It's been quite a summer for face computers. Samsung unveiled its first smart glasses — no display, no keyboard; you talk to them. The Ray-Ban maker says its smart-glasses revenue nearly doubled in a year. IDC expects almost 14 million pairs this year, up 41% on last year, and double that by 2030.
In the right places, glasses beat a screen: a surgeon who never looks away from the patient; a cyclist whose eyes never leave the road; a singer’s next line arriving right on cue; opera surtitles in your own language, on your own nose; a student mid-experiment, gloves on, the next step in view; live captions for a grandparent whose hearing is going.
In the Google Glass years I was the engineering half of a two-person startup in Silicon Valley, building advanced earphones — not at Google, not at the still-new Google X — but Astro Teller took us under his wing, and we worked with Google on pairing our earphones with Glass. Astro still runs X; his optimism rubbed off, and I needed it. I also remember the backlash, because I shared it: there is no social contract for a forward-facing camera.
Look a bit closer at that backlash, though. It was never about the display or the assistant; it was the camera. Very little of what glasses do best needs one — captions film nobody. Some of the best face computers will carry no lens at all.
Camera or not, one question stays open: how do you type on them? A name, a film, an address — there’s no keyboard in mid-air, and talking in public was the Glass lesson too. My parents peck out WhatsApp messages one letter at a time. For them it isn’t a detail; it’s whether they’re in the conversation.
That is why the wand exists: a handheld that types what you write in the air. Today’s wand has no camera and no microphone — privacy as physics, not policy. It learns your hand, and it works now on the daftest screen in the house: the telly. The thin end of the wedge.
Voice will come — I spent twenty years in wearable audio, much of it on voice. On the variants we are designing, the mics are unpowered except while you hold the button. Say the easy things; write the precise ones.
Wearables win when they respect the room. Someone still has to give the face computer handwriting.
Fancy a go? Your phone can stand in for the wand: phone-demo.the-wand.ai/write
— John