Sweat and My Weekend Without Glass

Sweat and my weekend without Glass

As I tend to do, I went to a Meetup last Thursday at Google, for a presentation on Chrome Packaged Apps. It was a very well delivered presentation, and the pizza was a bonus.

Yay pizza!

And, as always, I rode my bike to the meetup, and then from Google back home, which is almost twice my normal commute. I was getting fairly sweaty on the ride, and when I was getting close to home, Glass started freaking out. It was as if I were constantly tapping and swiping the touchpad. This was quite a distraction while riding, as the screen was doing all sorts of wacky things. When I got to a stop light, I powered Glass down, and finished up my ride. I waited a little bit to turn Glass back on, probably a half hour or so, and the problem persisted. I powered it down and waited an hour, and it was still acting up, but now it wasn’t recognizing touch input. I decided that I would give a factory reset a try, just in case this was an oddly timed software bug, and I had the thing in debug mode - for development. After the device rebooted it was actually quite difficult to get it signed in, because the touchpad was still not working properly.

The other wrinkle here was that I was flying out to Vancouver, for the weekend, early the next morning. I was disappointed, but decided to leave Glass behind for the trip, and figured that I would call the morning after returning home.

Leaving for the airport at 5:30am, without Glass was an odd experience. I had only had Glass for about two or three weeks at this point, and already, I’ve gotten quite used to it. I noticed myself several times wanting to flick my head up to see the time as we rushed to SFO. I noticed that I had the urge to check the flight status that had been showing in my timeline, to see if the flight was on time, and to check the weather - not that we could have done much about what we had packed at that point. The one thing that I did not miss that morning was trying to get Glass through airport security. I had no idea how they might react - not that I would keep it on, but who knows.

Throughout the trip, there were moments where I’d catch myself reaching for one of Glass’s features, whether it be quickly checking Google to figure out the difference between Steelhead Trout and Salmon, or to snap some quick photos at the concert. My phone works for both of these, however, my phone has also become quite slow in the last few months, and Glass is just so much faster for those things than a phone could be.

QOTSA at Squamish

Glass currently seems ok, but I have no idea if there has been permanent damage, or if was just temporary, or if/when it may happen again. There was a suggestion of using one of those sweat headbands to soak up the moisture and protect Glass a bit, and I will certainly use that from now on. It would be unfair to draw any conclusions about Glass’s eventual durability as a wearable from the experiences of Explorers, so I’m not going to even hint at that. I have a feeling that the most important part of this program for Google is to learn how this thing will fail out in the wild, so that they can make the consumer version that much better. At least, that would be my top priority if I were the one running the show.