One of the biggest potential benefits that Google Glass could offer is to reduce distracted driving. In a connected world an unconnected commute is not something consumers are willing to bear. Robert Scoble has just published a video of him driving with Glass which he says is something everything with Glass will try.
He raises some important notes, a main one being that the Glass is potentially a lot safer than looking down to an in-dash navigation system. Another key point is that Glass isn’t always on, Scoble even goes as far as saying that “almost always off”.
While you may have been hoping for Google Glass to provide GPS navigation to augment your vision while driving, then your out of luck. The positioning of Glass means that you need to look up, not through. It will however read the directions to you.
As for the voice, it will allow you to get text messages and email read to you while driving which is obviously hands-free and gets you a lot closer to feeling connected on the road. The real goal of a connected driving experience is to get to a point where you get out of the vehicle and not feel the need to drive into Twitter and Facebook and catch up on what you missed during the trip.
As for the video quality it’s pretty bloody great, although posts to Google+ don’t allow embedding like standard YouTube clips. Obviously it could do with some optical image stabilisation and better battery life, but hopefully we get that in Google Glass (Consumer Edition).
More @ Scoble’s Google+ page.
