My feeling is that this effect might fade away as people become more used to the device. Anyone who wears glasses can tell you that the first time you put them on, the frames are very distracting in your peripheral vision. You become accustomed to them rapidly, however-- within days, the frames are invisible, and you retain this even when you take them off for a while.
A similar phenomenon takes place when driving. Every now and then you realize that you weren't watching the road at all, just driving along automatically with your peripheral vision. And the haptic compass experiments have demonstrated people have the ability to gain an unconscious sense of location from external stimulus.
Obviously something popping up in focus is always going to be distracting, but with a notification icon in the corner of your eye, it's entirely possible that one would grow used to it and stop consciously noticing its appearance-- you'd simply have a somewhat-unconscious "email sense".
And there's no reason that should distract one from what they're doing; when the mail comes to my door, I don't stop whatever I'm doing and go read it. I make a mental note to check the mail when I get a chance, and continue the conversation.
I'm pretty excited about this technology.
The effect of removal from the environment will not fade, but the social ramifications for the user will. People are less pissy now when someone stops to check their phone during a conversation, but that's more due to the expectations of those around them rather than our expanded ability to functionally multitask.
Part of the promise of the information age is general cognizance of the fact that we live in an incomprehensibly vast and complex universe, and that we are only able to perceive the most infinitesimal mote of it during our lives. With the judicious application of technology, we can expand our perceptions many times by accumulating information from different parts of physical space. For thousands of years, it was possible more or less to pretend that there was nothing else in the universe outside this room, and no one else alive but your family; thanks to the internet, that is purely impossible today.
It should not be surprising that this frightens some people.
Technophobes frequently protest that assisted communication can't have the value of face-to-face speech, which is frankly complete horseshit. Most of the in-person conversations that most people have most of the time are more banal and purposeless as the front page of Reddit (or 4chan, depending on your peer group). What is important is the relationships that we have with other people, and I've seen nothing in my experience or the literature to imply that relationships are intrinsically less meaningful because they are not communicated in person.
This sentiment is a form of forceful control exerted by those who have no other reason to command attention but proximity. This is also crap; attention is a product of interest and respect. If I am not interested by what you are saying, you will not maintain my full attention for long; and if you demand my full attention for no other reason than that you happen to be the human being closest to me in physical space, neither will you my respect.
Also of use might be some way for the device to show to other people (not the user) that it isn't distracting the user at the moment. So it doesn't give off a "they aren't paying attention to me" vibe. Perhaps just normal light leakage, or lack thereof, while the display is active/not will be enough for this signal.
Further in the future, the device will likely shrink to, or work with a contact lens. At this point, this is not even a question of science, but of engineering [1].
[1] http://wireless.ee.washington.edu/papers/Lingley_JMMNov2011....
Something like this pretty much just needs something to charge from. Like your computer while you work, and the wall while you sleep, from a USB port perhaps (which you already have).
Not making any claims as to which are more useful / applicable to more people. Just that there are major physical barriers to anything that requires even a pocket, much less infrastructure. A small wearable computer just requires somewhere to sit when you're not using it.
They'll be like bluetooth headsets. Reserved for a very specific subset of the population.
"Wearable" computing has the same issue, and will only take off if it can be made to look stylish enough for fashion-conscious people. This is Google we're talking about, so it's safe to assume the product will be about as stylish as an industrial vacuum cleaner. Some other company will have to come along and fix it before it becomes popular.
The display is harder to understand. What information do you need in front of your eyes right now that actually helps you? Today you might check Yelp for a restaurant review or Google Maps for directions, but you rarely ever keep your phone in front of your face while you walk through New York... it's a reference, not a constant aide. It's a cool idea but most people (even some of the geeky ones who visit Hacker News) don't see the value.
I think the big vision here is that you'll have a camera that consumes the world around you and a system that can process what the camera is seeing, and give you real useful information about the world around you immediately. You walk into the office and the system tells you that you're looking at "Sarah" and you have a meeting with her at 3pm, or that the menu item you're looking at has 615 calories and most people who order it love it, or that the product you're about to buy is $50 cheaper at an online store and can be shipped to you in 2 days. Glass doesn't offer any of this right now... but it will some day. I want one and if I'd attended Google I/O I'd have spent the $1500 for the early prototype.
We point our phone at that product, or at our lunch, or at the home diy project we need to do, or at some hobby we're doing, or at the car repair we're doing. we don't need glass for that.
Sort of shame, really, as we had some plans to build a service exactly in the same space (though more base on learned routines a bit like Bret Victor's The Magic Ink describes)
They're riding the wave of hope that voice controls have now, maybe I'm naive but it's going to have to improve by miles for anything beyond novelty use.
I could see this focusing on a tighter use case, like content aware eye mounted cameras with social features, and why not two of them for stereoscopic?
Mobile is primarily different from Desktop in that the little annoyances are too much for the form factor and use cases. And indirect pointing and clicking just doesn't cut it in mobile.
Wearable will only be more extreme this regard.
EEG or other electrical signals are scrambled in the skull, bouncing around inside, making discovery of origin impossible from the exterior. The best we can do is binary on or off, which is how the emotiv device works, along with detection of facial/other head muscle movements.
MRI can detect origin of signal, but the machines are huge, like the size of a car; and power hungry, and crazy expensive, and the resolution is something like one minute per signal.
Sorry to be a bummer ;) I want to see brain-computer interface as much as anyone.
I'm not really convinced by this. "Out of the way" means you have to switch focus every time you want to see your information, and then switch back afterwards. To me, this seems even more distracting, albeit less prone to clutter.
As for the comment about making something that doesn't come between the user and the physical world -- how about not using this device?
I think it's an intriguing concept, but right now it's a solution looking for a problem. Building software this way is relatively cheap (Google Wave...) but hardware?
It makes me think that an audio-focused UI that allowed commands via throat mike might be a good way to go.
>As for the comment about making something that doesn't come between the user and the physical world -- how about not using this device?
It's less intrusive than pulling out your phone to take a picture while playing with your kids.
It's a brave new world, aye!
Honestly, I think it has more to do with them costing $5k and being less mobile than a bike, which you can pick up. That alone makes them absolutely worthless beyond their battery range, and to anyone who encounters stairs in their day to day life. And out of the price range of an enormous percent of USA's population, and it only gets worse for families.
But opinion battles have no end. We disagree at a rather fundamental level, I'm happy to leave it at that.
1. http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/130923-mit-creates-glucos...
I did read your post, I disagree that the tune out will ever end, its just how it's read by others will culturally shift. you're still gonna be withdrawing your mental presence from the space, an externally triggered space-out.
Don't tell me you can't spot someone with a portable music player from a hundred feet away. If anything the visibility of those has increased as the popularity of over-sized headphones has grown.