Google Glass:

The next wave of tech and how it can best be used in Australia

Currently at Loud&Clear we’re working with a few new exciting pieces of technology.

Getting our hands on some of this tech early has given us the chance to identify some really great opportunities for a couple of our clients, and find ways to merge their objectives with the tech capabilities to help them become market leaders in their industries.

We’d like to share our initial thoughts on some of the tech you might have heard of, but not necessarily seen or used yet.

This week we’ll start with Google Glass.

We were delighted to get our hands on these as early explorers. The tech is fun, and feels really new. Nothing about wearing Glass feels particularly natural, either in the frames, the movements required or the focal adjustment you’re constantly being required to do in order to use it effectively. To be clear, Google Glass is an absolute distraction, certainly not the seamless transition from ‘life-to-screen-to-life’ that some expected it to be.

Camera is king on Glass and most practical uses will be centred around the fact that you’re able to capture image and video from a ‘human eye view’ with relative ease and subtlety.

How will Glass be used?

Apart from the variety of nifty little tricks you can do when you have a smart phone attached to your face, the ability to capture and localise hands free images and video in the field and feed them back to a central point for further analysis are the most exciting aspects of Glass. Such instances would see;

• Paramedics in the field receiving instructions from specialists
• Journalists and soldiers in hot situations being able to report/ recon hands-free
• Construction and mining engineers inspecting sites and faults
• Virtual instructor training past a designated target eg. recreational pilot’s license — 35 hours and beyond

The hard work is creating a platform that collects the live footage, applies any location or case specific data or graphics over it and distributes it confidentially, in real-time to the desired audience.

The audience will then need to send their feedback in the form of audio, and graphics, this will need to be compressed at a low enough quality to transfer rapidly, but still be useable.

Given that most of the scenarios listed above are pressure situations where drop-offs can mean the difference between life or death, the API (application programming interface) will need to sit in a cloud cluster robust enough to handle the real-time flow of data.

At Loud&Clear we’ve had experience in doing just that with the Virtual Instructor Led Training (VILT) we built in 2013 for Telstra.

Retail

Right now, any use of Google Glass in the retail space for Australian retailers will be more of an experiential activation in order to generate PR rather than providing a better UX for your shoppers. The uptake from shoppers won’t be there for a while, and until Google find a way to make them look a little nicer (which they say they are working on), I can’t see fashionistas combing outlets with these attached to their faces.

There is potential for location based retail activity, though there are far more effective, and cheaper ways for retailers to reach out via location based technologies using ‘beacons’ which I’ll cover next week.

The camera will lend itself to social shopping (does my bum look big in this?) in the pursuit of a second opinion, though it’s pretty easy to pull out your smart phone and take a picture.

Experience wise, Layar have just released their augmented reality SDK (software developer kit) to developers giving retailers the chance to bring their stores to life for Glass wearers.

The omnipresent command to kickstart activity on Glass is ‘ok Glass’ followed by what you want the glass to do. By adding the command ‘Scan this’, Glass will use the camera to scan for extra AR content.

Imagine, walking into a store and seeing prices hovering above all of the clothes. Seeing images of which of your friends have previously purchased (along with reviews), flicking through virtual catalogue images of models wearing them, then selecting and paying for the items without the need to queue up at a checkout (or having to speak to an assistant if you’re anything like me).

That sort of interactivity used to be the stuff of sci-fi movies, and now it’s all possible with Glass, but requires considerable development and investment from a retailer or brand with a hunger for that kind of green field experimentation.

For that to happen, there needs to be an audience for it. Google’s challenge is to keep developing their product in order to make sure that there is a cost effective, sexy product that people are willing to purchase and wear.