The video below is an interesting time capsule. It’s Eric Sykes, talking to Jack Ashley on See Hear about his special glasses, which are in fact hearing aids. They use bone conduction technology to transmit sound into his inner ear.
A year from now, Google will be selling a pair of glasses that transmit sound to the wearer through bone conduction. However, unlike the specs that Eric Sykes wore, Google Glass has the potential to change deaf people’s lives forever.
Google Glass is essentially a wearable computer which sits on the user’s face. A single glass lens over one eye, displays colour images in a similar fashion to the head up display you see on fighter jets, or on sports cars. The resolution has been described as a 21inch television viewed at a distance.
You can adjust the headset so that the images appear directly in your line of vision, or just avobove or to the side. When the text and images are in your line of vision, they sit in a middle focal distance, similar to watching a 3D film through glasses and seeing subtitles appear on their own distinct focal plane.
Google Glass will use a combination of touch and voice commands, and function in a broadly similar way to an android mobile phone. The video below gives a good idea of what you can see and do with the headset.
The publicity around Google Glass so far has been a mix of the negative, and the sceptical. There are lots of people in the United States walking around wearing developer prototypes, with the nickname ‘Glassholes’. There are also privacy concerns – photographs and 720p video can be recorded with a single blink.
One Seattle bar has already banned Glass users from wearing them on the premises.
There are a few other niggling issues with the headset. It doesn’t fold like a pair of glasses, making storage difficult. Battery life is poor. People have reported that the display doesn’t look great.
Despite all that, despite the reliance on voice commands… I’m excited. From what I’ve seen and read so far, Google Glass could be a truly disruptive innovation that smashes down access barriers for deaf people in a way that’s never been done before.
The term “disruptive innovation” originates from a book by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma. In simple terms, it’s a technology that does not just alter the market, but creates an entirely new one.
Gillette adding additional blades to their razors is an incremental innovation. Apple making their iPhone screen a centimetre taller is incremental.
Past disruptive innovations are the leap from physical music formats to MP3s, or the transition from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Wikipedia.
Google Glass has the potential to be a bigger innovation for deaf people than the textphone, teletext subtitling, mobile phone texting, cochlear implants, or relay phone services. I’ll give some examples of how Google Glass might be used by deaf wearers.
CINEMA SUBTITLES ANY TIME, ANYWHERE
If you want to watch a subtitled film in the UK at a cinema, you have to keep an eye out for specially scheduled subtitled screenings, not always at a convenient time, and not always subtitled due to technical faults or oversights on the part of the cinemas themselves. Sony has cinema glasses in development, but these aren’t available to the public.
There are already lots of iOS and Android apps that provide real time subtitles for films – but watching a film with subtitles on a second screen is difficult, as you have to keep changing focus from near to far.
If similar apps were made available for Google Glass, deaf people would be freed from the tyranny of cinema scheduling and subtitle availability. We could go to see any film we wanted, wherever and whenever we wanted – pop the Google Glass headset on, use the built-in camera to recognise the opening logos of the film and sync the subtitles to the film as it plays out on the big screen.
LIVE SUBTITLING WHEREVER YOU GO
Google already has real time speech recognition software running on YouTube, and on its Android platform. It’s not perfect… but it’s getting better. It also seems to work better with American accents than British ones – I recently watched Patton Oswalt’s legendary Star Wars filibuster on Parks and Rec, and found the automatic captions surprisingly good.
Google are working to improve the accuracy of their automatic voice recognition all the time, with the recent acquisition of a Neural Network startup.
If Google’s automatic offering isn’t good enough, you could always book remote captioning for your Google Glass headset via companies like 121 Captions. Their service is pretty good for meetings, conferences and more – and reasonably priced too. The only issue could be ensuring the audio quality is good enough for the remote captioner to transcribe accurately.
DISCREET IN VISION INTERPRETING
Veteran interpreter Roger Beeson recently wrote an excellent article about his experiences, in which he envisioned a future where most sign language interpreting is done remotely.
That’s perfectly feasible, but one issue for any deaf person talking to a hearing person via sign language interpreter is eye contact. This eye contact is broken when the deaf person looks away from the hearing person speaking to an interpreter, or to their video monitor.
With Google Glass, having a sign language interpreter on screen means that you can look directly at the person you’re speaking to – AND see the sign language interpreter clearly. This is a first, and could make a subtle yet key difference to how deaf people interact with hearing people socially and professionally. The only bit I’m not sure about is how it would work if the deaf person wanted their own signing interpreted!
NIGHT VISION AND RADAR FOR THE DEAFBLIND
Some deaf users may also have visual impairments such as poor night vision, tunnel vision and more. Google Glass could be a useful tool, using the built in camera to project an enhanced, zoomed-in ‘night vision’ mode for people to navigate safely in the dark.
Or perhaps Google Glass could work with Google Maps and GPS to create a live real time ‘radar’ showing where the wearer is at all times and where they are in proximity to roads and other hazards, similar in function to the Soliton Radar of the Metal Gear Solid games.
THE CONNECTED HOME
Many deaf people’s homes have a Mountcastle silent doorbell, a Bellman fire alarm, a Nightingale baby alerter, and more besides.
A recent Glass patent shows that Google is looking into various connectivity options – meaning that everything that happens in your home could be transmitted to, and controlled by, your headset.
You’d receive visual or vibrating alerts for anything from an oven pinging to a doorbell ringing. Not only would that be cool, but it would certainly minimise all the different gadgets cluttering up the home.
Those are just a few possibilities. I’m sure there are people out there thinking up new ways to use Google Glass that are beyond our current scope of imagination.
It isn’t perfect for deaf people – not everyone will find the bone conduction works for them, but it could be solved by a bluetooth hook up to hearing aids or cochlear implants. Deaf people still have an uneasy relationship with voice commands, though.
A recurring complaint that people have about Google Glass is that it just doesn’t look that cool. People are starting to appear out and about in public wearing them. They look like, well, people with some sort of visual impairment. Again, I don’t think that’ll be a problem for deaf people used to body-worn technology.
My gut feeling is that Google is a pretty deaf friendly company. As well as honing their real time captioning, they’ve done little things here and there like enabling sign language interpreting in Google Hangouts.
There’s also another Google Glass patent that I discovered in the course of writing this. As we know, Glass can be controlled by voice and touch… but also by gesture recognition.
By waving your hands in front of you, you can access different apps and commands.
A brave new world where everyone’s walking around, signing? Now that would be fun to see…
Further Reading:
A detailed infographic on how Google Glass works
Thoughts after A Week with Google Glass
BBC News: Google Glass – Will we Love it or Hate it?
Guardian: Are you a Google Glass Half Full or Half Empty kind of person?
Wired: The Inherent Dorkiness of Google Glass
Techcrunch: Using Google Glass is Weird
Eric Schmidt: Google Glass Critics Afraid of Change
William Mager is a Contributing Editor for Limping Chicken. He is also an award-winning director for film and TV, who made his first film aged 14 when he “set fire to a model Audi Quattro and was subsequently banned from the school film club for excessive pyromania.” He’s made short films, dramas and mini-series, and works for the BBC. Find out all about his work at his personal website, read his blog, and if you’re on Twitter, follow him here.
The Limping Chicken is supported by a range of charities and organisations linked to deafness, all of whom offer services that enhance deaf lives. Click on the images on the right-hand side of this site or go to our Supporter’s page to find out all about them!
yourlocalcinema (@yourlocalcinema)
May 7, 2013
Great article William, hopefully glasses will catch on, so the prices will come down, so people will buy them, so there will be a market for developers.
wmager
May 7, 2013
The price at the moment is very high – the same as a high end laptop. It would need to be the same cost as a smartphone (if not cheaper, considering it doesn’t do all the things that a typical smartphone does!) to be a feasible proposition…
JGJones
May 7, 2013
Those glasses are high cost as they are the “developer edition” – that is – they have unrestricted access to all the source code of the Glass – they can do whatever they want. And of course – very low volume always result in high cost – just over 1000 was made that’s it. It’s so people can see what it could be used for.
However – the CPU etc that goes into the Glass is more of a “low end” compared to a typical smartphone = it’s cheaper if made in mass volume.
Hearing Link
May 7, 2013
The Google Glass was discussed a our Link Up Programme this weekend, with lots of innovative ideas for making this sort of technology work for people affected by hearing loss! Exciting times ahead!
Katherine Coutanche
May 7, 2013
Hugely exciting innovation and the gesture recognition software could be amazing. Just a shame it’s by Google. Their tax avoidance policies mean I don’t use them for anything if I can help it.
Sylvia Webb
May 7, 2013
Ever since I first saw Google Glass I have been asking the question “Do they come with subtitles?” But didn’t know where to send the question ……. Looking forward to Google Glass and the future ………….
intrinsicchaos
May 7, 2013
Great article. You’ve thought of a lot of potentially disruptive applications for Google Glasses. Remote interpreting is already catching on here in the US so it seems natural to move it to Google Glasses (but then it becomes an one-way interpreting situation!).
One thing you mentioned was Sony captioning glasses – ‘still in development’ – they’re actually used nationwide in the USA at hundreds of cinemas…for more than a year now. They work most of the time but a lot of Deaf people (including me) find it uncomfortable. It does liberate us from following set times for subtitled films so that’s a perk. Surprised they haven’t made they way across the Atlantic yet!
wmager
May 7, 2013
That’s fascinating re the Sony glasses. So you just pick them up at the cinema as you would a pair of glasses for a 3D film?
In what way are they uncomfortable? Is it eyestrain, or the way they sit on the face..?
Editor
May 7, 2013
I’m excited about the possible uses for Deaf folk, but I must admit, the idea of people being even more distracted than they already are, is something that fills me with dread!
Great piece as ever, Billy. Ed
wmager
May 7, 2013
I was having breakfast in a cafe this morning and watching people walk to work. They all had earbuds in their ears and were staring down at a smartphone in their hand. At least with Glass, people will be looking where they’re going..!
Editor
May 7, 2013
True, that! Though I’m more worried about knowing people are listening to what I’m saying, rather than reading Twitter at the same time! (I know I’m INCREDIBLY BORING, but still.) 😉
maggisummerhill
May 11, 2013
Agree, don’t use them when driving or when operating heavy machinery….
JGJones
May 7, 2013
All of the stuff you’ve mentioned have already been thought of and is most likely being planned by Google – as you’ve mentioned – they have been extremely helpful in making Google+ as accessible as possible – their disability teams are bloody fantastic with plenty of feedback and very responsive. Google Hangout – along with interpreter & captioning support will work (if not already) in the Google Glass as it’s Android based.
However Google Glass is gonna benefit a lot of people potentially – such as being able to control a wheelchair – http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/google-glass-eye-control-app-for-wheelchairs (think of people that have no control over their limbs, this would be one possible use to give them some independence).
How about the blind? think it’s useful for them since it’s sight based? Yes actually! http://www.abilitynet.org.uk/blog/why-google-glass-is-clear-winner-blind
Obviously there’s a damn lot more we might have not thought out yet – I just hope that some of those with a developer’s edition of Google Glass is teaming up with some disabled people to see what more they could do. It’s a potentially fantastic device not just for the deaf but a pretty wide range of disability.
(It’s also an clear example of how being open source is so beneficial)
Julie Bishop
May 8, 2013
Vinton Cerf, one of the earlier developers of the Internet, is a Google VP and profoundly deaf. In fact he was drawn to developing the first internet protocol (IP) because he knew it would be a game changer for him and others with hearing loss.
cherry
May 11, 2013
Like others who tired the google subtitling glasses I found them very uncomfortable hurt bridge of my nose as heavy and placing them over my own glasses difficult to focus each time I blinked or moved my head – altogether not a engaging experience. My preference for comfort and enjoying a film is on the big screen so I need subtitles on the big screen or just below.
what I find disturbing is that everything is being focussed on google because they are the giants with the money etc etc and we are ignoring the fact there are some very simple solutions and inventors out there who are ‘small’ people without the funding needed to get into the market and have what I consider far more user friendly simple cost effective devices. One was shown on another limping chicken article
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6uDWl4wVFg&list=HL1366992931&feature=mh_lolz
….so its possible to develop this here in UK but no one comes forward with the backing – wonder why that is?
Why are those with the means to encourage investors of inclusive cinema experiences and organisations such as CEA not jumping at this opportunity but keep supporting google glasses when many who tried them have already expressed they are not a fan of them? Is there a hidden form of collusion going? is there money to be had in supporting google instead of seeking all other options to develop??
Its time to support the small inventors into the market place who are more hands on and can make this all so simple for us to access an enjoyable experience in cinemas. They need help with creating prototypes and business plans and marketing etc to get their ideas for better options out there into the bigger domain.
So take a moment to view this “Off-Screen Cinema Subtitle System” a really simple solution all set and ready to develop if Jack the inventor had support and finance backing which is not forthcoming whilst google hold centre stage creating a false idea that there are no other options but theirs! I’m just saying!!
cherry
May 11, 2013
ooops just realised my bad to my last comment i need to correct, I actually was making reference to Sony subtitling glasses not being my preference for cinema having tried them as described above…. the rest remains what I say and having more simple options if the big boys would just let the small inventors in like Jacks!
wmager
May 14, 2013
Interesting. Of course, the Sony subtitle glasses have been rolled out on a huge scale in the United States recently.
It’s a shame that there’s still no universal solution to cinema access which all deaf people are happy with!
wmager
May 16, 2013
It looks like there could be an obstacle to Google Glass ever appearing in the UK – it apparently breaches privacy laws here:
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2013/05/16/google-glass-illegal-ip-lawyer-warns
JGJones
May 16, 2013
If that’s true then it would mean a smartphone is also illegal – there’s nothing to show that I’m taking a picture or video, upload it to YouTube etc. In fact my phone already automatically upload all video and photos so in theory I’m already breaking the law according to the lawyer. Google Glass isn’t going to be doing anything differently really.
Denise B Rogers
May 27, 2013
Seems more improvements needed and in Time HOPEFULLY they will have it perfected!!
myfavaslworld
May 29, 2013
William, this is interesting and hopefully it will be reasonable by the time it is in market. I am excited to try this one. I have tried one at movie theatre. It is ok and bit heavy on nose and ears when wearing it. Keep up good ideas! Paul
Ben Putano
June 5, 2013
You have great experience and perspective in the world of the hearing-impaired. We cited you in our latest article because of your thoughts on the impact of Glassware for the impaired. You can see it here MforMedium.com.
What do you think of the ideas for Glass we discussed? We will excitedly update our article with your insight.
Tina
January 29, 2014
Hey Billy, your crystal ball is pretty good! We are now able to offer remote captions streaming to Google Glass. We’re so excited!!
Zenon Rodriguez
February 12, 2014
Anyone know how to buy that google glasses for me. Because I am deaf so I want to change my life to be hearing people now. Can Insurance pay full for it? Or I have to pay for it?