Why 2014 is the 'year of smart glasses'

I consider that I live day to day in a very average technical social scene. I don&#x27;t know a single person that wants to have to wear smart glasses, myself included.<p>There isn&#x27;t a scenario under which a company can convince me to frequently wear glasses. You couldn&#x27;t pay me to do it, I hate the physical annoyance.<p>I have an alternative prediction: while the tech people predicting smart glasses or smart watches are the future, the smart phone will simply roll on dominating the &#x27;smart&#x27; category, overwhelmingly. Five years from now, smart phones will still dominate, to such a degree it&#x27;ll be viewed as a joke in hindsight that anybody thought smart watches or smart glasses would replace or even meaningfully compete with smart phones. This will befuddle all the experts, because they don&#x27;t actually understand the larger consumer market.<p>I&#x27;m not a big Apple fan, but I believe the reason why the best consumer electronics company hasn&#x27;t been in a rush to dive into smart watches or smart glasses, is because both are borderline irrelevant side markets and will remain so. It would have been like Apple feeling the need to dominate the LCD picture viewing device segment that was temporarily the &#x27;thing&#x27; seven or eight years ago.<p>Another prediction: smart glasses will be useful enough beyond what smart phones offer, in about another decade, to justify some independent category success. In the meantime the failure of the category to catch sustainable consumer traction, is, again, going to astound the &#x27;experts.&#x27;

Ugh, I really hope not. I can&#x27;t see any reason people <i>wouldn&#x27;t</i> use this, though, since it&#x27;s a lot less likely for someone to care about other people&#x27;s privacy or convenience than their own.<p>I can certainly see myself asking people to take them off if they want to talk to me (unless they&#x27;re the same people that currently browse&#x2F;text&#x2F;play on their cell phones during conversations, as that&#x27;s a conversation you might as well not have anyway).<p>More cameras, microphones, and sensors all over people, and mostly connected to the internet. What could go wrong? This is obviously a good direction.

Year of smart glasses?<p>It&#x27;s a half assed product, introduced years before it&#x27;s any good for use, and it&#x27;s main real utility is that of a smaller Go Pro-style live action camera.<p>Plus, it didn&#x27;t even make any dent in the market.<p>It&#x27;s not like Google search in 1996 or the iPhone in 2007, products that immediately changed whole markets.<p>So, no, 2014 would not be the year of &quot;smart glasses&quot;.<p>With the display technology used and the battery life they have, those things are useless, except for showing off.<p>Except for the &quot;eye level live action camera&quot; part, you can do the same things with your smartphone, better and faster.

I really think this will be the year of smart watches. Smart glasses look so absurd, I think this year there will be a number of options for glasses in market, but they won&#x27;t gain popularity 2015-2016.<p>Smart watches, however, don&#x27;t look particularly different than normal watches, they aren&#x27;t obtrusive to other people, etc. like glasses are.<p>EDIT: Using words better.

&quot;Year of the Glasshole&quot; would be a better title.

I doubt it. Battery life is still too poor. If it needs to be charged even once during the daytime people will just stop using it after the novelty fades.

This is old news, but: smart glasses solve the problem of making something smaller and more convenient, without the problem of a too-small screen.<p>While google glass does look stupid, it&#x27;s not hard to make cool-looking sunglasses.<p>Privacy concerns will delay adoption, but unfortunately we&#x27;ve already lost privacy. It will just take a while for us to accept it - though I doubt we will by 2014.

I don&#x27;t understand the desire to isolate each wearable in such ways. We have in our pocket a computer which should always have order of magnitudes of processing power and storage, to which other wearables should be able to take advantage of! Think the old days of logging in to your powerful mainframe, but on the body(glasses watches, clothes bluetooth into your pocket computer.) So a lot less needs to be embedded into each, to make it more style worthy(smaller footprint), and feature rich.

I&#x27;m myopic with astigmatism, so I am very interested when the ophthalmic version is coming out. When I visit HN using my 15.6 inch screen laptop I have the zoom set to 150% or higher (the text is tiny), with my specs on.<p>An ophthalmic frame has to endure a fair amount of physical stress during the glazing procedure, especially curved frames. Also my dominant eye is oculus sinister, am I supposed to wear these damn things upside down?

2014 will be the year of the ____________ .<p>There&#x27;s got to be some better alternatives. Ideas?

I see smart glasses as the next tablet. Initially, no one wanted one, they did poorly, and early manufacturers scrapped their product lines. Now suddenly, they are indispensable.

Is there a better predictor that year X <i>won&#x27;t</i> be the year of Y, besides tech sites in December of X-1 saying &quot;X will be the year of Y&quot;?

I don&#x27;t think glasses as a wearable tech will catch on. I think it would be socially awkward for everyone to be sitting at a table with Google glass on.

You mean like 2013 was the year of the smart watch?

2014 will be the &quot;internet of things&quot; (Bluetooth LE) and wearables will be a subset of it.

&quot;Prediction is hard, especially about the future.&quot;

&quot;year of smart glasses&#x27; not in my country :(.

the title alone reeks of future foot in mouth