It is difficult to avoid sounding vulgar, somehow, when
discussing the future of facial computing. There is something inescapably
crude, isn’t there, about the prospect of everyone walking around with
computers on our faces?
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And yet I suspect the world may adopt face computers anyway,
and not long from now, perhaps even within the coming decade. People in tech
have long been wondering what might succeed smartphones as the next dominant
computing platform. For a long time I’ve thought that nothing would — that
phones would remain our primary computers for the foreseeable future. In the
past few months, though, I’ve begun to face the fact that our faces are ... in
trouble.
The face computer is coming — brace yourself for an
onslaught of “smart” glasses, virtual-reality headsets and other devices that
connect your eyes to the digital world.
So far there have been only a few such machines, most
famously Google’s failed digital specs, Google Glass. Facebook and Ray-Ban
recently unveiled camera-enabled sunglasses; Snap, which makes Snapchat, also
has such a device. The sunglasses let you photograph life in the moment, from
your eyes’ point of view; when you’re building sand castles at the beach with
your kids, you can tap your specs to capture the memory while you’re living it
rather than reaching for your phone with sandy fingers.
Facebook and Microsoft are making virtual-reality headsets,
too. These function as powerful personal computers mounted to your eyes,
creating an enveloping digital experience — video games and movies surround
you, the real world replaced by the machine.
Though none of these devices has been a huge success, the
tech that powers face-mounted computers is getting quite good quite fast. It is
probably only a few years until a face computer hits big — perhaps when Apple
releases the one it has been reported to be working on.
There are enormous social, cultural and legal reasons to
worry about face computers becoming ubiquitous. Such devices could turn your
eyes into constantly recording dashcams, superimpose Instagrammy toxicity over
your real-life conversations and add a layer of reality-bending computer
graphics to everything you see. It doesn’t help that they are being developed
by some of the most intrusive, least trustworthy corporations in the world.
But if creepiness posed a fatal impediment to success in the
tech industry, we wouldn’t have smartphones or Facebook. Here’s the thing about
face computers: With the right design, when their components inevitably become
small and powerful enough, these machines could make computing much more visceral
and accessible, which most likely means more irresistible, too. I worry about
the sudden inevitability of face computers — that, as happened with
smartphones, they could become ubiquitous before society begins to appreciate
the way they might be altering everything.
I say this having used a lot of pretty bad face computers
over the past few years. Even the worst of them suggested a compelling goal.
Face computers promise to improve the two things we most often do on our
phones: watch stuff and take pictures of stuff. A computer you can always see
paired with a camera always watching whatever you are — isn’t it obvious how
such a device might fit in during the age of YouTube and TikTok?
Face computers also mitigate two of the touch-screen phone’s
biggest shortcomings — the touch and the screen. My phone claims to help me,
and yet it demands constant attention from my fingers and my eyes. In this
economy?
This is the best pitch for the face computer: It lets you
get digital information more flexibly than you can on any other device.
On the one hand, these machines can conjure experiences that
are much more intense than on any other device. With a face computer, you’re
not just watching videos online — you’re inhabiting them in a way that feels
embodied.
Recently I’ve been hooked on Facebook’s Oculus Quest 2, the
light, portable virtual-reality headset released late last year. What I like
about it is its depth of experience: I’m not usually a gamer, but the Quest 2
has a large library of immersive titles that I found entrancing, among them a
rock-climbing game whose perilous realism made my hands clammy.
Virtual reality will conquer gaming because it is unmatched
at affecting your entire physical experience — when you ride a virtual-reality
roller coaster, your stomach drops just like on the real thing. Even ordinary
videos gain from the VR experience — I found that scrolling through
high-resolution nature videos on YouTube’s virtual-reality app is a wonderful
way to remember what it was like when we were allowed to leave our houses.
Mainly we’ll use these things for fun. But there’s a chance
VR catches on for other uses, too. Nutty as it sounds, I have been meditating
in VR — picking some peaceful virtual spot and sitting there silently, just
“feeling” the world around me. Yes, it’s super dorky; it’s also terrifically
relaxing.
Computers conquered our lives during the pandemic, but it’s
the rare Zoom meeting that doesn’t feel lo-fi, awkward and distant. Talking to
people over VR is natural by comparison. Because the headset lets the digital
world fully engulf your senses, it has the ironic effect of liberating you from
the ever-present sensation that all of your interactions are being mediated by
machines.
I still don’t think VR is for everyone — the experience is
so immersive that it often feels impractical. VR shuts out the offline world
entirely, demanding all your attention. Who has time to drop everything to
climb a virtual mountain?
And so tech companies have been experimenting with less
immersive machines for your face, what some call augmented reality. This is the
world that Google imagined when it started selling its Glass spectacles in
2014.
As a matter of technology, Glass was a marvel — Google had
stuffed a display, speakers and a camera into a machine built only slightly
obtrusively into eyeglass frames. One knock on Glass was that it didn’t do a
whole lot to justify its price. It could snap short videos and display digital
tidbits, like the weather, in the corner of your visual frame, for $1,500.
Yet function is rarely an obvious impediment in wearable
tech. Wristwatches only tell time, and sunglasses only tell the world you’re
awesome. In some ways not doing too much was the point of Glass. The specs
promised to offer you digital information more discreetly than your phone
could. It imagined a visual field one day enriched by information — the latest
headlines and your incoming texts superimposed over your walk home, a
cable-news chyron on the lower third of your life: Spouse says milk gone. Blame
Biden?
The big problem with Google Glass was not technical but
social. Despite the company’s best efforts to make Glass cool, the people who
first got the device tended to be of a certain type — overconfident, entitled,
rich tech guys. Soon they earned a derisive nickname — “glassholes” — and at
that point the device was done for.
A lot has changed since Glass’ release. Cameras and mobile
processors are smaller and more powerful. Now Glass-like tech can be built into
spectacles without much sacrifice in style. There is also far less social
opprobrium attached to wearable tech. Earbuds and smartwatches are not just for
rich nerds. And for a lot of people, especially young people, there is little
separation anymore between the online world and the offline world — suggesting
potentially huge demand for glasses that fix the internet to your eyeballs.
I also wonder if the pandemic might have eased people’s
inhibitions about wearing something on their faces. Yes, a lot of people have
recoiled at face masks, but a lot more are now quite comfortable both wearing
them and seeing others wear them.
To me the stage feels set in a way that recalls the period
before the iPhone’s release in 2007. Technology and consumer preferences are
aligning. We’re on the cusp of something big. I only hope that, unlike with
smartphones, this time we go slow. Smartphones became an inescapable fact of
modern life long before we understood all the ways they would alter society,
for better and for worse. Now, as the machines march for our faces, let’s at
least keep our eyes wide open.
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