Build an App: Fun with Google's Project Glass

 

You may have heard of Google's Project Glass, a mobile computing project that puts its users behind the frames of augmented reality eye wear. As I understand it, these glasses function as a kind of hands-free smart phone that displays its data on the eyeglass lens rather than a touch screen. A promotional video (above) introducing the glasses features a "day in the life" narrative of a Project Glass eye wear user, and shows him replying to instant messages, checking the weather, and being notified that the train he planned on taking is out of service. Immediately after he's told that he won't be taking the train, the device begins calculating and displaying an alternative walking route for him to take to his planned destination.

Perhaps you’ve also heard of the so-called “avoid ghetto” smartphone application. The GPS route recommender got this nickname because it considers a neighborhood’s demographics and crime statistics along with weather reports and recent maps when it suggests routes. 

When I first heard of the “avoid ghetto” app, I immediately thought of our growing reliability on GPS devices, and I wondered how they might be working to widen the growing gulf of social stratification. I imagined suburban teens driving around in cars that ensured they wouldn't have to know what poverty looks like. 

So, when I watched the Project Glass video calculate an alternative route for its augmented reality user, I wondered about the filtering possibilities of this augmentation. Might there be a way to avoid spare-changers? Find safe venues for recreational slumming? See only cute people and kitties? Might you somehow/someway/someday be able to augment your particular experience of reality to filter out select unseemly experiences? 

I’ve got two app ideas for Project Glass that also augment reality, but hopefully do so in a way that pushes its users to read their experiences rhetorically, that is, to understand that what they are seeing is an argument—one interpretation of how to perceive what's in front of them.  

1: The Psychogeography Application*

(Note: I'm interested in how psychogeographical approaches to engineered spaces can disrupt our expectations of how space should/could/can be understood and used. You may see me bring odd terms like "psychogeography" into our class simply because it's on my mind a lot).

Let’s imagine that Google knows a lot about you and your behaviors, habits, phobias, hobbies, interests, the kinds of restaurants and shops you frequent, your daily routine, and the kinds of places you’re likely not to go.   ;)

The psychogeography app is designed to challenge you to see the places that you "know" differently and introduce you to places you wouldn’t think to go.

Say I ask the psychogeography app to take me to the farmer’s market. The psychogeography app may not lead me there. It might, but you never know. It may take me on a trip to a part of town I’ve never been to before. It may provide only scant or intermittent directives, or ask me to wander around aimlessly. It may actually take me to the farmer’s market, but once I’m there it will give me a map that challenges the way I’ve always experienced the farmer’s market. Perhaps the “produce” “fish” and “meat” will be labeled “Peggy” “Tom” and “Pat” forcing me to experience the farmer’s market as a network of flesh and blood people rather than products. Perhaps it will ask me to navigate the farmer's market I'm in with a map of a farmer's market in another part of the world or country.

*Not sure yet if an app like this would be antithetical to the ethos of psychogeography. If you have any thoughts on that, please share.

2: The World Through My Window Application

Ever see the movie They Live? This app is kind of like the glasses from that movie, but instead of revealing scary aliens living among us, these would help us recognize that the scary aliens are ourselves. Yes, you. I’m one too. And so is everyone we know. Boo! I’m going to turn you into a mindless consumer machine! Wait, we’re already consumer machines? Buzz kill. 

The world through my window app is actually pretty simple. It would allow us to experience the word through the eyes of other people. My experience of reality would be augmented to match that of yours, or hers, or hirs, or his. The idea is that interpellations like this might breed understanding. This could lead to a massive mind meld and the power of our collective consciousness might make the universe explode. Or maybe people won’t fight as much.