Tom Foremski has a great take on the medium to longer term opportunities that Google Glasses is going to create. Couldn't agree more. Though at first they seem really odd and rife comic misadventures (and late night commentary on such) once we get beyond the shock of the new we're going to see more and more ways in which they'll infiltrate and augment and change our lives. Just think about how we use smart phones now and extrapolate to how useful the new form factor will be once we've figured out how to knit it in - in a seamless way - to pretty much most everything we do...
Google's augmented reality glasses are the key to a killer
business strategy: how to provide Google to its users 24/7 - it's instant
search on steroids. You'll be able to Google reality anytime, and all the time.
Facebook can keep the social network
space and the ten and more hours a month that its users spend there; Google has
it's eyes on the biggest prize of all — reality. Forget social, 24/7 is the new
battleground.
Google is ready and able to mediate
your visual and auditory experience as you move through your day. Whenever, and
wherever you are, Google's glasses will tirelessly filter and overlay your
experience with helpful, and commercial messages.
Gone will be our pure, unmediated
experience of the world. Will it be a fair trade?
The few discussions about technology
for augmented reality apps like Google glasses always carry a positive message,
that it's an 'enhanced' reality, it's more reality. In this example, it's a G+
reality.
But it's clearly a fallacy to
portray augmented reality as being an "enhanced" reality. Reality is
reality, it's 100% all the time, every time. There is no such thing as 120%
reality or 400% reality.
Augmented reality is always an occluded reality, it always
obscures something, it always takes something away from a person's experience
of the world.
The overlay of Google's search
results, messaging, and advertising onto our reality is already here for a good
part of our day, when we are at our desks, and increasingly now, when we are
mobile and have our phones switched on.
The next big market to conquer is to
win users that are always on, always Googling, always connected.
The video of Google glasses should
be seen as far more than a quirky project dreamed up by a few engineers and set
to Apple-like cheery, tinkly advertising music. (That type of music has become
synonymous with a friendly, techno-optimist future by listeners, thanks to the
stirling media work of the late Steve Jobs (and Madison Avenue (not late... not
yet)).)
Google has identified the next
market battle ground: 24/7.
What larger market is there?
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