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Post Mortem of a failed technology: Google Glass
Abstract
Google glass was supposed to be the future of interaction, designed so people would stop staring at their phones, glass was launched in 2012 as a futuristic gadget during Google's I/O 12. There was a lot of excitement surrounding this new development, but soon more and more issues appeared causing the project to stop in 2015. Wasn't the world ready for google glass? or were a lot of design decisions to blame for the demise of this project?
In this essay I will argue that google glass failed because of a series of poor design decisions paired with an increase of people's interest around privacy issues. Google glass was supposed to become a revolutionary wearable technology that would allow its users to be more present, instead it was seen as "creepy" and '"invasive", prompting even violent situations where Glass wearers were attacked in the streets, and the popularization of the term "glasshole" to refer to people who were not respectful of other's privacy.
In conclusion the team behind Google Glass was trying to create a wearable that would help people stay present in the moment without being distracted by technology, but instead they created a product that did the opposite by becoming distracting not only for the primary users but also for everyone who came in contact with Glass.
Google Glass was a wearable device developed by Google X in 2011; it was unveiled during Google's annual developer conference, Google I/O 2012. The presented prototype was called “Google Glass Explorer Edition”; a wearable metallic frame shaped like glasses that would superimpose important information in front of the wearer’s eye and would be controlled by voice commands, thus replacing the need to look at a smartphone to navigate the Internet.
Glass was introduced in two different ways; first in April 2012 with a prototype video named “Project Glass; One day” which shows the daily tasks of an user persona using the prototype (Google, 2012). Later in June 2012 with a live demo conducted by Google’s co-founder Sergei Brin which included skydivers, mountain bikers and rapellers who demonstrated how the glasses could be used to share live video through the internet (Google Developers, 2012).
The Glass explorer edition was launched in 2013; this edition was only available to Google’s approved “Glass Explorers”, a group of 8000 tech enthusiasts and developers who were invited to buy the $1500 USD glasses to be beta testers of the product (Steeves, 2016). The launch of Google glass generated a lot of expectation between tech enthusiasts and mixed reviews from the technology press, with some praising it as “the next form factor of computing” (Ha, 2012) and others describing the new technology as “creepy” (Arthur, 2012).
Since Glass could only be acquired by invitation Google created a subscription form in April 2014 that allowed anyone to join the explorer program (January 25, 2015). In May of 2014 Sergei Brin affirmed he was not sure Google would be able to have a consumer launch by the end of the year. The project had many setbacks during this period; Developers and users losing interest, private businesses and governments had concerns about the privacy of Glass, and many violent incidents involved explorers being attacked in public (Kerr, 2014). In January 15 2015 Google announced that they would stop the explorers program and instead would focus on their enterprise-edition glasses (Luckerson, 2015).
Google glass was supposed to become a revolutionary wearable technology that would allow its users to be more present, Google designer Babak Praviz explained “We want people to be engaged with the physical world. We want to untether them from the desktops and laptops.” (Levy, 2012). From the beginning, the Glass project was met with controversy, especially around privacy; as early as in 2013 people wondered about the potential privacy violations that could happen with glass’s camera which could be used to broadcast what the wearer was seeing in real time. Journalists discussed the dangers of “pervasive technologies” such as Charles Arthur, who asks “Can a child properly consent to filming or being filmed? Is an adult, who happens to be visible in a camera's peripheral vision in a bar, consenting? And who owns – and what happens to – that data?” (Arthur, 2013) these discussions led to the ban of Glass in many establishments, such as cafés, bars, schools and casinos, because the glasses violated the privacy expectations of people who visited these places (Steeves, 2016).
In interviews with the designers of the Glass project we can see there is a lot of secrecy; from inviting only selected people to buy the glasses, not allowing anyone to use them and not discussing key aspects such as battery life (Stern, 2012). This secrecy made the glasses feel unapproachable because people couldn’t afford to buy them if they weren’t invited, but could be photographed by someone wearing the device at any time without their consent. Babak Parviz, one of the senior designers in the project recognizes that “I have to say that this device is very experimental. It crashes a lot of times, and a lot of the features don’t work. There’s quite a bit of work that we have to do to make this a seamless, enjoyable thing for regular people to wear.” (Levy, 2012). Even from the designers perspective the product wasn’t fully ready for the consumers market.
By 2014 The term “glasshole” started getting popularized to describe Glass users who would record people without permission or would get distracted during conversation while using this technology. Google had to create a set of do’s and don'ts for explorers when interacting with others (Glass-Explorers, n.d). This shows how every new technology comes with new ways of being in the world and new sets of rules for the users and also for the people who indirectly come in contact with said technology, what is considered acceptable with one technology becomes rude with another one.
In conclusion the team behind Google Glass was trying to create a wearable that would help people stay present in the moment without being distracted by technology, but instead they created a product that did the opposite by becoming distracting not only for the primary users but also for everyone who came in contact with Glass. The failure of this technology can be attributed to the following issues: Privacy expectations, the adoption of wearable technologies and marketing.
First, glass had a camera and microphone that could record, take photos and live stream everything the wearer was looking at without anyone noticing, these concerns were never acknowledged by Google, but were discussed by experts who concluded there were many ethical issues surrounding the use of smart glasses (Hofmann, Haustein, & Landeweerd, 2017). Second, Glass as a wearable technology didn’t understand the symbolic aspects of adoption, some users were not attracted to the product because they didn’t want to be seen as “fashion-victims” by adopting this technology too quickly (Arbore, Soscia, & Bagozzi, 2014). And finally marketing; by deciding to launch the product too soon to only a selected group of “explorers” the company made the product seem too exclusive, so regular users lost interest, especially when the first negative reviews of the product started appearing, exposing that the product wasn’t ready for the consumer market (Bliton, 2015).
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