Eng 101 Assignment Two Duefriday March 6

Obstructed Reality Smart

Glasses are more distracting than smartphones.

By Will Oremus.

There are two
problems with smartphones. One is that they’re distracting. To use one, you
have to pull it out of your pocket, hold it in your hand, and look away from
the world around you. The second problem is that they’re small. The keys are
tiny, making typing difficult, and Web pages don’t always adapt well to 4-inch
screens. To these problems, the technology industry has offered a solution:
wearable gadgets. Google Glass in particular has been touted as a more seamless
way to experience the digital world: no more peering down at a handheld gadget
to get directions, no more fiddling with a miniature touchscreen keyboard. With
smart glasses, you just glance upward to see the screen; commands are carried
out by voice, or with a simple tap or swipe of the frame. That’s the theory.
Here’s my experience: In most cases, smart glasses are more distracting than
smartphones. Their screens are smaller, too. Oh, and you still need a
smartphone in order for them to work when you don’t have Wi-Fi. Smartphone problems:
unsolved. An example of smart glasses’ unfulfilled promise is an app called
Field Trip, which Google promoted at a media event at New York City’s Chelsea
Market on Thursday. The event was meant to show how Glass can be a handy tool
for the tourist on the go. But, as with my first trial of Field Trip on Glass
several weeks earlier, I came away convinced you’d be better off leaving home
without it. The Field Trip concept, developed by Google’s own Niantic Labs, is
intriguing: Speak the words “OK Glass, explore nearby” and the device’s screen
will display a series of cards devoted to notable sights in your immediate
vicinity. You can search by category—food, architecture, history—or just browse
at random if you’re feeling lucky. The results, however, amount to a
frustrating lesson in the limitations of a device that’s too small to deliver
the full power of the open Web. “Explore nearby,” I commanded my glasses. The
first card that popped up bore the cryptic title, “SL – Architizer.” I tapped
the glasses’ frames to learn more, and was treated to some photos of what
appeared to be a swanky nightclub. I eventually discerned that SL was the
club’s name and Architizer the name of the content source, but I still didn’t
know where SL was, nor why I should care. “Get directions,” I said. Glass
commenced a Google Maps search—and promptly froze. Eventually I had to turn off
the device and reboot it. I tried again, and this time Maps pinpointed a
location a block or two away. Moments later, it changed its mind. “You have
arrived!” it announced cheerfully. On my second try, I searched for food and up
popped an article about an establishment called the Doughnuttery from a site
called Tasting Table. “The Doughnuttery makes pint-sized donuts,” it informed
me. “No doubt you are being bombarded with diet ideas for 2013.” I was not
being bombarded with diet ideas for 2013, nor did these nonexistent diet ideas
involve miniature donuts, but I pressed on. This time, I left the Field Trip
app to seek directions via Glass’ standard Google search function.
Unfortunately, the device heard “Donuttery” and pointed me to a place in
Huntington Beach, California, that makes regular-sized (!?!) donuts. With
Glass’ limited interactivity, I saw no obvious way to correct the error. And I
never even wanted any doughnuts! To be fair, Field Trip’s suggestions can
occasionally be as serendipitously pleasing as you might hope. A history search
turned up a well-written article about the history of the High Line, the
abandoned elevated rail line that has been turned into a distinctive public
park. I hadn’t realized that former mayor Rudy Giuliani had been planning to
demolish the line before a pair of grassroots preservations dreamed up the park
idea. Yet as I gazed upward and to my right, upward and to my right, to read a
sentence or two at a time on the tiny screen, I found myself wishing that I
could just read the article on my smartphone’s Field Trip app instead. I was no
less distracted reading it on Glass, but the process was slower and less comfortable
and I looked twice as silly. The effect is magnified on a busy street, where
you’re tempted to keep walking while using Glass. Unless everything goes
right—which is rare, in my experience—you end up having to repeat voice
commands and swipe repeatedly to back up and toggle through results, all while
glancing nervously back and forth between the screen and the sidewalk in front
of you. You’d almost certainly be safer just stepping out of everyone’s way,
using your smartphone for a minute, and then putting it back in your pocket so
you can return your focus to the world around you. (An observation: When I’m
without my smartphone for some reason, I feel anxious and incomplete until it’s
safely back on my person. With Glass, it’s the opposite: Whenever I’m using it,
I feel anxious and distracted until I take it off.) Tripit, an on-the-go travel
app, makes a slightly better case for Glass’ utility, if only because the
airport is one place where you’re likely to have both hands full of luggage.
You can use it to double-check your rental car reservation or get an alert
about a gate change for your flight without breaking stride (provided you don’t
trip over anyone else’s bags while you’re glancing up at the screen). Again,
though, there are bugs to be worked out, and you can only do so much with it
before you have to dig out your phone. For instance, if your flight is late,
there’s an option to see a list of alternate flights to your destination. But
you can’t select any of them, or call to change your reservation: They’re just
displayed on a static card. Google Glass isn’t bad at everything. It’s a great
improvement over smartphones for a few specific purposes, like snapping a photo
on the fly or shooting video while your hands are occupied. It can also be
helpful in its capacity as a heads-up display—e.g., for glancing up at a recipe
while you’re cooking. And one app that
Google showed off on Thursday looks genuinely great. It’s called Word Lens, and
it’s the niftiest translation tool I’ve yet encountered. Say you find yourself
on a street in Russia staring at a sign that you can’t understand because you
don’t speak Russian. Open Word Lens, select “Russian to English,” and then look
at the sign again. As if by magic, Word Lens replaces the Russian words with
their English counterparts’ right before your eyes. The
translations aren’t perfect. They’re actually just one-to-one transliterations,
and the mistakes can be comical. Presented with a sign that read “Joyeriadel
Barrio,” it tried “Jewelry of Mud” and “Jewelry of Barrel” before (mostly)
correctly settling on “Jewelry of Neighborhood.” But surely they’ll continue to
improve. And while Word Lens has been available on smartphones for a few years
now, it’s the rare app that works significantly better on Glass, because you
can just look at the word you want to translate instead of having to aim a
camera and read a screen. Apparently it isn’t lost on Google that Word Lens is
a potential killer app: Google announced on Friday that it’s buying Quest
Visual, the startup that makes it. It’s a reminder that, as underwhelming as
Glass might be today, the technology is still in its infancy. Google—and the
rest of us—are still just beginning to figure out what smart glasses can and
cannot do. Glass is likely to be judged harshly upon its release, thanks in
part to the high bar that Apple and other consumer-electronics companies have
set for mobile devices over the past decade. As a replacement for—or even a
supplement to—a smartphone, smart glasses today simply aren’t worth the trouble,
let alone the price.

Still, let’s give Google and its rivals a few years before
we give up on smart glasses. In the meantime, maybe we can start appreciating
our smartphones a little more. As distracting as they can be, at least they
still spend most of their time hidden away in our pockets.