The Refined Geek

When a technology company doesn’t get a whole lot of press it usually means one of two things: the first is that it isn’t that interesting and no one really cares about it or, and this doesn’t happen often, they simply don’t want/need it. Conversely if a product is a dismal failure it’s usually guaranteed that it’ll get a whole bunch of the wrong type of attention, especially with the Internet’s bent towards schadenfreude. With that in mind it made me wonder why I hadn’t heard more about D-Wave since I last wrote about them around this time last year. Especially considering that Lockheed Martin had bought one of their D-Wave One systems a year prior to that.

Turns out they probably don’t really need the press as they’re doing just fine:

VANCOUVER — When the world’s largest defence contractor reportedly paid $10 million for a superfast quantum computer, the Burnaby, B.C., company that built it earned a huge vote of confidence.

Two years after Lockheed Martin acquired the first commercially viable quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, the American aerospace and technology giant is once again throwing its weight behind a technology many thought was still the stuff of science fiction.

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was just old news resurfacing 2 years later but it isn’t as Lockheed Martin just purchased a D-Wave 2, their latest and greatest quantum computing offering. Details are a little scant as to what is actually in their latest system but going off their product road map it’s likely to be some variant of their Vesuvius chip which contains 512 qubits. That’s 4 times the amount of qubits in their previous system which would make it exceptionally more powerful and all for the same cost as the first unit they sold.

In my quest to try and find a little more information about their new system I stumbled across this page which digs into the underlying architecture of the D-Wave One/Two systems. Now back when I first wrote about D-Wave they weren’t exactly forthcoming with this kind of information which was what drew them a considerable amount of criticism but since then a lot of their loudest critics have renounced their positions. Interestingly though, and feel free to correct me if I’m interpreting this wrong, whilst they indeed claim to have produced a functioning qubit they haven’t managed to entangle several of them together. Whilst this doesn’t make their system useless, single qubits daisy chained together will still be useful for some specific functions, it does mean that the exponential scaling doesn’t really apply to D-Wave’s style of quantum computers. I could be wrong about this but their explanation only mentions entanglement-like properties in the qubit section with their interconnecting grids only being used to “exchange information”, not to provide multi-qubit entanglement.

That doesn’t make it any less cool however as I’m sure as they continue to scale up their processors they’ll eventually start entangling more bits together which will increase their computational power exponentially. We won’t see consumer level processors using technology like this for a long time though as they’re akin to CUDA units on graphics cards, highly specialized computational units that excel in their task and not so much in general computing. Still D-Wave’s systems signal the beginning of the quantum computing era and that means its only a matter of time before we see them everywhere.

The state of broadband Internet in Australia is one of incredible inconsistency. I lived without it for the better part of my youth, being stuck behind a dial up connection because my local exchange simply didn’t have the required number of people interested in getting broadband to warrant any telco installing the required infrastructure there. I was elated when we were provided a directional wireless connection that gave me speeds that were comparable to that of my city dwelling friends but to call it reliable was being kind as strong winds would often see it disconnect at the most inconvenient of times.

The situation didn’t improve much when I moved into the city though as whilst I was pretty much guaranteed ADSL wherever I lived the speed at which it was delivered varied drastically. In my first home, which was in an affluent and established suburb, usually capped out at well below half of its maximum speed. The second home fared much better despite being about as far away from the closest exchange as the other house was. My current residence is on par with the first, even with the technological jump from ADSL to ADSL2+. As to the reason behind this I can not be completely sure but there is no doubt that the aging copper infrastructure is likely to blame.

I say this because my parents, who still live out in the house that I grew up in, were able to acquire an ADSL2+ connection and have been on it for a couple years. They’re not big Internet users though and I’d never really had the need to use it much when I’m out there visiting but downloading a file over their connection last week revealed that their connection speeds were almost triple mine, despite their long line of sight distance to their exchange. Their connection is likely newer than most in Canberra thanks to their rural neighbourhood being a somewhat recent development (~30 years or so). You can then imagine my frustration with the current copper infrastructure as it simply can not be relied upon to provide consistent speeds, even in places where you’d expect it to be better.

There’s a solution on the horizon however in the form of the National Broadband Network. The current plan of rolling out fibre to 93% of Australian households (commonly referred to as Fibre to the Premises/Home, or FTTP/H) elminates the traditional instability that plagues the current copper infrastructure along with providing an order of magnitude higher speeds. Whilst this is all well and good from a consumer perspective it will also have incredible benefits for Australia economically. There’s no denying that the cost is quite high, on the order of $37 billion, but not only will it pay itself back in real terms long before its useful life has elapsed it will also provide benefits far exceeding that cost shortly after its completion.

Should this year’s election go the way everyone is thinking it will though the glorious NBN future will look decidedly grim if the Coalition has their way with it. They’ve been opponents of it from the get go, criticising it as a wasteful use of government resources. Whilst their plan might not sound that much different on the surface, choosing to only run Fibre to the Node (FTTN) rather than the premises, it is a decidedly inferior solution that will not deliver the same level of benefits as the currently envisioned NBN. The reason behind this is simple: it still uses the same copper infrastructure that has caused so many issues for current broadband users in Australia.

You don’t have to look much further than Canberra’s own FTTN network TransACT to know just how horrific such a solution is. After a decade of providing lackluster service, one that provided almost no benefit over ADSL2+, TransACT wrote down their capital investment and sold it to iiNet. If FTTN can’t survive in a region that is arguably one of the most affluent and tech savvy in Australia then it has absolutely no chance of surviving elsewhere, especially when current ADSL services can still be seen as competitive. You could make the argument that the copper could be upgraded/remediated but then you’re basically just building a FTTP solution using copper, so why not just go for optic fibre instead?

What really puts it in perspective is that the International Space Station, you know that thing whizzing 300KM above earth at Mach 26, has faster Internet than the average Australian does. Considering your average satellite connection isn’t much faster than dial up the fact that the ISS can beat the majority of Australians speed wise shows just how bad staying on copper will be. FTTN won’t remedy those last mile runs where all the attenuation happens and that means that you can’t guarantee minimum speeds like you can with FTTP.

The NBN represents a great opportunity to turn Australia into a technological leader, transforming us from something of an Internet backwater to a highly interconnected nation with infrastructure that will last us centuries. It will mean far more for Australia than faster loading web pages but failing to go the whole for the whole FTTP will make it an irrelevant boondoggle. Whilst we only have party lines to go on at the moment with the “fully detailed” plan still forthcoming it’s still safe to say that the Coalition are bad news for it, no matter which angle you view their plan from.

Microsoft’s flagship product, Windows, isn’t exactly known for it’s rapid release cycle. Sure for things like patches, security updates, etc. they’re probably one of the most responsive companies out there. The underlying operating system however is updated much less frequently with the base feature set being largely the same for the current 3 year product life cycle. In the past that was pretty much sufficient as the massive third party application market for Windows made up for anything that might have been lacking. Customers are increasingly looking for more fully featured platforms however and whilst Windows 8 is a step in the right direction it had the potential to start lagging behind its other, more frequently updated brethren.

Had Windows 8 stayed as a pure desktop OS this wouldn’t be a problem as the 3 year product cycle fit in perfectly with their largest customer base: the enterprise. Since Windows 8 will now form the basis of every Microsoft platform (or at least the core WinRT framework) they’re now playing in the same realm as iOS and Android. Platform updates for these two operating systems happen far more frequently and should Microsoft want to continue playing in this field they will have to adapt more rapidly. Up until recently I didn’t really know how Microsoft was planning to accomplish this but it seems they’ve had something in development for a while now.

Windows Blue is shaping up to be the first feature pack for Windows 8, scheduled for release sometimes toward the end of this year. It’s also the umbrella term for similar updates happening across the entire Microsoft platform around the same time including their online services like Outlook.com and SkyDrive. This will be the first release of what will become a yearly platform update that will bring new features to Windows and its surrounding ecosystem. It will not be in lieu of the traditional platform updates however as there are still plans to deliver Windows 9 on the same 3 year cycle that we’ve seen for the past 2 Windows releases.

Whilst much of the press has been around the leaked Blue build and what that means for the Windows platform it seems that this dedication to faster product cycles goes far deeper. Microsoft has shifted its development mentality away from it’s traditional iterative process to a continuous development process, a no small feat for a company of this magnitude. Thus we should expect the entire Microsoft ecosystem, not just Windows, to see a similarly rapid pace of development. They had already done this with their cloud offerings (as it seems to gain new features every year) and the success they saw there has been the catalyst for applying it to the rest of the their product suites.

Microsoft has remained largely unchallenged in the desktop PC space for the better part of 2 decades but the increasing power of mobile devices has begun to erode their core business. They have then made the smart move to start competing in that space with an unified architecture that will enable a seamless experience across all platforms. The missing piece of the puzzle was their ability to rapidly iterate on said platform like the majority of their rivals were, something which the Blue wave of products will begin to rectify. Whether it will be enough to pull up some of their worse performing platforms (Windows Phone) will remain to be seen however, but I’m sure we can agree that it will be beneficial, both for Microsoft and us as consumers.

If you’ve ever worked in a multi-tenant environment with shared resources you’ll know of the many pains that can come along with it. Resource sharing always ends up leading to contention and some of the time this will mean that you won’t be able to get access to the resources you want. For cloud services this is par for the course as since you’re always accessing shared services and so any application you build on these kinds of platforms has to take this into consideration lets your application spend an eternity crashing from random connection drop outs. Thankfully Microsoft has provided a few frameworks which will handle these situations for you, especially in the case of Azure SQL.

The Transient Fault Handling Application Block (or Topaz, which is a lot better in my view) gives you access to a number of classes which take out a lot of the pain when dealing with the transient errors you get when using Azure services. Of those the most useful one I’ve found is the RetryPolicy which when instantiated as SqlAzureTransientErrorDetectionStrategy allows you to simply wrap your database transactions with a little bit of code in order to make them resistant to the pitfalls of Microsoft’s cloud SQL service. For the most part it works well as prior to using it I’d get literally hundreds of unhandled exception messages per day. It doesn’t catch everything however so you will still need to handle some connection errors but it does a good job of eliminating the majority of them.

Currently however there’s no native support for it in Entity Framework (Microsoft’s data persistence framework) and this means you have to do a little wrangling in order to get it to work. This StackOverflow question outlines the problem and there’s a couple solutions on there which all work however I went for the simple route of instantiating a RetryPolicy and then just wrapping all my queries with ExecuteAction. As far as I could tell this all works fine and is the supported way of using EF with Topaz at least until 1.6 comes out which will have in built support for connection resiliency.

However when using Topaz in this way it seems that it mucks with entity tracking, causing returned objects to not be tracked in the normal way. I discovered this after I noticed many records not getting updated even though manually working through the data showed that they should be showing different values. As far as I can tell if you wrap an EF query with a RetryPolicy the entity ends up not being tracked and you will need to .Attach() to it prior to making any changes. If you’ve used EF before then you’ll see why this is strange as you usually don’t have to do that unless you’ve deliberately detached the entity or recreated the context. So as far as I can see there must be something in Topaz that causes it to become detached requiring you to reattach it if you want to persist your changes using Context.SaveChanges().

I haven’t tested any of the other methods of using Topaz with EF so it’s entirely possible there’s a way to get the entity tracked properly without having to attach to it after performing the query. Whether they work or not will be an exercise left for the reader as I’m not particularly interested in testing it, at least not just after I got it all working again. By the looks of it though a RC version of EF 6 might not be too far away, so this issue probably won’t remain one for long.

My introduction to RSS readers came around the same time as when I started to blog daily as after a little while I found myself running dry on general topics to cover and needed to start finding other material for inspiration. It’s all well and good to have a bunch of bookmarked sites to trawl through but visiting each one is a very laborious task, one that I wasn’t keen to do every day just to crank out a post. Thus I found the joys that were RSS feeds allowing me to distill dozens of sites down to a singular page, dramatically cutting down the effort required to trawl through them all. After cycling through many, many desktop based readers I, like many others, eventually settled on Google Reader, and all was well since then.

That was until last week when Google announced that Reader was going away on July 1st this year.

Google has been doing a lot of slimming down recently as part of its larger strategy to focus more strongly on its core business. This has led to many useful, albeit niche, products to be shutdown over the course of the past couple years. Whilst the vast majority of them are expected there have been quite a few notable cases where they’ve closed down things that still have a very active user base whilst other things (like Orkut, yeah remember that?) which you’d figure would be closed down aren’t. If there’s one service that no one expected them to close down it would be Reader but apparently they’ve decided to do this due to dwindling user numbers.

Whilst I won’t argue that RSS is the defacto standard for content consumption these days it’s still proven to be a solid performer for anyone who provides it and Google Reader was the RSS reader to use. Even if you didn’t use the reader directly there are hundreds of other products which utilize Google Reader’s back end in order to power their interfaces and whilst they will likely continue on in spite of Reader going away it’s highly unlikely that any of them will have the same penetration that Reader did. Even from my meagre RSS stats it’s easy to tell that Reader has at least 50% of the market, if not more.

If you doubt just how popular Reader was consider that Feedly, shown above syncing with my feeds, managed to gain a whopping 500,000 users in the short time since Google made the announcement. They were actually so popular that right after the start their site was down for a good couple hours and their applications on iOS and Android quickly becoming the number 1 free app on their respective stores. For what its worth it’s a very well polished application, especially if you like visual RSS readers, however there are a few quirks (like it not being in strict chronological order) which stopped me from making the total switch immediately. Still the guys behind it seem dedicated to improving it and filling in the void left by replicating the Reader API (and running it on Google’s AppEngine, for the lulz).

From a business point of view it’s easy to understand why Google is shutting down services like this as they’re a drain on resources that could be better used to further their core business. However it was usually these niche services that brought a lot of customers to Google in the first place and by removing them they burn a lot of goodwill that they generated by hosting them. I also can’t imagine that the engineers behind these products, many of which were products of Google’s famous 20% time, feel great about seeing them go away either. For something as big as Reader I would’ve expected them to try to innovate it rather than abandon it completely as looking over the alternatives there’s still a lot of interesting things that can be done in the world of RSS, especially with such a dedicated user base.

Unfortunately I don’t expect Google to do an about face on this one as there’s been public outcries before (iGoogle, anyone?) but nothing seems to dissuade them once their mind has been made up. It’s a real shame as I feel there’s still a lot of value in the Reader platform, even if it pales in comparison to Google’s core business products. Whilst the alternatives might not be 100% there yet I have no doubt they’ll get there in short order and, if the current trend is anything to go by, surpass Reader in terms of features and functionality.

Australia is a relatively unexciting place, tectonically speaking. We’re smack bang in the middle of the Indo-Australian plate which means that our landscape is quite old (as there’s no tectonic activity reshaping it) and earthquakes are quite rare, with the few we experience being rather weak by anyone’s standards. This is quite good for builders here as this means that tall buildings like skyscrapers and radio towers don’t require additional engineering in order to protect them from those kinds of natural disasters, although we still have tropical cyclones, mass flooding and spiders the size of small horses (I’m only lying about one of those, I swear).

Other countries aren’t so lucky and should they want to build something over a certain height there’s a certain amount of engineering that needs to be done in order to make sure they don’t go tumbling down once the first earthquake hits. Japan is arguably the leader in this technology as they have to deal with large magnitude quakes as a semi-regular occurrence. Seeing it in action though is rather impressive:

A quick bit of research shows that these are mass damper protected buildings (they are the Shinjuku Nomura on the left and Sompo Japan Head Office on the right, for reference) which have a large sprung mass inside them that moves counter to the direction of the seismic waves. Now this doesn’t completely eliminate all the energy passing through the building so they still sway a significant amount. However the majority of modern skyscrapers are designed to sway by a fair amount due to regular things like wind which exert an enormous amount of pressure on buildings this tall. You wouldn’t notice that however as it happens a lot slower than what you’re seeing in this video.

What I find truly amazing though is just how stable it is inside the building (Shinjuku Center) where the filming is occurring. Indeed that building would have been undergoing the same amount of sway and flex as the rest of the buildings were but to an observer inside it looks like you’d barely be aware that anything was happening. The translated description text does say that most of the building services shut down during the quake (elevators being the main concern) so if you weren’t aware of it when it started you’d probably find out in no short order.

I had seen many videos showing off the technology behind this video but after viewing it I realised that this was the first I had seen of it in action and it’s far more impressive than I expected it to be. It’s yet another testament to how far science and technology has come, being able to tame forces of nature that were long thought to be out of our control. It might not be the most exciting thing to talk about with your friends but it does make for some damn cool watching, that’s for sure.

How many times have you had your signature checked by someone at the store? If you visited my store back when I was working at Dick Smith I can guarantee that I’d check it every single time, regardless of how big or small your purchase was. However, as a customer, I can count the number of times that someone has checked my signature on my right hand. This is probably a good thing for me as the years of keyboard warrior-ing has turned my hand writing into something that’s barely indistinguishable from random chicken scratchings, but that doesn’t make me any more comfortable in the supposed security system that is my signature.

Not that I’ve had to use it much in recent times as nearly everywhere now supports the use of a PIN with credit card transactions. Still there are a few places where I’ll have to sign, especially if I’m using my AMEX, and with only a few exceptions do they ever actually check to see if my signature matches the one on the back of the card. It’s even better when places have the NFC readers as they cut the already short amount of time required to complete the transaction down to almost nothing. This hasn’t yet made its way onto all cards or places of purchase however which is a shame as it would also mean that the second I get a NFC enabled phone I could theoretically do away with my cards completely.

I had figured that the signature was going to stick around for a fair while longer though since it’s still the defacto standard for authorizing or approving something. However I saw today that the big names in the credit card industry, namely Visa and MasterCard, have had their eye on phasing out the inherently insecure authorization method for some time now with it originally scheduled to be gone within the next couple months. That’s been pushed back until the chipped cards make up a greater percentage of the total cards in Australia but it does signal that the writing is on the wall for putting pen to paper when it comes to making your purchases.

It’s a good move for both sides of the credit card equation as anything that reduces the barrier to purchasing something, however small, will result in an increased usage of said payment services. Even though I may only save a handful of seconds using contactless payment I still find it a whole bunch more enjoyable than having to swipe, pin and/or sign (yeah sometimes I’ve put my PIN in only have it require a signature as well) in order to complete a transaction. Additionally the use of PINs and contactless payment devices is far more secure than a signature which is rarely checked for authenticity.

Now all we need in Australia is something like Google Wallet so I can do away with my wallet almost completely. Now that’d be something!

I’ve been using Windows 8 for a good 6 months now and as someone who’s use all previous Windows versions going back to 3.1 it’s easy for me to say that it’s the best of the lot so far. Sure I don’t use the Metro interface a lot but that’s mostly because it’s not designed for the current platform I’m using it on (a PC that doesn’t have a touch interface). Still it seems I can’t go a day where someone, usually an executive from a large OEM, is bashing Windows 8 in one way or another. Considering that nearly everyone I talk to, including people who aren’t that technically inclined, seems to say the direct opposite of what they say I figured it was something worth looking into.

A lot of the criticisms seem to stem from the awkward launch that Windows 8 had. Now I’m not going to try and be an apologist for this as it’s well known that even Microsoft was disappointed with the initial release. For those of us who endured the Vista launch however it’s pretty obvious why this occurred as whenever a new Windows release deviates heavily from the previous one (whether in terms of interface or underlying architecture) the sales are always lackluster as their biggest customers, the enterprise buyers, don’t want to take the risk until all the teething issues have been sorted out. More crucially though is that whilst the launch might have been an all round disappointment it didn’t take long for Windows 8 to gain some significant steam, getting on par with Windows 7 after 90 days.

Several other high profile people have gone on record saying that the Surface is also seeing lackluster sales. This coming not long after many people have called the ultrabook market a failure (which is not unjustified) makes it look like Windows 8 ‘s introduction can’t have any impact on what looks like a declining PC market. Now I’m not going to argue against those numbers however if you look at past Windows releases, take 7 for instance which was released in Q4 of 2009, you’ll see that whilst there was a small boost (which wasn’t out of line with current trend growths) the previous quarter it was back to where it was before. What this means is that while you’d expect people to be buying a new computer in order to get the latest version of Windows many in fact don’t. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise as the system requirements between Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8 aren’t that great and indeed any PC bought during the time that these operating systems has been available would be more than capable of running them. Indeed many computers have reached the level of good enough half a decade ago for the vast majority of the population so the lackluster growth isn’t surprising, nor is it anything to worry about in my point of view.

I think the reason for the backlash is due to two reasons, both of which the blame does actually lie with Microsoft. The first is a bit of speculation on my part as I think Microsoft promised a boost in PC sales to the various OEMs in order to get them on board early with Windows 8. This is pretty much par for course when you’re working with OEMs on a new and risky product as otherwise they’ll be waiting until the product catches on before they throw their hat in the ring. Now whilst Microsoft could probably handle Windows 8 not getting a lot of OEM support for a while it would have been likely that Windows 8 wouldn’t have caught up to 7′s sales in the first 90 day period, severely stunting its future growth. Whilst they wouldn’t have a Vista level disaster on their hands it would’ve been much worse than what they’re dealing with now.

Secondly I get the feeling that many of the OEMs aren’t too enthused about the Surface and I don’t blame them. I said a while back that Microsoft needed to keep their product in the premium range in order to not piss off their partners and they’ve done that to some extent however with the exorbitant license cost for OEMs it’s incredibly hard for them to make a comparable tablet for the same cost as the low end Surface RT. This has no doubt generated a bit of animosity towards Microsoft with many OEM executives bashing Surface at every chance they get despite it selling out almost immediately upon release. Whether Microsoft can repair this relationship remains to be seen however as the platform’s long term survivability will be made or broken by their OEMs, just like it has been in the past.

Microsoft took a risk with Windows 8 and by most accounts it appears to be paying off for them, unlike their previous experience with Vista. It might not be the saving grace of the PC industry nor might it be a runaway success in the tablet market however Microsoft is not a company that plays the short term game. Windows 8 is the beginning of a new direction for them and by all accounts it’s creating a solid foundation with which Microsoft can further build on. Future Microsoft releases will then be able to deliver even more capabilities on more platforms than any other ecosystem. This isn’t the first time they’ve been on the back foot and then managed to managed to dominate a market long after it has established itself (Xbox anyone?) and I’d be really surprised if they failed this time around.

We’re on the cusp of a new technological era thanks in no small part to the ubiquity of smart phones. They’ve already begun to augment us in ways we didn’t expect, usurp industries that failed to adapt and have created a fledgling industry that’s already worth billions of dollars. The really interesting part, for me at least, is the breaking down of the barriers between us and said technology as whilst it’s all well and good that we can tap, swipe and type our way through things it does feel like there should be a better solution. Whilst we’re still a ways off from being able to control things with our brains (although there’s a lot of promising research in this direction) there’s a new product available that I think is going to be the bridge between our current interface standards and that of more direct control methods.

Shown above is a product called the MYO from Thalmic Labs, a Y-Combinator backed company that’s just started taking pre-orders for it. The concept for the device is simple: once you slip this band over your arm it can track the electrical activity in your muscles which it can then send back to another device via BlueTooth. This allows it to track all sorts of gestures and since it doesn’t rely on a camera it’ll work in far more situations than other devices that do. It’s also incredibly sensitive being able to pick up movement right down to your fingers, something which I wasn’t sure would be possible based on other similar prototype devices I had seen in the past. Needless to say I was very intrigued when I saw it as I instantly saw it as a perfect companion to Google’s Glass.

All the demonstration videos for Google Glass shows it being commanded by a pretty powerful voice interface with some functions (like basic menu navigation) handled through eye tracking. As a technology demo its pretty impressive but I’m not the biggest fan of voice interfaces, especially if I’m in a public space. I then started thinking about alternative input methods and whilst something like a laser keyboard works in certain situations I wanted something that would be as discreet as typing on a smartphone but was also a bit more elegant than carting around that (admittedly small) device.  The MYO could provide the answer to this.

Now the great thing about the MYO is that they’re opening it up to developers from the get go, allowing people like me to create all sorts of interesting applications for the device. For me there’s really only a single killer application required to justify the entry cost: a simple virtual keyboard that uses your muscles. I’ve read about similar things being in development for a while now but nothing seems to have made it past the high concept stage. MYO on the other hand has the real potential to bring this to fruition within the next year or two and whilst I probably won’t have the required augmented reality device to take advantage of it I’ll probably end up with one of these devices anyway, just for experimentation.

With this missing piece of the puzzle I feel like Glass has gone from being a technical curiosity to a device that I could see myself using routinely. The 1.0 MYO might be a little cumbersome to keep around but I’m sure further iterations of it will make it nigh on unnoticeable. This is just my narrow view of the technology as well and I’m sure there’s going to be hundreds of other applications where a MYO device will unlock some seriously awesome potential. I’m very excited about this and can’t wait to get my hands on one of them.

My group of friends is undeniably tech-oriented but that doesn’t mean all of us share the same views on how technology should be used, especially in social situations. If you were to see us out at a restaurant it’s pretty much guaranteed that at least one of us is on our phone, probably Googling an answer to something or sifting through our social networking platform of choice. For most of us this is par for the course being with all of us being members of Gen Y however some of my friends absolutely abhor the intrusion that smartphones have made on normal social situations and if the direction of technology is anything to go by that intrusion is only going to get worse, not better.

Late last year I came across the Memento Kickstarter project, a novel device that takes 1 picture every 30 seconds and even tags it with your GPS location. It’s designed to be worn all the time so that you end up with a visual log of your life, something that’s obviously of interest to a lot of people as they ended up getting funded 11 times over. Indeed just as a device it’s pretty intriguing and I had caught them early enough that I could have got one at a hefty discount. However something that I didn’t expect to happen changed my mind on it completely: my technically inclined friends’ reactions to this device.

Upon linking my friends to the Kickstarter page I wasn’t met with the usual reactions. Now we’re not rabid privacy advocates, indeed many of us engage in multiple social networks and many of us lead relatively open online lives, but the Memento was met with a great deal of concern over it’s present in everyone’s private lives. It wasn’t a universal reaction but it was enough to give me pause about the idea and in the end I didn’t back it because of it. With Google Glass gearing up to increase its presence in the world these same privacy questions are starting to crop up again and the social implications of Google’s flagship augmented reality device are starting to become apparent.

Google Glass is a next step up from Memento as whilst it has the same capability to take photos (without the express knowledge or consent from people in it) its ability to run applications and communicate directly with the Internet poses even more privacy issues. Sure the capability isn’t too much different than what’s available now with your garden variety smartphone however it is ever-present, attached the side of someone’s head and can be commanded at will of the user. That small step of taking your phone out of your pocket is enough of a social cue to let people know what your intentions are and make their concerns known well before hand.

What I feel is really happening here is that the notion of societal norms are being challenged by technology. Realistically such devices are simply better versions of things we have natively as humans (I.E. imaging devices with attached storage) but their potential for disseminating their contents is much greater. Just like social norms developed around ubiquitous smartphones so too they must develop around the use of augmented reality devices like Google Glass. What these norms will end up being however is something that we can’t really predict until they reach critical mass which, from what I can tell, is at least a couple years off in the future, possibly even longer.

For my close knit circle of tech friends however I can predict a few things. Most of them wouldn’t have any issues with me wearing and using it whilst we were doing things together but I can see them wanting me to take them off if we were sitting down to dinner or at someone’s private residence. It could conceivably be seen as somewhat rude to wear it if you’re deep in conversation although I feel that might change over time as people realise it’s not something that’s being used 100% of the time. Things will start to get murky as Glass like devices start to become smaller and less obtrusive although the current generations of battery technology put Glass on the slimmest end of the spectrum possible so I doubt they’ll be getting smaller any time soon.

Essentially I see these kinds of augment reality devices being an organic progression of smartphones, extending our innate human abilities with that of the Internet. The groundwork has already been laid for a future that is ever-increasingly intertwined with technology and whilst this next transition poses its own set of challenges I have no doubt that we’ll rapidly adapt, just like we have done in the past. What these adaptations are and how they function in the real world will be an incredibly interesting thing to bear witness to and I, for one, can’t wait to see it.