‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” When Christopher Isherwood wrote these lines in his memoir, Goodbye to Berlin, he was referring to his desire to capture the moment, the zeitgeist of the decadent time and place in which he had found himself, Germany’s Weimar Republic.
Yet what Isherwood imagined 70 years ago has now come to pass. If I were to sum up the prevailing mood of today’s age it would include those two naked spectres: voyeurism and exhibitionism, and next year they will embrace a new dance partner from which they will soon be inseparable.
The latest threat to personal privacy comes from Google, which next year will launch Google Glass, a device that mixes a pair of glasses with a mobile phone. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator, those who purchase the device will be able to see footage and information projected, not on the inside of their eyeballs as in the 1984 movie but on one of the lenses.
A miniature microphone on the glasses can record the surrounding audio, which means if one is in Starbucks and an unknown song comes on, the title and recording artist will scroll down the inside of the lens. If you wander around a museum then every artefact on view could be accompanied by a potted history; take a stroll in a garden and what you previously recognised by the bland generic bouquet of “pretty flowers” will soon spread out its petals as the glasses detail each bloom’s Latin name and horticultural background. There will be no need to look down to one’s phone or iPad as the answers will be in front of your eyes. Full story...
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Yet what Isherwood imagined 70 years ago has now come to pass. If I were to sum up the prevailing mood of today’s age it would include those two naked spectres: voyeurism and exhibitionism, and next year they will embrace a new dance partner from which they will soon be inseparable.
The latest threat to personal privacy comes from Google, which next year will launch Google Glass, a device that mixes a pair of glasses with a mobile phone. Like Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Terminator, those who purchase the device will be able to see footage and information projected, not on the inside of their eyeballs as in the 1984 movie but on one of the lenses.
A miniature microphone on the glasses can record the surrounding audio, which means if one is in Starbucks and an unknown song comes on, the title and recording artist will scroll down the inside of the lens. If you wander around a museum then every artefact on view could be accompanied by a potted history; take a stroll in a garden and what you previously recognised by the bland generic bouquet of “pretty flowers” will soon spread out its petals as the glasses detail each bloom’s Latin name and horticultural background. There will be no need to look down to one’s phone or iPad as the answers will be in front of your eyes. Full story...
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- This is the Modem World: The dark side of Google Glass...
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- Seeing the world through Google Glasses...
- Professor to become "The 3rd. I" with a camera installed behind his head!
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