I HAVE TO SAY, AS A RABID GOOGLE FANBOY,…

I have to say, as a rabid Google fanboy, that I was rather disappointed with the Glass demo today at #io12 .

First of all, we only saw pictures. Sorry, but in the age of ubiquitous smart phones, I’m not all that impressed when a small device can take a picture. Hands-free doesn’t quite wow me as much as they think it should. Hands free is certainly not worth $1500.

Second, am I supposed to believe that it will ever be possible to have a flawless high-bandwidth Wifi connection from a mile in the air? Whatever tech they were using to pull it off, it’s tech that I’ll never have access to as a consumer, and that completely took the wind out of my sails. I don’t want to see how billionaires at play will use the hardware, I want to know how it will change my life.

If you want to impress me, +Project Glass, you need to show me the interface and the overlay. This is an augmented reality device, yet apparently your pitch involves demonstrating just how little it will actually augment your reality. “Glass- the tech so advanced it doesn’t do anything at all!” Sorry, +Google, but I want your products to make me into a cyborg. Getting the tech out of the way defeats that purpose. The pictures-and-nothing-else demo for Glass wasn’t just counter-intuitive, it runs contrary to the very nature of the device they’ve designed. This makes me worries that Glass is so far ahead of its time that Google doesn’t actually know what it’s doing.

My big worry is that if Google fails with this device, it will set the augmented reality movement back a decade by scaring off investors in similar tech. That would make me very sad.

This is tech that will change the world, and we need the change badly. Please, Google, don’t mess it up.

[Posted this comment in +Tim O’Reilly‘s thread, so naturally it got buried. Reposting here for posterity.]