Can someone please look through that slideshow and explain to me how anyone could single out Google Glass as "silly" with a straight face? I mean, look at these earrings:
This is a community that upvoted a story about wearing the same outfit every day to the front page last week. I say we leave the fashion critiques to them and they leave the technology analogies ("they're an iPhone you can wear on your face") to us.
I don't care about fashion one way or another. I understand that it is a kind of art that is not supposed to be appreciated in the sense of "real people actually will wear this specific outfit". A lot of it looks completely ridiculous, but I understand that there is artistic merit (which I have no grounding to appreciate, or any real interest in) to it outside of what it looks like if you imagine someone on the street wearing it.
Which is why it seems to me like "that looks silly" isn't a valid thing to say at a fashion show in the first place.
The high-end fashion designer's job is to push the edge of clothing, to give clients something new and interesting. Honestly, I don't know that many women will buy that particular piece, but they looked pretty good with the outfit, and in general I thought her accessory choices were pretty good.
The glasses, on the other hand, looked out of place. I understood exactly where the author was coming from -- due to the technology, the glasses still look a bit odd.
I'm always amazed with the... what is even a good word for the tone of this article? "Rich people scratching each other's backs" and "an iphone you can wear on your face."
Dismissive? Contemptuous? Irritated? Something.
Anyways, its always weird to see tech covered by non-tech outlets. It seems like the result is often worded like this.
This just reads like any contemporary "fashion" writing to me. You see it in those magazines with a model on the cover and stories about if he's really that into you inside. I think you summed it up pretty well, but I don't think it's got very much to do with the subject matter.
I won't berate a fashion column for not going 'I wonder what they were' and then actually researching and finding out that yes, they will be sold to the public and so on.
However, it's interesting that they've been essentially branded as seriously uncool before they've even launched. I wonder if this will lead to someone at Google trying to make them more stylish, or whether they'll hope the target market isn't fussed on fashion and style and it'll spread enough for them to not care.
The start up community tends to operate in a bubble. Wearing something that makes you stand out as 'uncool' and a target for theft is enough to deter people from a product. Take the white ipod ear buds, they were 'cool' enough that most people would were them, however bluetooth handsfree headsets only took off with specific demographics.
"However, it's interesting that they've been essentially branded as seriously uncool before they've even launched."
The minute these were targeted for public release the fashion community's opinion was written in stone: uncool. An indeterminate but large part of the appeal of being in the high fashion world is the exclusivity. If they liked them it would be the kiss of death for seeing massive public uptake.
Not necessarily, it depends on how high in the clouds of high fashion you go. To the consumer level (expensive but not as over the top as some) then there's a trickle down of borrowing styles and themes from the top designers.
Plus something being really exclusive to a certain group of the population can have a massive effect on lust for another group of the population.
Just wait for the moment when laptops will be called iPads with keyboards and radios will be iPods for streaming without internet. Oh and Google self-driving car is just Siri on wheels.
They don't need to convince nerds. They need to convince the general public that Glass is cool, fashionable, and not a reason to shun someone. If Glass is treated as weird and undesirable even the nerds will eventually fall victim to the peer pressure and stop wearing them.
They need to if they want people to use it (and getting models at a fashion show to use it is pretty strong evidence they do want it to become fashionable).
I wear contact lenses and I would buy one of these without prescription glass in them. Not to use as glasses, but for the value-add. Adding features to the outdated design of the human body is a net positive as far as I'm concerned.
On the contrary, this may prove to be a brilliant partnership, in a evil mad scientist way.
If you understand how a trend starts, this is a perfectly logical place to attempt broader acceptance of what is, aesthetically-speaking, a bizarre fashion accessory.
There are distinct sociological strata that fashion trends progress through on their way to the mainstream and they never start at "nerdy conferences".
Is this one of those strata, though? I keep seeing "get a load of what she's wearing" excerpts from fashion shows for bizarre stuff that's never seen again.
Perhaps the goal is to get mainstream people accustomed to seeing people wearing the odd looking device. I don't think they look all that fashionable, but I could say the same about other things at most fashion shows.
Maybe by having them at fashions shows, they become fashionable? There is some kind of self fulling prophecy here....
Mainstream people don't watch fashion shows, nerds much like ourselves but who like clothes instead of computers watch fashion shows, I'd wager they were just trying to get it out there to designers and get feedback like this for free. Pretty clever of them if you ask me.
Fashion shows make the front page of news sites like seattlepi.com all the time, well beyond the public interest in fashion shows, since news sites like to show pictures.
Perhaps they learned from Apple. The iPod was seen as inferior in terms of features-for-price and the iTunes Eco system most likely did not help it among the hacker-set. So I think its appeal to the fashionable elite crowd played a large part in Apple's mainstream success to date
User interface design is a very important feature, as were other usability differences like Firewire for transferring tracks from your computer to your device quickly.
Specs like being able to play FLAC, and minor differences in capacity per dollar, and often higher quality DACs did not matter as much as the design that made it easier to use.
It is also worth remembering that competing devices addressed the problem of a large library with search, while the iPod instead used an active matrix LCD combined with a large scroll wheel to quickly navigate the hierarchy of artists <- albums <- tracks.
I had a Creative Nomad before the first generation iPod, and even though the Nomad had larger capacity, it immediately seemed like junk in comparison.
We get stats from phone companies that complain about how much more iPhone users use their data plans, and I suspect that if had similar data for iPod we would find that users simply used their devices to listen to music more than users of competing devices.
Stylish ads may have been a large part of publicizing them, but it was the complete change in interface design that made people actually use them regardless of whether they enjoy gadgets for their own sake.
Maybe I'm not remembering correctly but wasn't the iPod the first MP3 player to combine a disk harddrive with flash memory? Thereby allowing it to store gigs of music when the rest were touting 64 - 128 MBs of storage?
No. The early iPods used a hard drive, the later ones used flash for storage. The iPod was not the first device to provide a hard disk for large storage; look up the Personal Jukebox and the Creative NOMAD.
(I know it came post-iPod, but I loved my Creative NOMAD Zen Xtra. 60 GB drive and it would play all day on a charge, no trouble (wish my Android phone could pull that off))
That's smart of Google. And refreshing to read a non-techie write about the Glasses. To be successful in a mass market you will have to appeal to these people, something the iPhone obviously did. This collaboration will give Google valuable data on what non-techies think about Glasses and will help them refine the concept and marketing. Plus it will give them some great marketing material with top models wearing their product. The film will help them experiment with what on earth you do with all of these video streams. Can't wait to see what they'll make of it.
Maybe this question has already been answered, but are Google Glasses designed to be compatible with individuals whom wear prescription glasses? At a first glance, it looks like they currently aren't.
Google Glasses are the next hands free Bluetooth headset. Constantly blinking on someone's ear. It's annoying and will be culturally unacceptable to most people. The same reason why Bluetooth headsets haven't really caught on all that well in public. It's annoying and unnecessary to be connected to that extreme. That's why they'll fail.
Glass, people. Stop calling them Glasses. There is only one. NYM and NYT both got it wrong-- NYT even misheadlined the article that had the right content.
Can someone please look through that slideshow and explain to me how anyone could single out Google Glass as "silly" with a straight face? I mean, look at these earrings:
http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/fashion/shows/2013/spring/new-yo...
Look at them.