Don’t get me wrong, I can’t stand gardening. But the first thing that came to mind when I put on Google Glass was my mother’s organic garden.
You won’t catch me outside in broiling 98-degree southern humidity struggling to hack through a dense, painfully stinging row of okra, or pulling nasty, squirming wormy things off dozens of tomato bushes. No siree! But you will catch my mother doing that crazy stuff. For hours on end, day after day, week after week, throughout the south’s high summer months.
That said, if you can get past the oppressive heat and humidity there really is no more verdant and glorious vision of bounty, robust health and natural beauty than a southern organic garden at its summer harvesting peak.
Thus the thought of me strolling, beatifically wired, through rows of an organic garden in full, wearing a pair of Glass with my mother narrating the purvey and provenance of every lush plant and vegetable, set my pan-media-tuned mind into high and sunny gear.
Who wouldn’t want to document and share that kind of rich media in our connected world? To be fresh content-enabled, breezily so, by merely putting on glasses, something I’ve done every day since I was 7-years old anyway.
One of the great things about living near the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech, of course) is participating in some of the innovations and events churned from there. Whether beta testing products in development, networking, attending concerts or lectures, there’s a wealth of experience and knowledge available to the university’s surrounding community, so last night (July 11) I hopped over to nearby startup nurturer, Flashpoint on West Peachtree Street.
There, Randy J. Mitchell, the founder and CEO of Plisten, along with Google and Hypepotamus, hosted a meetup for Google Glass developers and designers. My friend/mentor and sometime colleague, veteran political reporter Tom Baxter, who’s always up for some new media-creation adventures, tagged along too.
Randy, longtime Atlanta entrepreneur James Harris, Nicola Smith with Engage marketing, Tech grad and developer-entrepreneur James Rundquist, and others generously shared their considerable Google Glass expertise, knowledge and hardware too, with about 40 others also interested in the new Internet-enabled, “wearable” technology.
Let me stress that Google Glass is indeed an easily wearable, Internet-enabled device. It connects you to the Internet, where you can see and hear anything you’d consume via the Internet as you typically do, but this time with a small, high-quality screen that’s watchable over your right eye’s field of vision. You issue web-surfing commands with your voice, or by light swipes and taps to a touch pad built into the stem of your pair of Glass.
Glass also lets you record what you are seeing and hearing in your immediate field of vision, whether by taking a picture or recording video directly from the device. It’s important to note that Glass is not (yet) an augmented or virtual reality device. Although such uses are indeed in development.
Needless to say, wearable Internet-enabled devices, and the ease of connectivity that comes with wearing the Internet (as opposed to having to haul it around via a laptop, mobile device or table), have infinite, active, real time journalistic and broadcasting implications that are indeed mind-blowingly vast — and instant, once you put on a pair of Glass. You’ll have to dream-up your own when you get your hands on Glass.
And I can dream about (easily) documenting and sharing… my verdant south.
Mostly Media 