Like many other people my first introduction to Glass was the YouTube video that announced the project to the world. The video followed a guy going about his day to day life with Glass. My vision of the future always involved some sort of augmented reality, video games style. It just seemed obvious to me that a Head-up Display (HUD) is the most unobtrusive way to deliver information. The Glass video showed the bloke being told that his subway was closed and here are alternate walking directions. He didn’t need to first take out a buzzing smartphone in order to learn about this. Instead, it was just there in his line of sight. If all alerts required us to disengage from what we were doing and physically take out an object, I’m sure we would be more likely to ignore the buzzing. Technology has yet to progress to the point where it knows us well enough to only deliver the important information. Currently, smartphones just deliver us everything that is happening. With augmented reality there is a much lower barrier to delivering information. However, the final iteration of Glass would turn out to be much more different from that video.

The Glass of today has the display just above our line of sight. The argument I made about technology not yet being able to know what is most important for the user still applies. Google cannot yet take that gamble of real augmented reality for several reasons. If Glass were in our line of sight all the time and buzzed us with everything, people would just be put off by it. Secondarily and back to my visions of the future, the displays for augmented reality would just be a piece of thin glass; not a bulky prism. My ideal future would have any pair of glasses be the device through which augmented reality is achieved. Lastly and on a more minor note, eye to eye contact is immensely important for communication. Maintaining it shows respect and interest in the other human being. Google made the right call with Glass wearers still being able to have eye to eye communication.

The video basically fulfilled every wish I had for augmented reality. When I watched that video, I honestly believed the future was here and that it came from the search engine I and the rest of the world use daily.

What was even luckier was how my aspirations were coming true in a relatively short period since I first dreamt it all up.

I wish for everybody that at least one dream comes true sometime during their life. It is truly hard to encapsulate in words or any other medium for that matter dreams coming true. it is a feeling of repeatedly just wanting to shout out ‘yes!” over and over while you carry a gigantic smile on your face. I did both things on that day and that happiness still resonates when I think about Glass. What was even luckier was how my aspirations were coming true in a relatively short period since I first dreamt it all up.