The Wearables Canberra Group had three Google Glass head mounted display devices available to try at the Entry 29 Co-working Space in Canberra last night.
While I was not impressed by the look of Google Glass, the experience of wearing the unit was a pleasant surprise. Other head mounted displays I have tried took a lot of adjustment and were never really comfortable. I have multi-focal glasses which makes fitting a unit and seeing a clear image in a display difficult. In contrast, Google Glass went on with no problems and I could immediately see a small clear screen apparently floating in front of my face to the right. While the unit is low resolution (640×360 pixels) it was a noticeably less pixelated screen than other displays I have tried. Text was clearly readable. It was a little distracting looking at someone close up, with the display obscuring part of the view (and I wondered why white text on a black background was not used, rather than black on white). The touch pad built into the side of the unit worked, but was distracting to use (you raise your hand to the side of your head and swipe back and forth, up and down). Also the voice commands made me feel a little silly. Overall the unit worked much better than I was expecting, but is still a solution looking for a problem and very much a prototype. What might make more sense is a slimmer head mounted display which is a Bluetooth peripheral for a smart phone. The headset could have a camera, microphone and speaker, but would use the phone's touch screen and processing. A much simpler, but almost as useful, device could omit the screen and instead use just audio. Omitting the screen would make the headset far less bulky, greatly extend the battery life and remove many of the social and safety issues. More at: http://blog.tomw.net.au/2014/03/wearable-technology-in-canberra.html -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
