If you think having a really nifty, current-generation smart phone represents the pinnacle of personal information integration, well, think again. A new wave of technology is about to break, one that promises—for better or worse—to tether our lives to the Internet with ever-more seamless constancy. So much so that it might make our cherished smartphones look downright clumsy by comparison.
I’m talking about Google Glass. This product, which was first announced about a year ago, is supposed to hit the market sometime later this year.
Google Glass currently looks a lot like a pair of glasses, with a frame that fits the face and places a tiny screen, a camera, a bone-conducting speaker, and a microphone in front of one eye. In other words, Google Glass ensures that you’re always plugged in.
But Google’s aspirations extend beyond simply providing a new physical interface for Web use. In addition, the search company is working on new, intuitive search software that “knows” where you are in terms of time and space, software that anticipates what information you might need and gives it to you before you even think about it or search for it.
“One thing that we’re really excited about and working hard on is transforming the way that people interact with Google,” says Google vice president Scott Huffman. “From the stilted one-keyword-at-a-time conversation, to more of a natural conversation … like a human assistant.” Jon Wiley, Google’s lead user-experience designer for its search functions, adds, “Our role is to understand user needs in terms of our search products and make sure that we’re developing a search experience that meets and exceeds expectations.”
To accomplish that goal, the company recently initiated a focus group test of sorts in which it asked participants throughout their day, “”What was the last bit of information you needed?” NBC News contributor Rosa Golijan said of Google’s information-gathering experiment:
“The point of the study wasn’t to trace the flow of data through the participants’ handsets. Wiley’s team just wanted to know what sort of information—simple or complicated, mundane or exciting—people were hunting for at any given moment. The study not only allowed Wiley’s team to better capture the sorts of queries that people don’t ask a search engine—”Why is my daughter being mean to me?”—but also the context in which all these questions arose. Where were people when they needed to know these things? What time was it? What were they doing? By gathering these details, the team could attempt to understand the contexts of searches (even the helpless ones) in our day-to-day, human trudge. One day, Google could perhaps provide all that information without prompting.
Whether or not you find the promise of such constant, intuitive connectivity intriguing or menacing probably has a lot to do with how you feel about technology in general.
One thing’s certain, however: As technology companies like Google continue to extend their already influential reach, all of us will increasingly have even more decisions to make about how much information we really need and how we want it delivered to us. And whether such advanced technology will be prove to be a boon, a bane or somewhere in between, is a question that even Google Glass—for all its prescient promise—can’t answer just yet.
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