Is Google Glass quickly falling into the waste bin of seemingly great but ultimately futile ideas?
That’s the view from PC Magazine UK, which likens Glass, and it’s seeming drift toward irrelevance, to buzzword trends of technology and the internet of yore, including VCRPlus and “the once ubiquitous ‘keyword’ employed by AOL.”
The backlash that Glass felt was high-profile (especially here in Google’s backyard) and, in a lot of ways, understandable – people simply don’t like, appreciate, or are outright hostile to the idea that their every move and every word are being recorded and transmitted to some unsecured cloud controlled by Google. The difference is important, PC Magazine writer John Dvorka notes – while other technologies faded away because they were no longer useful, Glass’s issues lay with the public perception.
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“It wasn’t outliving its usefulness like VCRPlus and keywords; it was negative social pressure that made them go,” Dvorka writes, predicting that Glass will be shutdown within a year.
Importantly, he correctly notes:
“In some ways this is a shame since a number of Google Glass applications still being developed could be useful for customer service and other business applications. Now they’ll probably never see the light.”
One area that became obvious – and far less socially awkward – is healthcare. Glass has shown usefulness in aiding surgeons and communication between providers and ambulances, adding another tool in the growing field of medicine, among dozens of other potential applications.
Just this past September, Pristine, which specializes in developing wearable healthcare technology, raised $5.4 million to develop Glass into a “more manageable, hands-free approach to telemedicine,” esteemed MedCity News colleague Stephanie Baum reported.
And MedGift, a project at Switzerland’s Institute of Information Systems, shows medics using Glass to stream video of a patient while en route to be treated by a physician, who is then better prepared when the patient arrives.
There are literally dozens of potential applications within healthcare. It’s arguably too soon to say which ones will really stick and which ones, like Glass itself, are hype. Nevertheless, that the healthcare world is more willing to embrace Glass than the general public is an interesting role reversal: the American healthcare system traditionally has embraced consumer technologies at a far slower clip than the average consumer.
So who’s to blame? Dvorka posits that the problem resides with Google’s naiveté toward the public-at-large. Some might say arrogance.
“The company has exhibited a very cavalier attitude towards individual privacy,” Dvorka says.
It’s certainly a fair point and a widely held sentiment among those who view Glass with a disdainful eye. The writer goes on to predict that, in the near future, Google will abandon Glass due to slumping interest.
But if healthcare is any guide, perhaps it’s possible for Google to refocus the product toward those who want to work with Glass versus cavalierly trying to convince all consumers to walk around like robots recording conversations in bars and dismissing critics as mere Luddites. It’s one thing for a person in an ambulance to connect with an ER physician – that has huge potential benefit; it’s entirely another to wonder if that shot of Jameson you take at happy hour is on full public display because of some socially awkward cyborg.
“With security cameras everywhere combined with unapologetic government surveillance of law-abiding citizens, adding Glass is just too much. They turned out to be a straw the broke the back of the privacy camel’s back. … No one needs friends acting as if they were agents of the government, perhaps streaming your image and words directly to the cloud during what should be casual conversation.”
It’s perhaps time that Google and other tech behemoths wake up to this basic fact. To be fair, it’s not just Google; it’s just that Glass was and continues to be literally the most visible intrusion – real or perceived – into peoples’ personal lives.
The technology itself is not the problem; the application and tone-deaf roll out is what will doom Glass, and that would be a shame given that there is some promise.
