Who would want to live in the Google Glass house?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/google-project-glass-augmented-reality

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When they go on sale in a couple of years, will Google's augmented reality glasses – a slick metal monobrow, with a thumbnail-sized screen hovering above the right eye – turn us all into the kind of person in the saccharine teaser ad that's circulating on the web?

After reluctantly accepting that Project Glass was not one of Google's April Fools' hoaxes (which included Gmail Tap, morse code to replace the qwerty keyboard for "people with fat fingers"), I found it hard to decide what was more disturbing: the AR glasses themselves or the ad's exemplary user. Floating around New York, he is supposed to be an empowered explorer, connected to the wider world with nothing more than a twitch of his head and a friendly yet imperious voice command – but it's actually more like he's suffering from locked-in syndrome. It's no coincidence that the head-first point of view of the ad feels intolerably claustrophobic.

Technically, there is a huge gap between the immersive experience that the video illustrates and the actual capability of AR glasses now or in the near future. But it's the very idealised status of the ad that makes it worth taking seriously. This is how Google expects us to behave, "one day … "

First of all, our protagonist doesn't appear to have to work. Instead he has a mission that day: learn to play the ukulele, like every good hipster should. A reminder appears before his eyes that he has to "see" Jess tonight at 6.30 (the meeting will in fact be mediated by face-mounted webcam). Then a plea arrives from a friend he has apparently been neglecting for quite a while. The reply he dictates – "Meet me in front of Strand Books at 2" – leaves no room for negotiation. He's going to the bookstore anyway, so won't have to take a second out of his busy schedule. The morning routine of AR man apparently does not include reading the news, or indeed sparing a thought for anything outside his (Google) circle. The worst thing that happens to this guy all day is that his subway line isn't running – which he would have found out in reality 10 seconds after his glasses informed him.

He is already living a kind of augmented, extremely privileged reality. What the AR glasses do is eliminate any remaining friction from his world. Friendship, music, graffiti ("Oh cool!" he says before taking a photo with his eyes), and love all become neutered, benign experiences that exist only to serve him. Maybe worst of all, in Google's AR-world, everyone is always extremely, inexplicably relaxed. (Though I swear the friend casts a funny look when they first meet up – noticing these ridiculous things he's wearing on his head.)

As a communique emerging from Google's secret "X" labs, the Project Glass ad must proclaim revolution without feeling in the least bit threatening. Google has nevertheless dared to declare a couple of ideological ambitions. First, "technology should work for you", helping you "explore and share your world". But it's the user who becomes the real slave, surrendering to Google any remaining shreds of intuition and agency. And it's not "your world"; it's the world. Deal with it. Google's second imperative is cool because it's really Zen: these glasses help put you "back in the moment". This is a shockingly Orwellian statement about a device that is essentially a disguise, making it infinitely easier for the user to be outside the moment, at any given moment, without anyone else knowing.

When someone is distracted by their smartphone mid-conversation, it's blatant. With Google Glass the interface – the device itself – starts to become integrated, clumsily, for now, into our person. This may be disturbing on an ethical level – a prosthesis that secretly enhances rather than simply corrects, like, say, spectacles.

But it's also misjudged on a behavioural level. What Google is forgetting is that it's the interface itself that forms the addictive attachment people have to email, Twitter, news, Angry Birds, whatever. Checking our phone requires a distinct and visible physical act, and we like performing this action. The feeling of clutching this small object is just as important as the content we're consuming. Using a phone sends a deliberate and transparent antisocial signal, allowing us to do what we really want to do: not augment reality with layers of redundant information, but escape from reality, if only for a few seconds. Somehow the honesty and liberation of this is much more appealing than becoming an insidiously augmented Superman, just a really nice guy pretending to be "in the moment".

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