Let’s talk about the camera and how a last minute addition may have messed up Glass forever. When Glass was in its infancy, it did not support a video camera and the intention was pure and clear about providing information as and when needed.
Later as camera technology kept on moving forwards at lighting speeds, the development team at Google started to research the possibility of adding the camera component and of course they decided to include it in the end, but was this the right thing to do?
It rapidly changed the purpose of Glass, to perhaps something that it wasn’t primarily intended to be. People are talking about the camera being a issue around privacy, but what they don’t know is that actually the quality of the camera isn’t as good as you might be lead to believe.
Sure it’s capable of taking a 5mp photo, but do you remember that tiny Sony camera that came out in the early days of digital photography, the one that everyone wanted and looked like a small matchbox. That was 2mp and if you look back at those photos you will be shocked how bad the quality was.
5mp is nothing, and if I took a photo of someone from behind, looking to steal information, I can promise you that no amount of zooming in will reveal information that is written on an A4. The camera is also setup to have an incredibly wide angle, probably to decrease the possibility of missing the photo angle.
The quality is echoed on the video side of things as well. I’ve recorded quite a lot of video and the quality of it is terrible. I wouldn’t use it for anything other than to remind me of a memory, and even with that I might like to have a higher quality video. Let’s say I was at a concert of my favourite artist and I recorded a video. I’d be pretty annoyed years later with the Glass video vs video recorded on any other smartphone.
I also beg to ask the question about the idea that you can record anywhere, which I accept is quite cool, but in the trailer video again they showed people skydiving, skiing, and doing all sorts of fun activities, which in my mind has really already been sewn up by GoPro. Why would you want to record your snowboard 1080 on glass when GoPro is 100x better?
Conclusion, the photo and video quality is like the cameras built in the late 1990s. It really could have been higher resolution, but I suspect the choice was made to reduce the resolution because of restrictions on digital storage. The higher the resolution, the larger the disk space it would take up, and there really isn’t much space already on the Glass hard disk.
