How about wearing a computer on your face? Sounds cool, I guess.
You might have come across the idea a while back in your local video store: wristbands you could talk into, sunglasses with digital readouts on them. Back then it was science fiction, but The Future is here and at an affordable price.
In science fiction, people are pretty keen to wear computers and other gadgets. Once, midway through the great 1990 movie ‘Total Recall’, I noticed a security guard on Mars wearing a familiar device strapped to his wrist. It looked to be a Casio FX-100D calculator - the same model I used for maths in high school.
But what was he using it for? I don’t know, but that’s not really the point. Clearly, the costume department simply wanted something that looked ‘futuristic’; what nobody but a slightly obsessive film nerd would recognise as an ordinary household object. The curious part for me is this: why did he need it strapped to his wrist?
Was his pocket not big enough? Too annoying having to constantly retrieve it from a bag? I guess those options are a little mundane. I think the idea with this sort of thing is to have us sitting here thinking “Wow – that’s just the spaceperson’s mobile phone? And to them that’s just normal!? Maaan they must be so much better than us”.
Imagining that incidental props have some complex practical purpose is part of the sci-fi experience; but how it works or what its purpose might be is secondary to the primary goal of marking out a character as from a world beyond. It’s this same collision of technology and fashion that we find with the current suite of wearable technology. Only here, unlike in science fiction, we know what the purpose is of much of the technology; it’s to retain something sharable from one’s experience.
There are a vast array of wearable gadgets on sale, with varying purposes – some record video, some play it back, some record other data such as GPS coordinates, some project this data to the user as a live feed. Some devices can perform many of these functions, but they all have at least two things in common: they all cost money, and the user risks looking like a dork while using them.
Broadly speaking though, current wearable gadgets fall into two categories – passive (e.g. it records) and active (e.g. it can record and broadcast to you live). Obviously, current mobile phones can perform a huge variety of functions but in my view they are generally carried, not worn, so they’re getting an exemption from this brief musing (look, it would just become too long).
In the passive category sit the highly successful consumer goods like action video cameras (from GoPro, Sony, and a variety of other manufacturers) and activity trackers (e.g. Fitbit). These record video or other data while being worn. They key aspect of these items is that the interaction with them during the experience they record is minimal.
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Want to find out how far you walked today? Just strap on the Fitbit and let it figure it out for you. Want to get an awesome ‘point of view’ recording of your bike ride, snowboard run or abseil? Just stick the camera on, press the button and check out the recording later when you’re done.
At least, that’s how it’s meant to work – but as many photographers are aware, sometimes it’s hard to forget about the camera while you’re doing your thing. The risk of getting distracted during the experience and trying to ‘get the shot’ can easy take your focus away from the raw experience itself, which in high-speed sports like skydiving or BASE jumping can be a mistake with very serious consequences. Regardless of this, the explosion of wearable ‘action cameras’ has come from offering consumers the opportunity to make cinema of their life. At least one company - HEXO+ - is marketing a drone that autonomously follows the user, meaning you can get your awesome ‘me’ footage from above and around, all by yourself. Clearly - showing your friends is of higher importance than having them there helping film you. Perhaps this is what The Future is about, having machines help you broadcast yourself to your friends’ machines, all by yourself.
‘Passive’ wearable recording gadgets allow us to share something of our experience later, without having to rely on tricky things like memory and your mate’s credulity. By contrast, what the ‘active’ wearable gadgets do is attempt to transform the experience itself.
This is particularly evident when it comes to the current rash of products intended to supplement the wearer’s visual field with projected data – notably, Google Glass and other products designed to interact with the user’s visual field. These are not-so-commonly known as OHMDs – Optical Head-Mounted Displays.
According to the internet, Google’s Glass project is in either dead or in transition; the company announced recently that Glass will be withdrawn from sale from January 19, though buzz continues about a next-generation product. With a range of functions including recording video and broadcasting information to the user incorporating GPS locating and other online information, Google promoted Glass as a unique solution to some uniquely modern problems – such as the diminishing number of wild rhinos, life-saving rescues in technically complex environments, or your mother calling while you’re experimenting with fusion cuisine. Essentially, it allows you to read and share information through a pair of glasses, guided by basic touch and voice commands.
This all looks really, really cool, and Google aren’t the only company working on production of a consumer OHMD. Zeal Optics and Recon Instruments partnered to release their first version of the Transcend GPS Goggles in 2010, which tracks GPS data to provide those in high-speed sports live and hands-free data streaming, which is broadcast to the user via a small screen inset in the goggles. For instance, a snowboarder can monitor the speed of their descent while they are in motion, or a wingsuit pilot can see their glide ratio while flying. Another product, Airglass, has been tested and offers to project virtual terrain to wingsuit pilots mid-flight, so they can test their skills high in the sky without running the risks associated with actual terrain flying. Other competitors to Google Glass include Sony’s Attach and the ODG Smart Glasses (which are already being bought by the US military). However, Google Glass is certainly the most well-known of these products, which perhaps explains the amount of criticism it has received.
One thing Glass came under fire for is the possibility of users surreptitiously recording video. The same argument could be made about action cameras – if they weren’t as obvious. I mean most of those cameras look like a big piece of Duplo stuck to a person’s head – not so with Glass. The problem is that a camera built into a pair of glasses is less noticeable than a small camera strapped to one’s head. While very sleek, it is still fairly obviously some sort of computer stuck to the face. It is something obvious that is trying to look like it’s not obvious, which is partly why it attracts attention.
Similar privacy concerns have more recently been raised about the increase in consumer drone photography. Video cameras are increasingly popping up in unexpected places – in the sky, just over there, and on that dude’s face next to you – reality is being harvested for cinema and the cast is not always willing to perform. To help address these concerns Google published a guide on using Glass, helping explain to their users that yes – having a video camera stuck to your face can be of concern to others around you. Nevertheless, barely concealed contempt persists in some quarters for the fashion of the Glass user – which might be less about what the product does than what the user looks like while using it.
Finally, it perturbs me a little that the whole point of these sorts of gadgets is to ‘augment reality’. While they do add something to experience - what it says on the box – I believe all of them suck attention away from the moment at least a little bit. I am absolutely sure that with a pair of glasses that can connect to the internet, record video, tell me my travel route and allow me to share pictures through verbal instructions there is something unthought-of and valuable to society waiting to erupt. However, for this Luddite some of the same old worries persist.
If ‘augmented reality’ sales increase, and these technologies become as ubiquitous in the Future as our smartphones are now, are we really helping ourselves that much more? Or - to paraphrase a line from Total Recall – back on Earth, are we being lobotomised?
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