Designing for Wearables

Chapter 4. The Glass Experiment

A Truly Wearable Computer

Google Glass, and what happened with Google Glass, has to be one of the most interesting stories in the history of wearable devices. The device came from a surprisingly long history in terms of functionality. It became a major cultural touchpoint and ultimately taught us a lot about where we are in terms of public acceptance of certain technologies. This entire book is about wearable computers, which are basically any devices strapped to your body that perform computation, but Glass belongs to a group of wearables that are truly wearable computers, a general-purpose computational platform that is designed to be worn on the body.

Glass is particularly interesting when you think about its relationship to computers as a whole. As I mentioned in the beginning of the book, we’re approaching the point at which technologies are small and powerful enough to no longer be restricted to what we now consider their traditional forms. Without significant constraints in terms of the size of the technology, we’re free to create computers that are designed from the ground up with our bodies in mind, and a truly wearable computer might make the most sense as the ideal form factor of computers as a whole.

Early Wearable Computers

Before computers had an established form factor of terminals with typewriter-style keyboards and big flat monitors, there were a handful of people who built devices that we wouldn’t recognize as computers today. The first ...