The old failed Google project may gain new life by presenting itself as an augmented reality alternative to 100% immersive virtual environments for Metaverses, such as those designed by Meta and some innovative projects, such as Decentraland (MANA) and Sandbox (SAND ), suggests technology journalist Paolo Sylvester in an article posted on O Macaco Elétrico blog, from O Estado de São Paulo.
Google Glass returned to the scene at the end of the keynote panel that opened the Google I/O conference on May 11. Sundar Pichai, CEO of the tech giant, has briefly unveiled a new prototype for one of the biggest failures in Google’s history.
Google’s annual conference is an event whose main objective is to present concepts and ideas for technological products and services in development. It is a kind of preliminary test, where they are brought to the imagination of the public so that the developers can discover whether or not they can gain acceptance with the users.
The advent of Google Glass could provide an alternative based on augmented reality, where virtual items are rendered over physical reality, to the Mark Zuckerberg-designed metaverse — where everything is virtual, including the humans themselves, whose personalities are transposed into avatars.
According to Sylvester, by projecting digital elements onto real environments, augmented reality allows “one to interact with them as if they were really there”. That is, there is a clear conflict between the two concepts, although it recognizes the need for both to coexist in the future.
Google glasses
Google Glass was launched in the already distant 2013, at least by the standards of the technology industry, and was a personal project of Sergey Brin, one of the founders of Google. The online tool suggested offering digital services without having to interact with the device.
Google Glass allowed its users to make phone calls, take photos and record videos, as well as provide access to the Internet through a small screen displayed in front of the user’s eyes.
However, Google Glass has been resoundingly defeated in its own struggle with the iPhone. The Apple device practically reinvented cell phones, turning them into devices for communication and interaction with the Internet, where the least important feature is the ability to make phone calls.
On the other hand, Google Glass did not match the desires and needs of its users at that time. On the contrary, the presence of glasses users has led to the inconvenience of others, especially due to the violation of privacy.
A Google Glass user can record any situation without the consent or even the knowledge of others present. And he was still an object without any aesthetic and visual appeal. That is, the piece drew attention only and exclusively to undesirable factors.
Consequently, it was discontinued in 2015. Now it’s back, and it’s still a prototype — not a market-ready product. However, the return of Google Glass was presented by Pichai as an artifact that seeks to meet the real needs of users.
In his presentation, the CEO of Google demonstrated the potential of Google Glass to facilitate communication between people. Whether it is to allow understanding between two or more users who communicate in different languages, or even to provide resources for people with hearing impairments. The new Google Glass picks up the speaker’s voice and displays the translation in subtitles that the user of the glasses can see.
shaping the future
Often, the failure of technology is as important as its success in shaping the future of society. Although it was an unsuccessful experiment at the time, Google Glass highlighted the dangers of a technology with such disruptive potential.
Directly or indirectly, the failure of the project ended up contributing to certain ethical boundaries and standards that developers of technology products and solutions need to abide by if they want their products to be truly embraced by users, Sylvester suggests.
Given the risks of centralizing large platforms such as Google and Facebook, cryptocurrencies and Web3 are presented as alternatives to distribute resources and power to content creators, for example.
Other kinds of problems may emerge from this, such as psychological dependence on digital devices – and perhaps in the future on virtual environments. The truth is that between the successes and the failures, concepts like the metaverse, virtual reality, and augmented reality are under construction. Very soon, they will become part of our daily experiences, and there is no way to fight them. “What we need is to customize all its advantages and control its risks,” Sylvester concludes.
As Cointelegraph Brasil recently reported, residents of developing countries tend to believe in the positive effects of metaverses on real life more than people living in rich countries.
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