I stumbled on a nice info graphic explaining how the Google glasses work and I would like to share it adding some considerations.

Google has announced the price: 1,500$. Not cheap in terms of mass market, amazingly chip in terms of technology.

More than the price, however, the real issue is the “wearability” of the glasses. And this goes beyond the feeling of wearing glasses (they can be worn also over normal glasses). How does it feel to have an overlaid image on reality?

Can Google glasses, or copycats, become a normal apparel people wear or will they remain a gadget? This, I think is the real question. In the second case we will see several, even many of them, but they won’t change our life. In the first case they will become part of our daily life and indeed will change our relation with the world.

Just at the turn of the century, as the Internet bubble was expanding, a start up came up with the idea of coupling odors with images displayed on the screen. They created a device that could plug in into a USB port of the computer and that, like a printer, had a number of cartridges each with a specific aroma. By combining them upon reception of a request it delivered a certain aroma.

Does it smell good?

They did not succeed. The result, I was told, was not as expected from a perceptual point of view. The aroma lingered in the ambient and mixed one another. The cost was also significant and there were too few information provider ready to provide the instruction to the device about when and what to spray in the ambient.

A few years ago the idea was tried out in some cinemas, under the name “Smell-o-vision”. It really remained limited to a few places and very few movies, more demos than a real application.

Now, at the University  of Agriculture and Technology in Japan a team of researchers have created a screen with the possibility to create a specific aroma, like coffee, and to make it feel as if it is coming from a specific area on the screen. So the idea is that you are shown a coffee cup in the upper left corner of the screen and from there comes a whiff of coffee aroma to hit your nose!

To do this they have inserted on the four corners of the screen tiny holes from where a stream of aroma can be emitted. By varying the intensity of the stream they are able to localize the sensation to a specific part of the screen.

The odors are created by vaporizing special pellets that produce the desired scent. So far the system can only manage one scent at a time but the goal is to be able to recreate a variety of aromas.

I am still doubtful that such a system may become a market darling. Our sensation of smell, although very crude in comparison to the one of our dog, is quite complex at the perception level and the feeling generated by an odor depends on the whole context. What you perceive as a wonderful “see smell” when walking on a beach is perceived as a rotten odor if you where to smell it as you walk on a trail in the countryside…

Hence recreating the sensation of an odor goes far beyond replicating the odor molecules…

Anyhow, it shows that researchers keep exploring many ways to make our virtual interaction closer to reality.

Once in a while you stumble upon a piece of text that you wrote, in your mind, a few years earlier and it feels good to see your thoughts in print.

Hypercities let you learn the past from what you see around you.

This is the case when I read yesterday this article dealing with the Future of Education.

The author reflects on the fact that the MOOCs, the new wave of using on line courses to learn, are just the same classroom we have been used to in the past. The only difference is that rather than going to a brick and mortar classroom you can stay home and follow the lessons.

I don’t think this is completely true, as an example you are completely free to roam in the cyberspace and get much more info, and compare it, than it ever was the case in a classroom.  However, there is quite some truth into that view.

The author then goes on considering how technology could reinvent learning. What if, and this is what brought me back to the study we did at the Future Centre few years ago, you use your cell phone, or whatever can connect the real world around you to the virtual one on the Web? You would be looking at a cityscape and you will get views on what that city was, and how it changed. You might even see, and hear, people talking in 1789 in the street of Paris during that faithful July in front of the Bastille. And one can imagine that what one person sees might be different from what another person may see at that same location, depending on his interest and “major”.
The question, is not technology: we know we can do that today and more so in the future. The question is the effectiveness of learning using this approach. Here I am no expert, but I have to say that I can easily see that this way of learning may very well flank the traditional one and bring several benefits.

We are seeing a number of projects that are leveraging on cell phones and use augmented reality as a way to deliver information, possibly customising it to the viewer.

Whether you agree or not, something is changing and reading that article surely makes you think.

Google has announced the availability of their glasses to people wising to develop applications. If you are based in the US you can send them a request along with 1,500$, as deposit, indicating what kind of apps you wish to develop. Once approved you’ll get the glasses and within 6 months you should show them your app. If turns up as you promised they will give you back 1,300$ and you can keep the glasses.

We can expect many people starting to work with them and I wonder what kind of apps they are thinking about. Clearly most will be along the line of augmented reality.

But what if, and no if I guess, somebody will develop a very simple app that just records what is going on as you walk around, and what if many people will be using it?

We will be living in an ambient where all our whereabouts are recorded, like having millions of security cameras with the twist that the recording are no longer kept private.

One person wearing the glasses may of course use this app to record her own life, a sort of myLifebits -remember the project? – but at the same time having thousands of people in your area recording “their” life bits will end up in having “your” life bits recorded as well.

And who is to stop these thousands people in publishing “their” life bits on Facebook, along with “ours”? And who can say that somebody will not develop an app to scavenge the web to collect our life bits?

Privacy is going to become very difficult to control….

Look at the glasses, not at the lady….

Vuzix has announced an electronic pair of glasses (that is, actually, as shown in the photo on the left, a monocle…) to be available on the market next year, to compete with the also announced Google Glasses.

The monocle is able to show an image that is perceived equivalent to the one you would see on a smart phone 4″ screen seen at 14″ distance in the 16×9 size factor.

The information to be displayed arrives from a smart phone connected via BlueTooth. It is not known, at this time, what would be the life of the battery …

Clearly this can be a factor in the usability but at the same time I feel that I personally would not like to have a continuous artificial  image overlapping on the reality I see. Hence, I can assume that this device will be used only once in a while thus decreasing the need for power. In other words, the power issue is not likely to be a game breaker. What is far more important is the seamless perception that can be provided.

Ideally, this kind of devices should disappear from our conscious perception, in the same way that the earbuds connected to the cell phone have. So far, devices providing an augmented reality have either been cumbersome (and you would never move around carrying them) or gadget like, so that after a short while one stops using it.

I feel it will still take some time before we will have this kind of glasses becoming as popular as the earbuds we’ve accustomed to.

Have ou ever used your index finger to point at something and asked: What’s that?

Well, this is what has probably motivated a group of MIT researchers to use an (augmented) index finger to get information about the world around us.

As you can see in the photo on the left, they have developed a sort of ring to wear on your index finger. You point your finger at an object and the camera embedded in the ring transmit the image to a smartphone in you pocket where it gets identified. Through an Internet connection you can get information associated to that object, possibly contextualised to your experience.

It is really moving in the direction of the Internet WITH Things, where every object will become part of the Internet and we will be able to interact with each of them.

Clearly, this gadget looks cumbersome, although it was impossible to imagine just 20 years ago that one would be able to have a videocamera and a radio transmitter embedded in a ring, but we know that in a few years it will shrink to become almost invisible. And, besides, we will be wearing Google Goggles in two years time, probably supporting this same feature through a compass and an accelerometer embedded…

Researchers have found various ways to simulate the sensation of touch (haptic interfaces). Now they have gone a step further by finding a way to provide a different touch sensation.

This has been demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2012 by Disney researchers who have found a way to trick our touch by circulating a weak electric current through our body as our fingers touch an object.

The physical principles is to send an oscillating current (at high frequencies currents mov on our skin, not inside our body) that interacts with the object surface (the object has to be connected to the same computer generating the current in your body) and creates the artificial sensation.

In the future, I can imagine, we can touch a teapot and feel it wet if it contains tea inside, dry if it is empty… (you can also imagine touching your car near the gasoline tank and get this kind of “touch signal”).

It is yet another way to provide a sort of augmented reality!

Graphic image used in the Technology Review article

This is what a Technology Review article is reporting! After several years of progress in both devices and software, several attempts in marketing applications we are now seeing a number of practical applications targeting the mass  market.

Augmented reality started several years ago, over 15 years ago to be exact, as a way to help professionals in tough situations, be that an airplane engine repair in some remote location with AR providing assistance to the local engineer, or as an help to a surgeon during surgery. In 2009 the first mass market apps (Yelp, Layar…) to float information on the images captured by a smartphone camera. Interesting the one that allowed you to translate road signs on the move just by pointing your phone camera to the sentence (Word Lens).

More recently, thanks to more powerful smart phones and to better wireless connectivity, apps have begun to exploit image recognition capabilities and also to share information with other phones. Crowd Optics, as an example, has shown a way to look with your cell phone at a distant part of a NASCAR racing circuit to get photos taken by people in that part of the circuit, like having a personal cameraman at your fingertips to bring in images of those parts of the circuit you cannot see from your location.

This and other examples are provided in the linked article on Technology Review.

What I like to point out, though, is that all these steps improving augmented reality through a cell phones are but the beginning of the Internet WITH Things!

We will get used to expect that any “thing” around us is loaded with information and services, and that we can get at those just by pointing our smart phones to it. And, of course, this is just the beginning. Other ways to support interaction will be wearing glasses that embeds video display capabilities (Google glasses?) and screens embedded in the Thing itself.

More down the lane we (you) might have a chip embedded in the retina… a bit scaring though.

A group of Israeli students have created a video to represent what Augmented reality (AR) can mean once it becomes pervasive. I don’t like it, not the video, the potential change in life.

The idea is that AR couple with some form of advanced, seamless, visual interface to the internet would be able to provide us with immediate information on who is in front of us and to double check whatever is being said.

This, of course requires the availability of the seamless visual interface and one step in that direction might be Google glasses, expected to hit the market in 2014. And it requires the availability of personal information.

Now, the former is still a few years away, particularly the idea represented in the video involving contact lenses doubling up as screens (although there are already prototype contact lenses doing just that), but the latter is already available.

The personal information implicitly revealed on Facebook is already providing a probably too much detailed picture of ourselves, something we may regret in several circumstances. And this is something we seldom think about, particularly the younger generation.

Looking at the clip prepared by the Israeli students may serve as a warning bell for today, not just as a scaring view of tomorrow.

[vimeo 46304267]

Not long ago Google announced new glasses for augmented reality: you look at the world and information is overlaid on the objects you are seeing.

Indeed, at this point it is just a (small) step to imagine that through the glasses part of this information may be used to clarify somebody’ speech, like it my be useful if that somebody is speaking a foreign language.

Translation appears as overlaid text

This is what Will Powell though and set up to do.

He has assembled a system consisting of a computer, a speech recognition software and a real time translator coupled with a pair of glasses that can display the translated sentences as subtitles…

The idea is that you just wear the glasses as you are talking to someone. A microphone embedded in the glasses captures the voice of the person who is talking to you and a computer translates it and the translation appears as a floating text in front of your eyes, like a prompt.

As you can see in the clip below, the system is quite bulky and it won’t be practical to use. But as it happens with all electronic components it just take a little time (and a good market) to have them shrinking to the point the basically disappear and become embedded.

Hence, I can imagine a real pair of normal looking glasses providing this type of service in just 2 to three years.