I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about Google Glass at the moment and so far I havent seen anything to make me want to rush out and buy a pair (although I reserve judgement till I actually play with one). One of the things getting a lot of attention is the ability to record hands-free video which in my opinion is over-rated. I’m basing this on in-car video recorders (and more recently dashcams) that people have been using to record hands free video while driving for years. I have been using a variety of different setups to capture in-car video over the years and have found that while its very cool at first, it’s quite rare to go back to look at the video. Of the hundreds of hours of video I have collected, I only look at it when there is something specific I needed to check (line, traffic, best lap, etc…) or to see if the video captured something spectacular (spins, passes, accidents, etc…). In general it is quite boring to look at hours of raw video even while doing something as interesting as racing cars on track. As for making edited videos it is a long, slow and difficult process and people wont be bothered to do it once.
What Google Glass really needs is to take a suggestion from the dashcam world and record a continuous loop of video that the user can save after the event to record the important/funny/interesting thing that they just happened to see. It would be a video version of the Personal Audio Loop (paper pdf). A Personal Video Loop if you will.
Imagine being able to immediately save some cute thing thing by your kids/dogs/cats/etc… Instead of remembering to tell Glass to record, it is always recording and you can just tell it to save the last X minutes. Apart from the cute overload videos, the number of dashcam videos on Autoblog and Jalopnik are proof that even the most average people will keep seeing some interesting things. Plus the sousveillance aspect of having cloud-stored video to back up you account of events would be pretty revolutionary as well.
I know there are a bunch of legal (and power) issues around recording video like this but someone should try building it. Glass explorers – start exploring š
