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Meron Gribetz wants to build a version of Google Glass that doesn't make you look like an idiot.
The Israeli-born former Columbia University student is the man behind Meta. The company's basic mission is to create computerized glasses that are everything Google Glass is not -- stylish, cool, and non-distracting.
“We want to make it look like a pair of Ray Bans,” says Gribetz. “[So] it looks exactly like what you’re wearing anyway. Is this a shirt or a digital shirt? Who knows.”
At the same time, as you don these digital glasses, Meta wants to ensure that the people around you are comfortable with them. Meta prototypes include a front-facing LED that will let others know when you're recording the world around you.
The company arrives at a critical juncture for wearable computers. Google Glass -- the web giant's computerized googles project -- has sparked a cultural debate. The devices have been derided as awkward, creepy, and de-humanizing, harbingers of Orwellian mass surveillance and markers of how intimate moments have been permanently corrupted by technology. And they aren't even available to the public yet.
But even as controversies engulf Glass, we’re seeing signs of how such wearables might fit harmoniously into society. From the technical side, Meta is working to improve projection techniques and form factors, allowing for cooler devices that can project information into the normal field of vision, eliminating the tell-tale diagonal gaze required with Glass. On the sociological side, we may even see greater acceptance of computer glasses, social behavior experts say.
If these advances can take the stigma out of using gadgets like Glass, the door will open to mass acceptance -- and thus mass sales -- of such goggles, creating a vital new front in a computing revolution that already has upended the personal computer industry via smartphones and tablets. But many people are still skeptical.
Gribetz isn't one of them, and many others are backing his crusade to make computer glasses successful. Prominent incubator YCombinator is investing in the venture, and tech luminary Steve Wozniak has pre-ordered an early version of the Meta glasses, due this fall.
Gribetz jump-started the project this month by hiring designer Martin Hasek, whose influence should be every bit as important as that of the engineers working on Meta’s stereoscopic 3D viewing capabilities and on its “true augmented reality system.” The system lets wearers look straight ahead as they normally do rather than at a video image in the corner of their field of view, as with Google Glass.
If you move beyond Silicon Valley, people are quick to tell you technology and design alone will not win widespread acceptance for computer glasses. There must be a social shift as well. The good news -- at least for people selling products like Google Glass -- is that society has learned to accept all kinds of technologies that initially scared people by raising privacy problems, both perceived and real.
“Most of us have demonstrated our willingness to sacrifice privacy for visibility, convenience, fun, and being a part of the collective,” says Lisa Wade, a sociology professor at Occidental College. “My suspicion is that, barring some extraordinary event that seriously shakes us up, Google Glass will become mundane.”
But before Glass becomes mundane, Wade predicts, it will become highly desirable. Or, as she puts it, associated with “a forward-thinking, innovative person with connections and money.”
This is a view endorsed by Whitney Erin Boesel, a frequent commentator on the social implications of technology who is earning her doctorate in sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Boesel has written that Google Glass serves as a status marker, one eagerly awaited by well-to-do digerati whose iPhones have become commonplace.
“Cell phones were symbols of masculine power when only wealthy businessmen had them, but now that literally billions of people own them, the cell phone’s ability to signify status has given three beeps and vanished like a dropped call,” Boesel wrote by way of comparison. “And now, something similar is set to happen with smartphones: Google Glass is the new iPhone.”
While the cool-ification of digital goggles is good news for Google and entrepreneurs like Gribetz, it may end up becoming something of a curse for us ordinary folk, still struggling to adapt our hunter-gatherer minds and intimate real-world relationships to bright, shiny, supremely distracting devices like smartphones and tablets, which have an uncanny ability to wedge themselves into dates, family dinners, and all kinds of social gatherings.
“Kudos to Meta. They’ve solved a technical problem that was out there,” says Sherry Tuttle, an MIT professor and author of a recent book on tech-driven isolation. “But from my perspective, the trouble with these new objects is they are taking us away from presence, and the more we confront that, the better it is for us...Your mom used to say, when you were a little girl or boy, ‘look at me when you talk to me.’ She was right. That’s how people connect.”
