think about for Glass Development, but these are a few of my starting interests. What do you think?
Glass Log - Day Thirteen
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 06/26/2013 - 21:12On Friday, June 14th, I went into New York City and to pick up Google Glass. It was a quick, uneventful trip. The Glass office on the eighth floor of Chelsea Markets had all the feel of a trendy New York City creative space sparsely decorated with tall ceilings a large windows looking out over the meat packing district.
After picking up Google Glass, I stopped by at the Apple Store next door. One of the sales people asked a bit about glass and we talked about the prospects for it. I then head dinner with two of my co-workers as we discussed how we hope to use Glass at work.
My initial reactions is that it reminded me of when I picked up an Apple Newton twenty years ago. For those who don't remember the Apple Newton, it was a handheld device, the precursor to the personal digital assistant and ultimately the smartphone. It is probably only a small number of older early adopting geeks that remember the Apple Newton, and I wouldn't be surprised that Glass will be remembered in the same way two decades hence.
Most people I've met have been fascinated by Glass, though some express concern about privacy. One person tweeted, "If you're wearing Glass, you've turned yourself into a sense organ for a corporate being. Not even a metaphor, that's the real situation."
I responded, "I, for one, welcome our new #glass providing overlords." I'll the discussions of the new form of the social contract in the digital world for a later time. I believe there is value to Glass if you use it with your eyes wide open.
Over on Facebook and Google+ there has been more of the discussion about facial recognition. Personally, I would be a big fan of facial recognition on Glass, even if it were only opt-in. If I see one of my thousands of friends, followers, or connections from Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter, I'd love to be reminded of who they are and how I know them.
The facial recognition would also be great for a politicians. Imagine working a crowd and being able to tell if the person you are speaking with has written to your office about an issue, has donated or volunteered for your campaign, or other information like that.
By the time I got on the train home, that first day, the battery had died. After trying to recharge it, I found Glass would not start back up. I spent much of Saturday talking on the phone with folks at Google, trying to find ways to restart Glass. By Monday, the decision was to RMA it. Now came the issue of how to do this. Normally, they ask people to return to where they got Google Glass and swap it. It is about a two and a half hour trip if I drive into the city, longer, but more comfortable, if I take the train. So, we explored other ways to do the exchange.
For people that live a long distance from a Google Glass store, they can get a new pair shipped, and then return their broken pair. All they need to do is allow Google to put a hold for $1,500 on their personal credit card. I don't have that sort of money to spare, and they wouldn't take a hold on a corporate card, so on Tuesday, I headed back into New York to get a new pair.
This pair has worked much better. I've taken pictures and videos, I've gotten information via Google Now, the New York Times, CNN, Twitter, and email. I've started to explore the development environment.
I recently received a survey from Google about how I use and like glass. As a wearable communications device, I really like it. The sound quality is not all that good for doing phone calls, or listening to information, but it is good enough to get alerts. The screen is okay, but I worry that if I used it a lot, I might get eye strain.
That said, when someone else isn't borrowing Google Glass, which happens a lot, I wear it almost all the time.
What will the replacement for Google Glass look like? Will it include other health monitoring tools like pulse, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels, etc, combining the best aspects of other wearable input devices, like Fitbit? Will it become smaller and even less noticeable?
I'll keep experimenting with Google Glass and talking with others doing the same. What do you think?
