URL: https://creativegood.com/blog/the-google-glass-feature-no-one-is-talking-about/
Originally published in 2013, super relevant today since Meta's been working on their own glasses in partnership with Ray Ban. Good for historical context, and how these "smart glasses" have been constantly criticized for not respecting any sense of individual privacy for more than a decade now.
Today, finally, that future has arrived: a major company offering the ability to record your life, store it, and share it - all with a simple voice command.
The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience - not of the user, but of everyone other than the user. A tweet by David Yee introduces it well:
There is a kid wearing Google Glasses at this restaurant which, until just now, used to be my favorite spot.
The key experiential question of Google Glass isn't what it's like to wear them, it's what it's like to be around someone else who's wearing them. I'll give an easy example. Your one-on-one conversation with someone wearing Google Glass is likely to be annoying, because you'll suspect that you don't have their undivided attention. And you can't comfortably ask them to take the glasses off (especially when, inevitably, the device is integrated into prescription lenses). Finally - here's where the problems really start - you don't know if they're taking a video of you.
And that, my friends, is the experience that Google Glass creates. That is the experience we should be thinking about. The most important Google Glass experience is not the user experience - it's the experience of everyone else. The experience of being a citizen, in public, is about to change.