Connected Development

Start a conversation about Artificial Intelligence and you evoke Hollywood’s vision of the future, full of killer robots, time-travelling cyborgs and sentient machines. That’s a fun, if apocalyptic, view but we’re closer than you think. To the AI, not end of days.

Thanks to our increasingly rapid efforts to connect the world around us, your car will soon drive you to work whilst teaching you Swahili, ordering milk and cheese for your fridge, reminding your significant other you’ll be home late because you’re having an affair with a robot shop assistant, taking a DNA sample from the steering wheel and poking you in the buttocks during your virtual porn session.

CES is once again revealing a selection of crazy devices many of us will never need but the message is the same – they should all talk to each other.

The machines don’t get to hog all the conversation as we’re already used to talking to the digital partners in our lives: Siri, Google, Alexa, Cortana, our cars. The idea works in a home or personal space where we’re all comfortable with a bit of digital banter, but it comes unstuck when we’re expected to talk to our devices in a social situation, wandering down the street, on a train, in the supermarket. This interactive tourette's didn’t help Google with its Glassholes image and I’m not sure this will change with Glass 2.0. It’s all still a bit weird – and noisy if we’re all doing it at the same time.

Speaking of cars (or to them) the tech and automotive worlds really have collided at CES this year. The convergence has been happening over the last decade but there’s never been as much infrastructure in place to genuinely make one relevant to the other as there is this year.

Ford announced its partnership with Amazon to connect their cars to Alexa, operating IoT devices such as lights, heating, A/C and garage doors. In home, the same tech offers status updates from your car via Echo. Ford also displayed their new smaller autonomous car sensors and announced their plans to become beyond an auto manufacturer in 2016, becoming a mobility company.

Major announcements have been timed to coincide with CES by big players such as BMW and Ford but it’s a new arrival that has grabbed some of the brightest headlines – Faraday Future. This new kid on the block plans to set up local operations right here in Vegas, with design and production of their first electric vehicle planned to start in 2017.

They revealed their FFZERO1 concept last night and it’s a truly stunning piece of design, not just from a physical product perspective, but also the well considered internal digital design and augmented reality and how this and the experience will translate to our personal devices. They're a young team that prides itself on rapid turnaround and they've designed a connected car from the ground up.

The concept of the connected car doesn’t just refer to a phone and a dashboard, it’s also the communication with the surrounding environment and how this awareness will eventually deliver the first credible autonomous vehicles. You’ll know of my love of cars and an unhealthy fascination with technology so you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m all for self-driving cars. I’ll sit on the central reservation here as I’ll happily hand over the controls on a motorway commute as long as I get the wheel back for the twists and turns of a challenging country road.

For me it’s an unwillingness to hand over the whole experience because I still love driving. For many others, it will be a trust issue as they’ll expect it all to go horribly wrong, or have all their travel data sold to the highest bidder (Google is building a car after all).

Our intelligent connected world holds great promise for things like interactive storytelling (I hinted at this in Mark Peising’s recent article for Publishing Perspectives) or making life simpler when travelling the globe. We’ll also have to wade through a pile of connected crap on the way as manufacturers and designers still seem hell-bent on adding ‘smart’ to everything they make.

It’s only a matter of time before a tabloid headline exposes a man caught having virtual sex with his SmartFridge.

“Siri, write another article about CES”.

First Byte of the Apple

Designers and creative types are notoriously bad at joining in, they don’t like to play with the ‘normal’ kids. Take it from me, I have first hand experience... I am one.

During my early days in the creative industry, the Mac was a piece of kit in a designer’s armoury that lined up alongside a drawing board, layout pad and Rotring pen. Anyone else remember these quaint objects? Actually I hope all good designers are still intimate with a pen and paper, the drawing board and Rotring probably less so.

The Mac was viewed as the rank outsider in a world dominated by the PC. We took it to heart, not because of its quirkily different beige box and solid construction but the ease-of-use and familiarity of the operating system. To compliment the built-in software, we embraced all things from Adobe, and at the time Quark and Freehand provided options as the support act.

That seems a long time ago (it was) and a lot has changed. The return of Steve Jobs and his creative partnership with Jony Ive delivered the vindication we had all hoped for (and secretly doubted) as Apple began to ship hardware that matched the software for innovation and creative flair, genuinely reflecting our industry whilst also appealing to ‘regular’ consumers outside the design industry.

One of the main differentiators in the Apple vs PC war of words has always been our relationship with the kit. As designers and innovators, we felt our Apple hardware represented so much more than a work tool and we developed a personal connection with the Mac that extended to the right tool in the right environment and became part of the creative process, rather than something to merely deliver it.

So, how have Apple’s products helped to shape the current digital marketplace? There are two key contributors – the design and innovation community and the consumer base.

As I’ve established, the creative industries have grown up around Apple’s software and hardware and key talent has naturally migrated towards Cupertino’s products. This loyalty filtered down from desktops to laptops to iPods to iPhones to iPads. Each device encourages us to create, to push boundaries and innovate wherever we are. We’re also a very forgiving bunch so poor iPhone battery life and signal strength don’t stop us from buying Jony Ive’s beautifully crafted objects.

Apple’s innovation shouldn’t be overlooked. They didn’t introduce the first smartphone or tablet but they cleverly shaped the landscape and introduced the iPhone and iPad to meaningful markets at key times where developers could lead the way with content production.

Apple already had the portable music market sewn up with the iPod, it was an easy step to embrace the familiar iPhone, then another no-brainer when Apple launched a big iPhone – the iPad. The audience was educated in the ways of the multitouch gesture by Apple so tablets became established on Apple’s own terms, not the market’s.

The App Store, iBook Store and iTunes delivery mechanism are so well established that entrepreneurs looking for the best platform to cover all bases naturally start with the most accessible for their customers. Speaking of which, consumers are the other key contributor to Apple’s relevance.

Apart from the stunning product design and ease-of-use, the quality of materials and overall reliability have allowed Apple to charge a premium and set a healthier profit margin than any other manufacturer.

This defines the audience. If Apple consumers are willing to pay up to $900 for an iPad, the first thing they want to do is fill it with stunning visual content (apps, iBooks, etc) to justify their purchase – and they’re willing to pay for it, unlike consumers on rival platforms.

So will Apple’s brand, it’s products and platforms remain THE hotbed of innovation and entrepreneurial focus? It’ll take a lot to sway the creative industry but there are still plenty of rival projects set to divert attention. Google’s Glass, Leap’s Motion and Thalmic Lab’s MYO are all ready to be unleashed over the next 12 months as gestural and wearable tech grabs all the headlines.

Let’s see what Apple has up it’s sleeve... so to speak.

Edited and updated from an article originally published in iCreate magazine, with my next column focusing on Apple's iPhone launch strategy.

Glass Half Empty

Hands up who thinks I look an idiot (comments restricted to the head gear please). Raise your hands if you think I’m spying on you. And finally, who wants a go on my new Google Glass?

I think we’ve already established my fondness for cars, design and technology. This new toy sits firmly in the third category and stretches my propensity for rabid gadget adoption to new limits. I love the thought of taking information away from a screen and delivering it as close to the brain as possible, however I’m not a fan of looking daft.

It’s this healthy skepticism that helped me through the door at Google’s New York office last week when I collected my shiny new Glass headset. Or should I say attempted to collect, more on that later.

If you don’t already know what Google Glass is (and I keep forgetting there are some of you who don’t) this is the Palo Alto tech giant’s first foray into wearable technology. 

Essentially, a metal bar runs around the user’s brow line from ear to ear, balancing on their nose. An additional arm reaches round the right side where a prism projects digital content directly onto the retina of the eye so both foreground and distant images remain in focus and the multitasking begins. This grey, black, white, blue or red arm also contains the speaker where the audio is transmitted directly into the wearer’s skull through bone-conduction. It’s not as freaky as it sounds and effectively leaves you with both ears to function normally without the ambient audio barrier headphones create.

That’s the tech, so what’s the experience? The screen image is almost unnaturally sharp and it comes as a shock when both the digital information and the world around you are in focus. The headset is very light and to someone who doesn’t usually wear glasses such as myself, it feels pretty unobtrusive.

When the headset is asleep, the screen remains completely clear and only when the touch-sensitive panel on the screen arm is tapped does the content spring into life. Next steps require the wearer to utter the magic words “OK Glass” to activate voice control or swipe back, down or forwards with one or two-fingered gestures on the screen arm. Still with me?

You can also nod your head up and down to deactivate the headset or go directly to the camera mode by pressing a physical button near the screen.

All this takes some getting use to but becomes increasingly addictive as you discover more features such as the ability to ask Glass for a local restaurant, then receive screen navigation direct to the door. Or how about a live Google hangout with your screen view transmitted to your invited circles? Maybe flight information beamed directly to your screen with Glass having drawn the information from your airline’s email confirmation?

That last point is actually impressive and unnerving in equal measures. The level of ‘data sharing’ hits home when you realise HAL has started reading your private correspondence.

At this juncture I’d like to explain why I’m not wearing a conventional pair of Google Glass in the photo above. I’m English.

It seems that’s the only reason. I was selected for the #ifihadglass programme via a twitter conversation instigated by Google, asking how we’d use Glass in interesting and innovative ways. Only a few of us were fortunate enough to receive the single acknowledging Tweet that said we’d been selected to participate in this groundbreaking research into the future of wearable technology (and it would cost us $1,500 each – a small price to pay in the grand scheme of things).

A wall of silence followed, during which time the first ‘I/O 2012’ conference attendees received their headsets (more commonly known as Glass Explorers, or the unofficial title, Glassholes). The press got to review this kit by spending time with these early adopters, who subsequently became tech/geek superheroes.

The silence persisted and my anxiety grew so I began to harass everyone I knew at Google (or were in any way connected to the organisation) to see if I could learn of the schedule for issuing Glass. I apologise now to all those nudged but the radio silence lead to doubts that I had actually been selected.

I needn’t have worried as the message finally appeared on my iPhone to tell me that @projectglass had followed me and a DM arrived “Your Glass is now ready! Please purchase within 14 days.” and I should head to a designated website to book my dedicated one-to-one introduction to Glass. This was it, I could organise my US trip to collect my headset!

With my US address supplied (Brandwidth’s New York office) and $1,500 paid in full (via my colleague’s US-registered credit card – thanks Dacia!) I was finally in the system with my designated time and destination set. Google New York here I come!

On the basis of this momentous occasion, I arranged a coast-to-coast US tour, taking in meetings in San Francisco, Cupertino, Mountain View, LA, Washington and New York – all in one fast-paced week, culminating in my appointment at the funky Google New York office.

Upon arrival I was escorted upstairs by a Glass-wearing brand ambassador, my first human contact throughout the whole process. I presented my passport as proof of ID at the reception desk and was issued with my Glass pass and whisked into the inner sanctum.

The one-to-one session began with the opportunity to try all Glass colour (or color) options, with and without the sunglass attachment. This was a pleasant surprise as I had assumed my selection would be set in stone the moment I had completed my online purchase. Both blue and red suggested I was trying too hard and looked more than a little like Timmy Mallet or Jonathan King – not a good look. The black looked a little heavy when not accompanied by the sunglasses. The white looks great but too clinical. I stuck with the neutral grey I had chosen on my original order.

I was logged into a Google Chromebook (the first time I had seen one in the wild), my headset registered and synced with G+ and GMail accounts and I was in the system! A two hour induction and training session followed during which I explained I intended to make a charity wing-walk wearing my new Glass, amongst other death-defying feats to entertain, reward and probably annoy my digital audience in equal measures.

Then my Glass world came crashing down as another cheerful Google employee asked if I was a resident of the United States? “No” I replied “but I do spend a lot of my time here, test and review emerging technology, build content for these devices and make recommendations to global clients. And was chosen by Google to be here”.

“Oh, but you’re English”

“Yep”

“I’m sorry but we can’t let you leave as this is only open to US residents”

“But that doesn’t make any sense for a beta programme looking to obtain as much feedback as possible from a varied global audience”

“I’m sorry but we can’t let you leave as this is only open to US residents”

“Can I not try to run out with them? I’ve paid for them and still own them?”

“I’m sorry but we can’t let you leave as this is only open to US residents”

I left, without shouting at the well-intentioned Google staff and walked 66 blocks in 30º heat to get the frustrating situation out of my system.

Had I made a run for it and actually made it as far as the sidewalk, my first public outing wearing my Glass headset would probably have been akin to wearing only an oversized pair of Dame Edna specs and my pants (that’s underwear for the Americans, not trousers). In New York, these anxiety levels may well have proven unfounded as the US crowds are more accepting of the technology – especially in cosmopolitan New York. Might have been quite different on the streets of London.

I’m still intrigued to see how Glass evolves and how the human element is represented. There certainly wasn’t much human interaction in the run up to my Google visit!

Although much of the focus surrounding Glass is on generating images and video footage that gives a first-person perspective, I’m concerned we’re beginning to see a removal of character rather than adding personality. Transmitting or recording ‘my viewpoint’ never actually features the wearer so we’re actually one step removed rather than making a connection. Either way, this still generates interesting content but we shouldn’t lose sight of the individual.

Am I disappointed? You bet your ass I am, even if the number of individuals lucky enough to be accepted onto the beta programme (as I was) are very small, I’m willing to bet I’m in a category of 1 when it comes to those that have owned Glass only to be parted from them for being a little too English.