Communications of the ACM
Wearable Computing Pioneer Says Google Glass Offers “killer Existence”
Google Project Glass technical lead Thad Starner has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993.
Credit: Wired
Google's Project Glass technical lead Thad Starner has been building and wearing head-mounted computers since 1993. He showed Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin an early version of a wearable computer in 2003, and in 2010 became the technical lead for Project Glass.
His first wearable computer that worked was a head-mounted display with a 12-MHz processor connected to a two-pound car cellphone and powered by a seven-pound motorcycle battery, which was carried in a shoulder bag. Starner has advanced the technology considerably with Glass, which he believes is an invention on par with the automobile for its ability to transform society.
Starner says that by reducing the time between intention and action, people can truly integrate Glass into routine activities. For example, he says writers could use an app that would pull up their previous relevant articles as they were typing. "There’s a lot of ways to improve it. A lot of it is going to be in how people use it, how people integrate it into their lifestyles," Starner says. "People always talk about the killer app, but this is more a killer lifestyle. It’s a killer existence."
From Technology Review
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