Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
originally designed starting around WW II for military use to overlay navigational
information onto aircraft windshields or helmets, but are now commonplace within
most gaming user interfaces to display information such as health and inventory
as well as chat boxes and mini-maps to collaborate with teammates. Google Glass
works in a similar way by showing various types of information in the upper-right
section of your field of view. It can provide you with directions, look up facts,
translate your voice or physical signage and of course help connect you with others.
One of Glass's most powerful features is the ability to live-stream video from your
own point of view anywhere and anytime. It's similar to a Google Hangout, but
it's completely untethered. These features quite distinctly differentiate Glass from
other forms of AR by creating what we can describe as Social Immersion rather than
Sensorial Immersion like the Rift.
8.3.2
Socially Immersive Artworks
Google Glass art is like the new reality TV - Glass art through livestreaming ties
back to artist and Internet pioneer Josh Harris and his various '90s projects like
“Quiet: We Live in Public” which surrounded 100 secluded artists with webcams
and broadcast their every move onto the Internet. Now Glass ups the ante by
enabling completely untethered high quality directorial power to broadcast your
own life or the lives of those you think the public may covet.
Helpouts (Helpouts by Google) were released in November 2013 in order to
create a public marketplace for purported experts to provide real-time video chats
for a fee. They are in essence an extension of Google Hangouts which have been
continuously evolving to provide better quality multi-user video chat rooms with
included screen sharing and embedded text chats. While the marketplace is only a
couple months old, there are already thousands of advertised services listed there
grouped into the following categories: Art & Music, Computers & Electronics,
Cooking, Education & Careers, Fashion & Beauty, Fitness & Nutrition, Health and
finally Home & Garden. The specific services being offered tend to range from pre-
made lessons (e.g. over 50 people offering Helpouts to Learn to Play Guitar) to more
personal problem-solving sessions (e.g. over 70 people offering Helpouts to solve
peoples' Computer Issues). These live video sessions are particularly well suited for
use with Glass in that many of them require the instructor to be hands free in order
to help execute the Helpout.
New York artist Molly Crabapple made a drawing of porn star and circus
performer Stoya while wearing a pair of hacked Glasses in a project entitled
Glass Gaze (Artist gazes at porn performer 2013). The Glass enabled Crabapple
to live-stream what she saw and thereby “to take the most classical, thousand-
year-old way of looking: an artist looking at a model. It's the most undistracted,
direct, unmediated thing. And then run it through this super-mediated, captured,
commodified way of seeing that Glass represents.” Crabapple reports that wearing
