On a weekday afternoon in late June, a nondescript forty-year-old man in beige shorts, a blue Penguin sports shirt, and what appears to be a pair of shale-colored architect’s glasses with parts of the frame missing gets on an uptown No. 6 train at Union Square to go see his psychoanalyst, on East Eighty-eighth Street. As the man walks into the frigid subway car, he unexpectedly jerks his head up and down. A pink light comes on above the right lens. He slides his index finger against the right temple of the glasses as if flicking away a fly. The man’s right eyebrow rises and his right eye squints. He appears to be mouthing some words. A lip-reader would come away with the following message: “Forever 21 world traveler denim shorts, $22.80. Horoscope: Cooler heads prevail today, helping you strike a compromise in a matter you refused to budge on last week.”There is a tap on his shoulder. He turns around. An older man, dressed for the office in a blue blazer, says, “Are those them?”
“Yes.”
“My kid wants one.”
“If you give them to your kid, you’ll be able to see everything he sees from your computer. You could follow him around all day.”
The businessman considers this. “Are they foldable?”
The man with the glasses shakes his head. A young college student in a hoodie and Adidas track pants, carrying a Pace University folder, takes out one of his earbuds. “What does it do?”
Everyone on the train is now staring at the man with the glasses.
The man with the glasses jerks his head up and down. The soft pink light is on above his right eye. “O.K., Glass,” the man says. “Take a picture.” The pink light is replaced by a shot of the subway car, the college student with the earbuds, the older man, now immortalized. If they are paying close attention, they can see a microscopic version of themselves and the world around them displayed on the screen above the man’s right eye. “I can also take a video of you,” the man says. “O.K., Glass. Record a video.”
“That is so dope,” the college student says. It appears to the man that the student is thinking over the situation. There’s something else he wants to say. It’s as if the man with the glasses has some form of mastery of the world around him, and maybe even within himself. (...)
My first encounter with Google Glass came on a Saturday in June, when I showed up at the Glass Explorers’ “Basecamp,” a sunny spread atop the Chelsea Market. My tech sherpa, a bright-eyed young woman, set me up with a mimosa as we perused the various shades of Glass frames, each named for a color that occurs in nature: cotton, shale, charcoal, sky, and tangerine. I went for shale, which happens to be the preference of Glass Explorers in San Francisco. (New Yorkers, naturally, go for bleak charcoal.) I was told that I was one of the first few hundred Explorers in the city, which made me feel like some third-rate Shackleton embarked on my own Nimrod Expedition into the neon ice. The lightweight titanium frames were fitted over my nose, a button was pressed near my right ear, and the small screen, or Optical Head Mounted Display, flickered to pink-ish life. I was told how to talk to my new friend, each command initiated with the somewhat resigned “O.K., Glass.” In deference to Eunice and Lenny, I started off with two simple instructions, picked up by a microphone that sits just above my right eye, at the tip of my eyebrow.
“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Korean.”
“Haembeogeo,” a gentle, vowel-rich voice announced after a few seconds of searching, as both English and Hangul script appeared on the display above my right eye. Since there are no earbuds to plug into Glass, audio is conveyed through a “bone conduction transducer.” In effect, this means that a tiny speaker vibrates against the bone behind my right ear, replicating sound. The result is eerie, as if someone is whispering directly into a hole bored into your cranium, but also deeply futuristic. You can imagine a time when different parts of our bodies are adapted for different needs. If a bone can hear sound, why can’t my fingertips smell the bacon strips they’re about to grab?
Glass responds to a combination of voice and touch-pad commands. After the initial “O.K., Glass,” you can tap and slide your way through the touch pad, but since there is no keyboard or touch screen, Googling and Gmailing will probably always involve voice recognition.
“O.K., Glass. Google translate ‘hamburger’ into Russian.”
“Gamburrrger,” a voice purred, not so gently, like my grandmother at the end of a long hot day.
And, all of a sudden, I felt something for this technology.
Photograph by Emiliano Granado
