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If Google wanted to sell it to the world, they should have first made it without the camera. Later on when people are comfortable with the form factor: add the camera.

This is how we have ended up with mobile phones with cameras that nobody seems to mind about. Phones only got cameras halfway through their life. By then, it was too late to stop.



I think cameras in phones had a lot to do with the limitations of the tech. Even so, it's a conscious action to hold your phone and take a photo, and while there's plenty of idiots on Reddit that don't care, it's not socially acceptable to take photos of strangers without permission. Everytime I've spoken to someone wearing Glass, I was so paranoid that a photo of my mouth in the wrong pose would be used for someone's karma.


It's still not socially acceptable to take photos, but it's a lot more acceptable to carry a camera around with you.

What percentage of drug deals do you estimate both buyer and seller are carrying a phone with a camera? 70%? 90%?

I laugh when I imagine how many movie plots are broken now that everybody has an audio recording device in their pocket.


Not only the actual inclusion of the camera itself, they would have marketed this way different, too.

Instead of marketing the benefit of HUD form factor, they have mainly shown off the device as a photo taking device. I remember when it was first appeared at I/O, their marketing video was mostly, if not only, about taking photo and video.

Edit: Fixed bad sentence break.


Completely. I hadn't thought about the camera-phone analogy but you're absolutely right. There were a few years there of hand-wringing over th new ability of snapping photos in locker rooms and people filming concerts.

I think the screens will lead the way. Seems "the screen" will migrate from the phone to the watch, and maybe then to glasses. Apple's move here seems smart.

Google glass jumped the gun, going after what was possible over what society was ready for.


Allowing customers to look like they are surveilling other people was a radically Orwellian-seeming move. It amazes me that Google was OK with this from the beginning.


It amazes me that people still worry about this when humans already walk around with two cameras connected to better resolution and light-level management hardware than the glass camera embedded in their skulls, and the input of those cameras, converted to audio, is generally admissible in all courts of law.


It may be sharable through speech, but a picture is worth a thousand words. Even the most detailed prose leaves much to the imagination. I don't think I'd even care if someone told a story about accidentally seeing me naked, but I'd be pretty pissed off if they were sharing a video.


What if they had photographic memory and a lot of drawing skills and were able to produce a drawing of you naked that was indistinguishable from a photo? Should we ostracize those people from society?


It is not true that we have two cameras in our eyes.

We do have visual sense. Completely different. The output of the system is a perception, an interpretation of reality.

Most of what you are seeing right now is going to be forgotten just in seconds. You only leave what holds your attention.

Cameras store the raw content of what they point to. That is gigabytes of information.

The speech information is barely kilobytes of information.


You do know how google figures out what ads to show people? They collect everything they can about you :)




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