[LINK] First Impressions of Wearing Google Glass

[Tom Worthington]

The Wearables Canberra Group had three Google Glass head mounted display 
devices available to try at the Entry 29 Co-working Space in Canberra 
last night.

While I was not impressed by the look of Google Glass, the experience of 
wearing the unit was a pleasant surprise. Other head mounted displays I 
have tried took a lot of adjustment and were never really comfortable. I 
have multi-focal glasses which makes fitting a unit and seeing a clear 
image in a display difficult. In contrast, Google Glass went on with no 
problems and I could immediately see a small clear screen apparently 
floating in front of my face to the right.

While the unit is low resolution (640×360 pixels) it was a noticeably 
less pixelated screen than other displays I have tried. Text was clearly 
readable. It was a little distracting looking at someone close up, with 
the display obscuring part of the view (and I wondered why white text on 
a black background was not used, rather than black on white).

The touch pad built into the side of the unit worked, but was 
distracting to use (you raise your hand to the side of your head and 
swipe back and forth, up and down).  Also the voice commands made me 
feel a little silly.

Overall the unit worked much better than I was expecting, but is still a 
solution looking for a problem and very much a prototype. What might 
make more sense is a slimmer head mounted display which is a Bluetooth 
peripheral for a smart phone. The headset could have a camera, 
microphone and speaker, but would use the phone's touch screen and 
processing.

A much simpler, but almost as useful, device could omit the screen and 
instead use just audio. Omitting the screen would make the headset far 
less bulky, greatly extend the battery life and remove many of the 
social and safety issues.

More at: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2014/03/wearable-technology-in-canberra.html


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/