James Horn retweetet
"Consumers don't want this," one of the repies to @markgurman said this morning in response to his post about Apple's glasses plans.
Now this is something I've actually studied deeply, doing consumer research in many places around the world while writing two books about spatial computing that I did over the past decade.
It is common bullshit that people say everytime there is a paradigm shift.
They used to say it when cars were brand new too. "Horses are better."
Or when personal computers come along. Woz told me his bosses at HP turned him down five times when he begged them to make a personal computer back in 1975/76.
Why do they say it?
Because they have no creativity.
For instance, have you been to a Formula One track, or a NASCAR race? I have.
I sat next to one guy who rented, for $80, a device to watch the race on a small screen that he held in his hands. Smaller than an iPad.
He loved it because it let him see what was going on on the part of the race he couldn't see.
It improved reality for him.
He wasn't a glasses wearer, but I told him about what I was seeing in labs. That glasses someday would let him see the entire track in a much better way than the device he was holding. With screens that will be hundreds of times bigger than the device he is holding.
Yeah, he didn't like the idea of wearing glasses at first either. But I sold him. He switched his mind.
And that's without having a pair to demonstrate to him.
This is what people never get going into a paradigm shift. People change their beliefs when a new product finally gets there that can do something dramatically better than the way we do things today.
Same thing with autonomous cars. I did the research there too (wrote a whole chapter on Robotaxis seven years ago long before anyone really thought about Waymo or Tesla or Zoox).
One guy in Kansas told me "I'm a narcisstic control freak and there's no f'ing way I'm letting a computer drive me around."
Yet Google already had the data to show that even the most hardened resister changed after getting three rides in one. (The head of R&D who funded Waymo told me that. They discovered it when they threatened employees with being fired before giving them an early prototype. After three rides everyone stopped driving and paying attention to the road).
It's why I don't get all excited for glasses. I see them as inevitable. They will give humans super powers they can't really understand today.
So I'd rather go to a Hackathon where people are building the future. They are the creative ones who can see what's coming and are building for it. Off to @ycombinator to see the finals of the robot hackathon going on there in San Francisco today.
And if you think you never are gonna wear glasses, well, I know you are wrong, and worse, will be at a severe disadvantage to someone who will wear them.
Even if at a @NASCAR race. (It gets worse in the boardroom, by the way).
I do have an advantage over the most hardened resisters. I have to wear glasses simply to see. Which is why I already have four pairs of AI-driven glasses from @getVITURE, @EvenRealities, Apple, @MentraGlass.
The Mentra ones are quite nice, and open source, but don't yet have displays. Which is where the magic is locked up. The Even Realities has displays, but no cameras.
Which keeps them from doing the magic too. You need glasses with both cameras and displays to do the Formula One/NASCAR track.
Google brings theirs later this year I heard from @XREAL_Global who is a Google partner on theirs.
Prepare your wallet. The glasses that are about to come are stunning.
And consumers will want them.
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