They say you just have to find a direction and walk
February 8, 2014 12:07 PM   Subscribe

"Last week I saw two visions for the future. The first is Her...and the other was this Infinity Augmented Reality concept video which had me in fits of laughter because it was so… well, just watch it for yourself. I liked seeing both. However accurate or ridiculous (and how can we truly know until the future is here?), the act of inventing is what sparks the realities of tomorrow." - Julie Zhuo imagines The Future.
posted by Potomac Avenue (79 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
The IAR video is the future as envisioned by creepy 20-something PUAs. All this amazing tech and all they can think of is getting laid and gamishitificating everything.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 12:16 PM on February 8, 2014 [54 favorites]


The heads-up Facebook stalking is one thing, but this man requires an app to extract emotional cues from tone of voice. That poor woman is going to accidentally open his freezer full of the meticulously labeled heads of his previous victims, and then the evening is going to take a turn for the worse.
posted by figurant at 12:17 PM on February 8, 2014 [35 favorites]


I am so glad that I am not the byproduct of an augmented reality pickup artist.
posted by oceanjesse at 12:22 PM on February 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


That Infinity thing.....it's real? It's quite a day when you witness something that stupid and horrifying in the same breath.
posted by Lipstick Thespian at 12:24 PM on February 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


Another depiction of augmented reality. More realistically creepy.

previously
posted by localroger at 12:27 PM on February 8, 2014 [9 favorites]


AR concept videos that just show interfaces overlaid on top of the viewer's normal visual field suffer from a lack of imagination. I'm more impressed with the kind of stuff that CastAR is doing: seamlessly integrating 3D projections into the world, like the holographic chess monsters on Star Wars. On Jimmy Pardo's last podcast, Adam Scott was talking about how he always wished he could have a hologram of a little foot-tall version of his favorite band come and play a concert on his tabletop. Hologram technology isn't there, but AR tech isn't too far off. This is how a Holodeck can actually be made possible.
posted by painquale at 12:28 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


the future is whatever happens next.
I'm going for a walk.
posted by philip-random at 12:29 PM on February 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


They skipped the part where the guys in the pool hall beat the crap out of him for cheating and stomped on his $1500 glasses.
posted by octothorpe at 12:41 PM on February 8, 2014 [49 favorites]


Nothing sets you up for a successful bike ride like a scotch on the rocks right before jumping on.
posted by jquinby at 12:47 PM on February 8, 2014 [13 favorites]


My eyes finally went bad - I was looking forward to getting a nice pair of good old-fashioned spectacles, but then the sleazy internet-futurists wafted in, ruined my avuncular phase and made me feel filthy inside.
posted by gorgor_balabala at 12:47 PM on February 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


There are people out there who aspire to be the dude in that video....Is there an app that automatically routes your existence around such folks?
posted by sendai sleep master at 12:48 PM on February 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


figurant: "The heads-up Facebook stalking is one thing, but this man requires an app to extract emotional cues from tone of voice. That poor woman is going to accidentally open his freezer full of the meticulously labeled heads of his previous victims, and then the evening is going to take a turn for the worse."

I kept waiting for a discussion of the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News' Sports...
posted by symbioid at 12:51 PM on February 8, 2014 [8 favorites]


The IAR concept video only works in a world where this is the only person with the AR glasses, and nobody else has ever heard of the concept.

The video: "You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you? (read off her Facebook profile)" "How did you know?" "Just a lucky guess". (Proceed to flirting and dating)

More accurate: "You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you?" "Yeah, yeah, you read it off my profile like every other schmuck."

I do kinda like the idea that there'd be some tidbit like that that you'd leave public, specifically to weed out people who see that and try to bring it up. PUA Honeypot.
posted by CrystalDave at 12:53 PM on February 8, 2014 [43 favorites]


So many curmudgeons.

Thinking about a smart watch. Don't need it (that's what I said about smart phones), but I'm curious.
posted by saber_taylor at 1:18 PM on February 8, 2014


You know, this video has me thinking: maybe the whole AR thing could do wonders for people with Aspergers/high-functioning autism. Having a more-or-less constant 'companion' to help decode social cues could be a huge boon.

(Though yeah, as presented, this is so mega hella creepy. Eesh.)
posted by Itaxpica at 1:21 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Let me know when this tech is jacked directly into the brain like that memory recording grain in Mirror Black. I don't like having to wear glasses or contacts for my augmented reality.
posted by birdherder at 1:24 PM on February 8, 2014


> The IAR concept video only works in a world where this is the only person with the AR glasses, and nobody else has ever heard of the concept. ...

More accurate: "You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you?" "Yeah, yeah, you read it off my profile like every other schmuck."


Nope, the bar's her place of work, and she's not stupid. The Simpsons knew exactly what happens here:

"You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you?"
"Oh you."
posted by benito.strauss at 1:36 PM on February 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


EGG →
← LETTUCE
CHICKEN ↓

Ingredient-recognition technology, people. Wave of the future.
posted by koeselitz at 1:38 PM on February 8, 2014 [30 favorites]


But it tells you what's in your salad! It distinguishes between egg and chicken! Oh crap, what koeselitz said.
posted by parki at 1:40 PM on February 8, 2014




Well, how the hell am I supposed to figure out what's in this salad that I made myself? Once it goes through the salad spinner, it becomes a mystery! Oh crap, what koeselitz and parki said.
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:40 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I kept waiting for a discussion of the finer points of Huey Lewis and the News' Sports...

BAT(E)MAN BEYOND
posted by Strange Interlude at 1:42 PM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


Seriously, I'd rather have Jack Womack's world of bodyguards with personal chainsaws over a vision of the future where some dude who needs his Google Glass to make small talk and that's presented as a good thing.

I was kinda hoping the video would be like the moment in The Diamond Age where a guy's personal network gets hacked and an advertisement plays continuously 24/7.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 1:46 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Yes, I want the drivers on the streets of my city, drivers who already can't manage to get two cars down a one way street without a moderate danger of a close traffic call, to have half their vision obscure with "helpful" icons. This will go poorly for me, I can tell you. Perhaps my glasses will warn me, "hey, you are about to be hit by a car." That will make me feel great about myself.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:00 PM on February 8, 2014 [6 favorites]


More accurate: "You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you?" "Yeah, yeah, you read it off my profile like every other schmuck."

"You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini, would you?"

She looks at him briefly, cocking her head slightly to the side. She starts to smile, and she's halfway there when her eyes narrow.

Briefly he catches a glimpse of his glasses putting up a snowstorm of warning messages before crashing out to a distorted terminal window. Page after page of angular text scrolls by too fast to read before the glasses finally lock up, a hexdump of meaningless line noise frozen in his vision for that fraction of a second before the bouncer puts his face into the bar.

He's barely got time to realize that his bouncer's been around this block before as the wristband where the rest of the hardware lives gets twisted up into the small of his back. Some small, deft movement and the glasses are gone; the wristband is already under the bouncer's bootheel, but the arm lock hasn't let up a hair.

In the moment he's pulled up off the bar he notices that the arm around his neck is tattooed from the wrist in; It's a seamless, twisting Japanese design that disappears under the tailored black jackets he shares with the two other men stepping into the wide space the bar's patrons have made for them.

One of them, the squat, heavyset one is wearing something like the glasses he's left in pieces on the bar but they're heavy, angular things, the squared-up matte black of a Glock. His partner takes his client's other arm, locking the wrist up as he and the bouncer look on expectantly.

The box on the decider's wrist looks the same as his glasses, a humorless block of Austrian milspec meant to be dragged through miles of swamp and desert en route to ruining somebody's day. It dawns on the man in the armlock, slowly, that those models can call up medical history, blood type... organ compatibility. He'd been a good citizen, checked that box on his drivers' license, given the DMV the drop of blood they needed for their records. His eyes widen.

The decider taps on it, stares for a moment that stretches seconds too long.

"The back room", he says. Then he turns , parting the crowd, as the bouncer drags him afterwards.

The arm around his neck tightens as he tries to scream, the thin sound that's all he can muster lost in the ambient noise.
posted by mhoye at 2:00 PM on February 8, 2014 [58 favorites]


I was so convinced it was a parody thing that would just keep going on through the hookup, with the interface showing him a diagram for how to unhook her bra, identifying her clit and helping him time and angle any thrusting going on... Eventually he wakes up alone, glasses-less, in the middle of the night and walks to the bathroom to pee and he doesn't have any stream targeting assistance and wets himself and makes a mess. Because he has nothing handily suggesting a link to "top 10 bathroom cleaning tips that will leave you speechless!" he just ends up on the tile floor, covered in pee, crying.
posted by Mizu at 2:00 PM on February 8, 2014 [32 favorites]


This Lawnmower Man remake sucks!
posted by Brocktoon at 2:01 PM on February 8, 2014 [4 favorites]


My favorite part of the video was the big, vision-obscuring rectangle that said "DRIVE SAFE."
posted by evidenceofabsence at 2:03 PM on February 8, 2014 [14 favorites]


Who else remembers the Saturday Night Live "Virtual Reality Books" sketch? This reminded me of that.
posted by stargell at 2:06 PM on February 8, 2014


Wow, that was an amazingly douchetastic video, one of those personal fantasies that tells you way more about someone than they think it does.
posted by Dip Flash at 2:07 PM on February 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


I guess I saw the video as raising questions rather than answering them. The ingredient identification clip seems more like, I guess we could do this, but we're really not sure what the point of it would be.
posted by saber_taylor at 2:12 PM on February 8, 2014


It's amusing to pair up such cutting edge technology with stone-age social attitudes. It would have worked better if the guy had permed hair, a mustache and polyester shirt open to show his gold chains. If nothing else a 70's look would have matched the muscle car and the astrology bullshit better.
posted by octothorpe at 2:13 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


It was nice of them to add the guy driving the Porsche Convertible to really drive home the 1%-ness of the insufferable douchebag's behaviour. With all the other elements, the ad was so perfectly calibrated to help me see that I in no way want this thing to be a part of my future.

But then, I think they had a different intention...
posted by dry white toast at 2:14 PM on February 8, 2014


I'd be so into the ingredient identification thing, actually. It'd be great for food tracking, macronutrients, etc. To the left of the "this is chicken!" points you could see the caloric values.

The rest of the video is gross, but I'd be down for (optional) automatic logging of food.
posted by c'mon sea legs at 2:16 PM on February 8, 2014


That video presumes these glasses are still rare. If this helps people play pool so well, they'd either all be wearing them, or they have a rule forbidding them. And if there's a pickup app for the glasses, the bartender would have encountered this before and recognize what's going on.


Zhuo's bit actually tries to consider that by the time the technology is mature, it's ubiquitous.


Has anyone done a video of five guys going out for drinks, four of them have the glasses, and they keep getting distracted from the conversation and staring off in the distance?
posted by RobotHero at 2:34 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


I'm more interested in whatever terrifying event in Her's future timeline led to belts apparently being outlawed.
posted by Sangermaine at 2:38 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I'd like to think that if Blur's Charmless Man was written today, the protagonist would have Google Glass.
posted by absolutelynot at 2:39 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


I think I watched the commercial for American Pyscho the reboot.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 2:40 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


The arm around his neck tightens as he tries to scream, the thin sound that's all he can muster lost in the ambient noise.

The sky over the port was the colour of the Google Glass 'lost network' message.
posted by Sebmojo at 2:46 PM on February 8, 2014 [12 favorites]


I actually kind of like the idea of "augmented reality as driving assistance." Not in a babysitting "step on the brakes you idiot, pass this taxi and save time" sense, but to increase the contrast of changing focal points from a boosted machine vision perspective. For example, say you're driving on a gray highway, and a skunk crosses the road. A smart algorithm that handles anomalous edge detection could notice something just ran into the road, and that little section of interest could be a more visible color. So instead of having a scurrying black on gray creature-on-highway death situation, the black skunk could be overlaid with a transparent orange layer, thus improving visibility and maybe reducing collisions. Or instead of skunks, deer avoidance. Or instead of deer, bicyclist or pedestrian avoidance. But instead of that sort of practical, useful application, all they can come up with is a million iterations of "put these on so you can get laid?" It's like an Axe commercial for brogrammers.
posted by oceanjesse at 2:46 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Speaking of focal points I guess Steven Mann thought Google Glasses regressed from a lot of trial and error he had learned w.r.t. augmented glasses. But at a certain point the social implications become more interesting than the hardware.
posted by saber_taylor at 2:53 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


In the "gamification" future, you will be required to wear these for your job, but at least you will have the option to customize people the Company has red-flagged as Orcs or Klingons.
posted by fraxil at 2:54 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


I do kinda like the idea of a system that would identify a printed image you're looking at as a still frame from a video and pull the video up.

More realistically creepy.

More realistically creepy? I was going to post a link to the same thing, but I think it's going to be a hell of a long time before your Google Glass can hack into your brain and control your mind.
posted by XMLicious at 2:57 PM on February 8, 2014


MetaFilter Google Glass: Like an Axe commercial for brogrammers.
posted by mosk at 3:09 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Well I meant the creepiness was realistic, not the actual capabilities, which aren't currently realistic for any of these videos.
posted by localroger at 3:09 PM on February 8, 2014


Are people misidentifying the car as a Porsche on purpose, to make some kind of point about not being invested in sportscars? Because I don't think the man/camera* could ogle those huge Ferrari logos a second longer without a heads-up display AI suggesting that he ask it out to dinner.

* even apart from the Batemanesque maximum-douche worldview, this video's use of objective/subjective camera is really poorly thought out and confusing
posted by RogerB at 3:10 PM on February 8, 2014 [7 favorites]


This wasn't Google Glass, more like Facebook Glass, and that's a Future I don't want to live in.
posted by oneswellfoop at 3:11 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


"Ingredient-recognition technology, people. Wave of the future."

If it counted calories, portion size and nutritional analysis, I'd actually really like that. Also, it would be excellent, really really unbelievably excellent if you could build in a chem sensor that would analyze the contents of your drinks.
posted by oddman at 3:14 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on this guys glasses - forever.
posted by Free word order! at 3:23 PM on February 8, 2014 [11 favorites]


I don't know, I feel sorry for the guy in the Infinity AR video. He is obviously missing a large portion of brain, from a horrific injury or somesuch: Unaware of what city he is in until reminded. Unable to estimate the weather even with a panoramic view from his window. Unable to make basic decisions about what to wear. Unable to memorize directions. Unable to process that '30% chance of rain' means you may want to leave the top up on your convertible. Unable to recognize obstacles in the road unless they are pointed out. Unable to make lane-change choices unless guided. Unable to park at all, apparently. Unable to make real friends to play pool with. Unable to form meaningful connections with anyone, really, requiring the crudest kind of manipulation to form fleeting, ersatz relationships. Unable to read a person's mood or tone of voice. Unable to motivate himself, requiring constant external feedback and reinforcement. Unable to recognize faces of people he has just met without being reminded. Unable to distinguish animal from vegetable in his food.

Truly this man should be the object of our compassion.
posted by um at 3:24 PM on February 8, 2014 [34 favorites]




they delved too greedily and too deep
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:10 PM on February 8, 2014 [9 favorites]


This thread is so much better than so many other things.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 4:15 PM on February 8, 2014 [3 favorites]


Are people misidentifying the car as a Porsche on purpose, to make some kind of point about not being invested in sportscars?

Oh the horsey picture was a car tribe thing? I thought it was some sort of secret brony identification badge, and was sad that we didn't get to see him spend some quality time looking at clop on Deviant Art.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 4:18 PM on February 8, 2014 [5 favorites]


It's funny, but I was in a bar downtown last week and this Russian woman with a cute hat kept going on about some footage on the web. I'm wondering if it was this thing she was talking about.

Of course, I lied and said I had already seen it.
posted by valkane at 4:21 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


jquinby: "Nothing sets you up for a successful bike ride like a scotch on the rocks right before jumping on."

...this is actually true, though

(Although putting a few down and then getting on a trainer is really missing the point.)
posted by invitapriore at 4:36 PM on February 8, 2014


"Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider; these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society."

I'm just happy that we're more and more likely to have the Ark II future instead.
posted by happyroach at 5:00 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


Googling up on the date in real time sure is creepy.

Good point Itaxpica, taken out of this context, technology that assists in reading body language and other cues could be of great help to many. Makes me wonder where does that technology go currently. Surveillance cameras notice behaviours such as running or loitering, and there is face recognition in cameras to detect smiles, but can they read anything finer than that?
posted by Arkki at 6:45 PM on February 8, 2014


I rather imagine that the AR scene in the bar would go more like this.


"Hey, what can I get you?"

"I'll have a whiskey, neat."
>SCANS FACE MELISSA BANKS FB PROFILE APPEARS

"You wouldn't happen to be a Gemini would you?"

"How did you know that... wait let me try."

(makes hands into Junior Birdman goggles and puts them up to her face)

"You wouldn't happen to be a douchebag would you?"

CLEARLY SHE POSSESES SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY

MOOD - ANNOYED WITH YOUR BULLSHIT

THIS ONE'S TOO GOOD FOR YOU, HOSS

LOL
posted by louche mustachio at 7:55 PM on February 8, 2014 [15 favorites]


I don't know, I feel sorry for the guy in the Infinity AR video. He is obviously missing a large portion of brain, from a horrific injury or somesuch

Nah, he's just been using those glasses for a few years. You know how when you start using a cell phone, calculator, or inline spell checker, your ability to remember phone numbers, do mental math, or spell words starts to atrophy?
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:25 PM on February 8, 2014 [1 favorite]


They lost me 18 seconds into the video. "GLASSES ON", and all I could think of was this.
posted by xedrik at 8:56 PM on February 8, 2014


You know how when you start using a cell phone, calculator, or inline spell checker, your ability to remember phone numbers, do mental math, or spell words starts to atrophy?

I used to think this was the case, but I realized that years drinking with stingy graduate students honed my mental math skills to razor-sharp levels. I can calculate any percentage of a bar tab for tip instantly, determine the most amount of pints one could drink based off prices and available cash, and figure out who the cheap basterd of the group is moments after they've put their share of the bill on the table. Smartphones be damned, suspicious students with limited drinking funds have way more on the line and are faster any day of the week.
posted by kurosawa's pal at 9:14 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


A smart algorithm that handles anomalous edge detection could notice something just ran into the road, and that little section of interest could be a more visible color. So instead of having a scurrying black on gray creature-on-highway death situation, the black skunk could be overlaid with a transparent orange layer, thus improving visibility and maybe reducing collisions.

I think if your car is that smart, you're probably better off just letting it do the driving.
posted by straight at 10:28 PM on February 8, 2014 [2 favorites]


Is the ending a nod to 15 million merits? I doubt it, that would take some self-awareness.
posted by benzenedream at 10:40 PM on February 8, 2014


I don't know about the writer/director of the video, but the voice actor reading the guy's lines has got to be making fun of the main character.

If I were directing that guy and had told him to play the character as a creepy loser, I'd have listened to this and told him to dial it back a little.
posted by straight at 10:49 PM on February 8, 2014


no amount of augmented reality is going to let that dude win a pool challenge with a stroke like that.
posted by lastobelus at 11:24 PM on February 8, 2014


For example, say you're driving on a gray highway, and a skunk crosses the road. A smart algorithm that handles anomalous edge detection could notice something just ran into the road, and that little section of interest could be a more visible color. So instead of having a scurrying black on gray creature-on-highway death situation, the black skunk could be overlaid with a transparent orange layer, thus improving visibility and maybe reducing collisions.

Already exists.
posted by dhartung at 11:27 PM on February 8, 2014


My favorite part of the video was the big, vision-obscuring rectangle that said "DRIVE SAFE."

I thought that was the most realistic part of the video; you just know that any VR intended for use while driving is going to come with five or six mandatory full screen "safety" warnings first.

And probably an ad for Blu-ray
posted by ook at 5:37 AM on February 9, 2014


I was just watching an episode of BBC's Click which showed a cool application, though unfortunately it doesn't seem to be available on the site as a video clip. Evidently a working version of this project from 2007, it showed someone stopping on the road because their "check engine" light came on, opening the car's hood, and the app showed an overlay engine schematic with animations demonstrating how to check the oil dipstick and refill the oil.

I also remembered this post from 2012 about a system built into a welder's hood that did a realtime analysis of the quality of the weld being made.
posted by XMLicious at 6:37 AM on February 9, 2014


Will there be an "X-Ray Specs" app that will make everything look like chicken feathers?
posted by lagomorphius at 6:39 AM on February 9, 2014


This video will have precisely the effect desired, which is to briefly gain the salivating attention of the 14-24 male demo, thus creating a brief pump and dump window (for the penny stock, I mean, cough). Move along.
posted by intermod at 9:16 AM on February 9, 2014


The IAR concept video only works in a world where this is the only person with the AR glasses, and nobody else has ever heard of the concept.

This.
Otherwise, he'd been forced to play the pool challenge without the glasses on. That, or, he'd regain consciousness out in the back alley just in time to watch his Ferrari burn to the ground.
posted by Thorzdad at 9:17 AM on February 9, 2014


Unable to form meaningful connections with anyone, really, requiring the crudest kind of manipulation to form fleeting, ersatz relationships.

Certain people would be sorely disappointed to hear that!
posted by ersatz at 11:42 AM on February 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


"It is your boss, the Vice-President of Engineering Services at Swiftcard. She is sharply dressed, with piercing eyes and impeccable bone structure. You always wonder if her avatar is bespoke designed, as it’s quite distinctive. But of course everyone is attractive, because why wouldn’t you pick an attractive avatar in a virtual world?"

Great excuse to open up your copy of Inifinite Jest to pp. 145 and reread the bit on videophony.
posted by stinkfoot at 2:07 PM on February 9, 2014 [1 favorite]


'the possibilities are endless' = 'we haven't thought of anything yet'
posted by compound eye at 2:30 AM on February 10, 2014


mhoye's excellent comment made me think about all the interesting possibilities of finding bugs in the computer vision code for such glasses, which could allow an attacker to take control just by having the right kind of tattoo.

I'm sure there already is some William Gibson novel where this is done
posted by destrius at 8:49 AM on February 10, 2014 [2 favorites]


CrystalDave: The IAR concept video only works in a world where this is the only person with the AR glasses, and nobody else has ever heard of the concept.

Yup, pretty soon they get to be known as "Creeper Specs" in bars and "cheater googles" in casinos and other competitive arenas, and there is an arms race to make the hardware look as "normal" as possible. Soon enough, people in glasses are never trusted, or there is counter-hardware to identify "smart" glasses from standard glasses used to improve vision. "Talk to me without the glasses" becomes the new slang for "be honest with me" or "be yourself," or "I know you're probably watching porn while trying to hold a conversation with me, and it's grossing me out."
posted by filthy light thief at 9:11 AM on February 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


destrius: mhoye's excellent comment made me think about all the interesting possibilities of finding bugs in the computer vision code for such glasses, which could allow an attacker to take control just by having the right kind of tattoo.

Why wait for a bug, when you can introduce a virus? There's already a few websites touting protection for Google Glasses, but I don't trust 'em, so I won't link to them.
posted by filthy light thief at 9:13 AM on February 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


David Langford has written a few cool short stories about an image capable of causing a glitch in the function of a person's brain (explained entertainingly in his fictional comp.basilisk FAQ).

And while that's pretty far fetched, it seems a lot more plausible that a virus introduced into these glasses could surprise the wearer with some sort of imagery that would cause nausea, trauma, or even a seizure. (Imagine a virus that occasionally overlays, for a fraction of a second, horrific wounds on the faces of random people. Just briefly enough that you wouldn't be sure you'd actually seen it. Or a virus that recognizes when you're driving and makes you see a child run out in front of your car.)
posted by straight at 2:55 PM on February 11, 2014


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