The main activity of the day which I wanted to test the Glass with was our group tennis coaching at my local tennis club. During my walk there I could test whether or not the voice recognition would work over the loud traffic sounds and it did, but only about 50% of the time.
Quite often it would recognise words incorrectly so this shows me that Glass would need to be used mostly in quieter locations.
Furthermore, as I was walking to the tennis club, I could see how well the tethering worked with the iPhone 5 personal hotspot feature. It would seem that periodically it loses the connection so that then limits the functionality of the Glass, since we have already established that Glass doesn’t really work without a good wifi or a strong 3G on your phone.
On arriving at the club, I was mostly interested to see how people reacted. This is quite a prestigious tennis club in south west London, and because I was going during the day, there would be more senior citizens, and wealthy people with time who were at the club.
Curiously not a single person recognised that what I was wearing was the Google Glass. Most did not even comment on it, and after speaking to one elderly lady, she thought it was some sort of eye device to help with my vision.
The tennis coach, a young 24 year old guy, didn’t know what it was. But after having a quick go, he could see the potential of it. In fact when I described it to him, he did not believe that such a technology could exist.
There was a couple of players on the courts next to ours who looked over a lot from the moment they entered the court. I could see that they were commenting and perhaps there were some anxious looks on their face, as if to wonder whether I was recording them or not. I suspect they knew what I had and weren’t pleased I was using it in a private club.
As for the usage of the Glass whilst playing tennis, I found it stayed on my head without a problem. At no point did I feel like it could fall off. I also didn’t feel like it got in the way of me playing, though a few times I wondered whether there was any use for it at all on the court since it wasn’t tethered to the iPhone at this stage.
I took a few photos, I took a few videos, one I particularly like is a serving video so you can almost see it from my perspective as I throw the ball up. You can see a similar video that Roger Federer did when he tested the Glass.
Overall I think it wasn’t too useful for tennis. The speed and nature of the game means that live Glass apps which might be able to assist in-play would be lost because a player simple does not have time to focus on anything else but the ball. Perhaps training apps could be made to analyse a players throw or just to track overall court movement.
What sports do you think you’d want to test the Glass with?
[videojs youtube=”http://youtu.be/9Eabp3Jpy-I”]