Re:Google Glass sales halted
by krapp on Thursday January 15, 2015 @09:54PM
(#8897021)
I think it's not so much even knowing there's a camera, but knowing there's a camera which might be on and streaming to the cloud at all times. Yes, I know there's a little light. No, no one is going to trust it.
There aren't a lot of random spy shops down the corner, and not a lot of random stalkers sneaking upskirts of people on escalators with pen cameras hidden in their shoes.
You could make the argument that cellphones are far more powerful as tools for surveillance (and they certainly are in regards to surveilling their owners) than Glass would have been capable of. And you would have a point - for maybe the first couple of generations, and before there were several million Glasses in the wild. At that point, being a random stalker becomes socially acceptable, and being randomly stalked becomes unavoidable.
Consumer AR isn't entirely dead. I've seen it on portable game consoles. But Google's attempt to literally shove it into people's faces demonstrates that there are more than technical hurdles to overcome.
There aren't a lot of random spy shops down the corner, and not a lot of random stalkers sneaking upskirts of people on escalators with pen cameras hidden in their shoes.
You could make the argument that cellphones are far more powerful as tools for surveillance (and they certainly are in regards to surveilling their owners) than Glass would have been capable of. And you would have a point - for maybe the first couple of generations, and before there were several million Glasses in the wild. At that point, being a random stalker becomes socially acceptable, and being randomly stalked becomes unavoidable.
Consumer AR isn't entirely dead. I've seen it on portable game consoles. But Google's attempt to literally shove it into people's faces demonstrates that there are more than technical hurdles to overcome.