Google recently released a video demonstrating Project Glass, a development project for creating augmented-reality glasses. While wearing the glasses, icons appear overlaid on your vision that let you know the weather outside your window, the path to take to a section of a bookstore and when a call is coming in. Take a picture of what you are looking at just by speaking to your glasses. Get reminders of your schedule by staring off into space.
It’s all well and good to let science fiction step into reality, and the video is quite remarkable, and bravo to Google for developing the technology, but …
and yet …
The glass is a little rectangle just above one eye. The video is a little deceptive, in that the icons won’t actually be directly in front of your vision. And the style of advertising that portrays lackadaisical hipster wannabes sipping obligatory coffee with laid-back music in the background is as tiring and overchewed as Instagramming the present to look like a perceived, unreal past. Same goes with fake-candid photography. (“Oh, look, someone just happened to take my picture while I was laughing. How real.”)
There’s fashion to consider. Let’s get practical and stop pretending that minimalism is in any way cool. An entire rig just to support a one-inch-wide piece of glass doesn’t embrace what these really are. We know who’s going to wear them. Make them right.
And so …
