I'd love to hear more if and when circumstances and mood permit it.
It's not so much a matter of moods: I am in the midst of some health problems I am not discussing online, because in general I don't and medical advice from the internet is never helpful, so it's really a matter of focus and stamina. Basically, I liked his narration of the history of wearable computing and what was then called "augmented reality" (because Timothy Leary had gotten to "artificial reality" first) and I was interested by the examples he showed of the efficacy of proto-Google Glass (of which he is an early adopter, being the project manager) in sorting tasks and embedding information, but I disagree strongly that it needs to be a part of everyone's thoughtless daily lives: that we should all check e-mail as blink-automatically as we look at our watches; that I need a screen overlaid on my visual field so that I can look significantly at jellyfish and pull up the Wikipedia entry, or capture video of a family birthday to preserve it forever. That is what research and my memory are for. I believe that integrating a wearable computer into the last twenty years of his life worked for him (even if I am always a little skeptical of people who say that an innovation made them "more powerful," because I don't know what they mean or want by power); I wouldn't ask him to take it off. It wouldn't work for me. I need the ability to unplug. I need to live without the expectation that I will respond to e-mail the instant it comes in, that my attention is constantly fragmentable, that I want to be scanning on all channels for messages and videos and cat macros and updates. Discount all issues of privacy (which he skirted by talking about how interaction with Google Glass still requires recognizable vocal or physical commands, so that it can't be done stealthily; I don't believe that will last any longer than the first person who decides to break it because they can) and I still don't want to live in a world where everything is all access all the time. His work, he said, was all about closing the gap between intention and action. Anyone who has ever fired off an e-mail and then regretted it—or just hit reply-all instead of reply—should know that gap is a lifesaver somtimes.
And he was an enthusiastic storyteller, but not a very organized one, so when he looked out into the audience and delivered his summing-up of the future of wearable computing in measured, complete sentences, with another person I'd have said he'd memorized his closing words; with him, I was fairly certain he was reading off his glass. And that was interesting.
no subject
It's not so much a matter of moods: I am in the midst of some health problems I am not discussing online, because in general I don't and medical advice from the internet is never helpful, so it's really a matter of focus and stamina. Basically, I liked his narration of the history of wearable computing and what was then called "augmented reality" (because Timothy Leary had gotten to "artificial reality" first) and I was interested by the examples he showed of the efficacy of proto-Google Glass (of which he is an early adopter, being the project manager) in sorting tasks and embedding information, but I disagree strongly that it needs to be a part of everyone's thoughtless daily lives: that we should all check e-mail as blink-automatically as we look at our watches; that I need a screen overlaid on my visual field so that I can look significantly at jellyfish and pull up the Wikipedia entry, or capture video of a family birthday to preserve it forever. That is what research and my memory are for. I believe that integrating a wearable computer into the last twenty years of his life worked for him (even if I am always a little skeptical of people who say that an innovation made them "more powerful," because I don't know what they mean or want by power); I wouldn't ask him to take it off. It wouldn't work for me. I need the ability to unplug. I need to live without the expectation that I will respond to e-mail the instant it comes in, that my attention is constantly fragmentable, that I want to be scanning on all channels for messages and videos and cat macros and updates. Discount all issues of privacy (which he skirted by talking about how interaction with Google Glass still requires recognizable vocal or physical commands, so that it can't be done stealthily; I don't believe that will last any longer than the first person who decides to break it because they can) and I still don't want to live in a world where everything is all access all the time. His work, he said, was all about closing the gap between intention and action. Anyone who has ever fired off an e-mail and then regretted it—or just hit reply-all instead of reply—should know that gap is a lifesaver somtimes.
And he was an enthusiastic storyteller, but not a very organized one, so when he looked out into the audience and delivered his summing-up of the future of wearable computing in measured, complete sentences, with another person I'd have said he'd memorized his closing words; with him, I was fairly certain he was reading off his glass. And that was interesting.