wearing augmented reality glasses (note: characters are fictional)
Do you think your natural senses are inadequate? Have you ever wished for more information about your surroundings? Augmented reality (AR) glasses could solve your problem. AR refers to the idea of overlapping a computer display on top of your field of view. Last week Google demonstrated its work on this technology, Project Glass, although the focus was on the glasses' camera and not the display. Project Glass is still a few years away from being a consumer product. Right now it seems only good for streaming videos and pictures, and we are told that it has a small computer display. The concept video below shows Google’s idea of how we might one day use such technology, but such versatility could be many years in the making.
Many people use their smartphones to compare prices for products seen in “brick and mortar” stores. This requires a shopper to take the smartphone out of its pocket and either snap a photo or manually search for a product. With AR glasses, one could simply stare at a product for a few seconds, and online prices would be automatically displayed in the shopper's vision. The glasses should make information more natural and personal to access—to the point of forgetting that you are using technology to look up prices. In the eyes of a user, the physical and digital worlds are seamlessly blended to create an information-rich environment.
One major obstacle for this technology is control. How do you communicate with a pair of glasses? The three most likely solutions are voice command, gesture command, and using a smartphone as a remote. It seems natural to build AR glasses like the next generation of Bluetooth headsets—an extension of a smartphone rather than a standalone device. This way many verbal commands could be processed by software like Siri, and a lot of time handling the smartphone would be eliminated. Another method of control is gesture recognition. Much progress has already been made in this field through Microsoft's Kinect and MIT's SixthSense. To take pictures, a user could frame a shot with his/her hands. The AR glasses would recognize the gesture and act accordingly. Pointing at something might initiate search queries. Handshakes could activate some social media function. Sign language could be translated in real time.
Google’s main selling point seems to be that parents will want an unobtrusive way of filming their children. When you photograph your month-old baby with AR glasses, he/she is looking into your eyes, not the camera. Wearing the glasses all day, parents can start recording at a moment's notice. The baby's first words, first steps, and countless other moments would be preserved that might have gone missed. But this accessibility extends beyond parents. Think of YouTube videos. How many more embarrassing moments, personal injuries, and hilarious cat videos will be uploaded when people wear cameras on their heads most of the time. Tutorial videos might also get a boost in quantity with instructors providing a first-person view of what they are doing. AR glasses could also have telepresence applications. Anyone wearing a pair could have a live video stream (as was demonstrated by Google with the skydivers and bicyclists). Concerts, conferences, street performances, movies, and many other events could have countless online viewers seeing through the eyes of one who is physically present.
Google’s Project Glass is loaded with various sensors. It can sense the wearer's global position, direction of view, and angle of view. With so much data ready to be streamed online, Google could create a highly detailed and constantly updated digital model of the world. Nature trails, tour routes, store departments, museums, caves. . . all could be easily mapped and uploaded to Google Earth. Photos could be automatically sent to Street View. Anyone wearing Google glasses could serve as a virtual cartographer for Google Earth. With so much geographical data, people could have GPS guidance for finding their favorite book section, the nearest food stand, or even the nearest restroom.
This summer, there will be laptops for sale that run on Google's Chrome operating system. For five hundred dollars you get a computer that lasts around eight hours per charge, uses up-to-date software, and even has some free 3G access (100MB). With any luck, the new operating system will run much smoother than Windows. The most interesting aspect is in how the laptops function. Most of the data storage and processing does not occur within the laptops themselves, unlike most computers, but on the internet. These “Chromebooks” might just be the way of the future.
As soon as you buy a traditional computer, it begins to depreciate. New, more powerful computers are constantly being put on the market, and products from previous years are rendered obsolete. The same principle applies to virtually all electronics, especially cellphones and cameras. You want the fastest computer available right now, but in a few months' time there will be a new line of even faster ones. What if you only had to buy a new computer every decade to keep up with the times?
The internet is a worldwide network of computers. If you could relegate an individual computer's processing to the many computers of the internet, then that computer would exceed the limitations of its own specifications. The process is analogous to a desktop computer. When you edit a typed essay on a desktop, the text file is stored in the CPU. But you see the file with a monitor, and you edit the file with a keyboard and mouse. With a Chromebook, you may see and edit a file from the laptop itself, but the actual file is stored and processed on Google's servers. This is called “cloud computing.” Because most of the computing performance happens on the internet, you should not need to buy a new Chromebook nearly as often as a conventional laptop.
What's the catch? The obvious weakness of this technology is the internet connection. If you lose your connection, then you do not have access to your files. For people with constant, stable connections, this trade-off could be very acceptable. Another problem is on the servers' end. What if the company hosting your files goes out of business? Or some sort of damage happens to the servers? Then all your files would be lost forever, unless you had a backup hard drive, of course.
Cloud computing might revolutionize the computer industry. Imagine, in the future, buying a laptop for a few hundred dollars, but—because it uses cloud computing—its performance will be on par with conventional laptops that cost over a thousand dollars. You never need to worry about updating your software since it happens automatically. If market growth is manageable, then the computing power should steadily increase as Google updates its servers' hardware. Perhaps for an hourly fee, you can boost your computer's processing speed to that of a supercomputer. As Google increases its data storage capacity, your own allotment grows, too, like with inbox storage on Gmail. That way, you can store more and more data without buying additional hard drives. Data storage and processing might one day be treated similarly as electricity and warehouse space. Computing will be a centralized commodity, and personal computers will be simple interfaces that access that resource from a distance. Cloud computing could also radically change the video game industry. Game consoles currently require expensive processors and graphics cards, but someday they may become slim and cheap interfaces. Imagine just buying a game controller without the console. The controller communicates with your Chromebook which is connected to the internet. Signals from the controller are sent to a gaming computer network, where those signals are interpreted. The game's response is sent back to the computer and displayed on the screen. This all happens so fast that you cannot perceive any delay. Eventually, a Chromebook, controller, and a fast internet connection might be all you need to play video games from any platform. What will that do to the industry? This separation of interface from actual computing may become a growing trend. It is quite probable that we will eventually have low-cost laptops that are constantly connected to cloud networks, making them portable supercomputers.
