Google Glass Team: ‘Wearable Computing Will Be the Norm’

By Steven Levy

Even though I followed Google’s I/O Conference from across the country, the event made it obvious that a company created with a strict focus on search has become an omnivorous factory of tech products both hard and soft. Google now regards its developers conference as a launch pad for a shotgun spread of announcements, almost like a CES springing from a single company. (Whatever happened to “more wood behind fewer arrows”?)

But the Google product that threatened to steal the entire show probably won’t be sold to the public until 2014. This is the prosthetic eye-based display computer called Project Glass, which is coming out of the company’s experimental unit, Google[x]. Announced last April, it was dropped into the conference in dramatic fashion: An extravagant demo hosted by Google co-founder Sergey Brin involved skydivers, stunt cyclists, and a death-defying Google+ hangout. It quickly attained legendary status.

Even before people got to sample Glass, it was popping their eyes out.

Google wouldn’t provide a date or product details for Glass’ eventual appearance as a consumer product — and in fact made it clear that the team was still figuring out the key details of what that product would be. But Google made waves by announcing that it would take orders for a $1,500 “explorer’s version,” sold only to I/O attendees and shipped sometime early next year. Hungry to get their hands on what seemed to be groundbreaking new technology, developers lined up to put their money down.

Meanwhile, I just as hungrily bit at the opportunity to do a phone interview with two of the leaders of Glass. Google originally hired project head Babak Parviz from the University of Washington, where he was the McMorrow Innovation Associate Professor, specializing in the interface between biology and technology. (One relevant piece of work: a paper called “Augmented Reality in a Contact Lens.”)
The other Glass honcho, product manager Steve Lee, is a longtime Google product manager, specializing in location and mapping areas. Here is the edited conversation.

Wired: Where are you now with Glass as compared to what Google will eventually release?
Babak Parviz: Project Glass is something that Steve and I have worked on together for a bit more than two years now. It has gone through lots of prototypes and fortunately we’ve arrived at something that sort of works right now. It still is a prototype, but we can do more experimentation with it. We’re excited about this. This could be a radically new technology that really enables people to do things that otherwise they couldn’t do. There are two broad areas that we’re looking at. One is to enable people to communicate with images in new ways, and in a better way. The second is very rapid access to information.

Wired: Let’s talk about some of the product basics. For instance, I’m still not clear whether Glass is something that works with the phone in your pocket, or a stand-alone product.

Parviz: Right now it doesn’t have a cell radio, it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. If you’re outdoors or on the go, at least for the immediate future, if you would like to have data connection, you would need a phone.

Steve Lee: Eventually it’ll be a stand-alone product in its own right.

Wired: What are the other current basics?

Parviz: We have a pretty powerful processor and a lot of memory in the device. There’s quite a bit of storage on board, so you can store images and video on board, or you can just live stream it out. We have a see-through display, so it shows images and video if you like, and it’s all self-contained. It has a camera that can collect photographs or video. It has a touchpad so it can interact with the system, and it has gyroscope, accelerometers, and compasses for making the system aware in terms of location and direction. It has microphones for collecting sound, it has a small speaker for getting sound back to the person who’s wearing it, and it has Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. And GPS.

This is the configuration that most likely will ship to the developers, but it’s not 100 percent sure that this is the configuration that will we ship to the broader consumer market.
Wired: How much does it weigh?

Lee: It’s comparable to a pair of sunglasses. You can stack three of these up and balance a scale with a smart phone.

Wired: What was your thinking when you embarked on the project, and how did that thinking evolve?

Parviz: We did look at many, many different possibilities early on. One of the things that we looked at was very immersive AR [Augmented Reality] environments — how much that would allow people to do, how much could come between you and the physical world, and how much that can be distractive. Over time we really found that particular picture less and less compelling. As we used the device ourselves, what became more compelling to use was a type of technology that doesn’t come between you and the physical world. So you do what you normally do but when you want to access it, it’s immediately relevant — it can help you do something, it would help you connect to other people with images or video, or it would help you get a snippet of information very quickly. So we decided that having the technology out of the way is much, much more compelling than immersive AR, at least at this time.

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‘Cop of the future’ technologies being developed in Israel

‘First responders’ dealing with emergencies – and especially police and homeland security officers – are about to move into the 21st century and beyond, using tools being developed by Israeli researchers at Motorola Solutuons

Once public safety officials such as police, emergency medical technicians, and firefighters had two things they could rely on in the field – their intuition, and the radio they used to contact headquarters. Once in awhile an emergency vehicle would come equipped with a video camera, but that was used mostly to record incidents for evidence purposes, or to ensure that public safety workers (and the authorities that employed them) were “covered” in the case of a lawsuit, complaint, etc.

LMR (land-mobile radio), as that communications technology is known, is fine as far as it goes – which in today’s world is not too far, according to Paul Steinberg, vice president and chief technology officer of Motorola Solutions. “Today, users have the ability to send images, video, social media messages, and much more. Now every civilian with a smartphone is a source of information for public safety workers.”

Implementation of those technologies for use by the professionals has been much slower, though, and Motorola Solutions, said Steinberg, intends to change that.

Steinberg was speaking in Israel at a recent event sponsored by Motorola Solutions on the technological future of homeland security. While the event was aimed at “first responders” of all types, “homeland security” is, of course, the domain of police and other security agencies, and the presentation was clearly geared to law enforcement and homeland security teams, both of which were well represented in the audience of about 1,000.

And police certainly have something to look forward to. From mere voice communications with base, cops and security personnel of the future will have access to the most up to date technologies in their equipment. Sensors, video cameras built into sunglasses, GPS and dead reckoning technology, wifi and 4G+ communication systems, extra bandwidth reserved specifically for law enforcement and homeland security, augmented reality– all this will become standard equipment in a short time.

In a typical scenario, an officer will pull over an individual for a traffic infraction and beam an image of the vehicle’s license plate or registration using a camera built into his sunglasses back to headquarters, where it will be looked up (the camera, of course, allows for a 360 degree view, giving officers “eyes in the back of their heads”). If the driver has any outstanding infractions, the officer will let him or her know, and with a mini-printer in the officer’s vehicle, a ticket will be printed out on the spot.

If the individual is wanted for other, more serious things, headquarters will let the officer know as well, and will also automatically alert other police in the area to arrive for backup. Using augmented reality software, a video image of the suspect is analyzed, and if s/he begins to make any suspicious moves, the officer will be alerted in advance. If the suspect tries to escape, the officer will be able to track him or her with his video camera, with location chips in the equipment letting headquarters, and backup, know the officer’s location at all times.

The same technologies will be included in vehicles, said Steinberg. “The driver’s seat will have a lot more tools, with voice activated controls to bring up video recording, tracking, augmented reality, location services, and even an on the road workstation. We call it the integrated cockpit.” The hardware to run this system will be built into the vehicle, with much of it deployed in the trunk. In addition, much work is being done to improve networks, and the recent allocation of cellular network bandwidth in the U.S. specifically to public safety needs will enable officers to use the technologies being developed much more efficiently.

While all these technologies exist and are used every day, few have been used in law enforcement and homeland security, Steinberg said, partially because arranging all the necessary tools in a package that is easy, convenient, and reliable has been a challenge, and the company has developed a number of solutions to enable officers to get the tool they need when they need it. “The more tools, the more effort we have to put in to use them. Individuals can manage, but for a cop or a fireman in the field, accessing these tools has to be second nature.” Part of the development of these systems involves enhancing voice command technology, letting officers activate the tool they need while keeping their hands free.

Much of the work Motorola Solutions is doing in this area is being conducted at the company’s large research and development center in Airport City. On display at the show were a number of devices and systems that Motorola plans to sell in the new future, much of them based on made in Israel technology – with some, such as the company’s LEX 700 Mission Critical Handheld fully developed here.

“As we develop and build systems we will be rolling them out here in Israel, where they will be tweaked and then implemented elsewhere,” said Steinberg. “Israel is the example for others when it comes to homeland security.” Israel has the trained personnel and the unfortunate experience of having to deal with homeland security issues in a much more intensive way than any other country, he added, and the confluence of trained personnel and experience in dealing with security issues makes Israel the best place to develop homeland security technologies.

And for those who think that his description of the “cop of the future” sounds a bit 1984-ish, Steinberg reminds us that law enforcement and homeland security officers are really only playing catch-up. “The bad guys already have, and use, these tools,” he said. “We have to make sure the good guys get them, so they can get ahead and stay there, in order to ensure the safety of the public.”