(Photo via)Nothing makes you ignore what’s in front of you like Google Glass. The world fades into blacks and whites as you move your head around in search of the best contrast, fixated on what looks like a shit version of a phone screen strapped to your face. To onlookers, you look like a slack-jawed moron, eyes raised up towards the great search engine in the cloud.In the lead up to Google Glass launching in the UK this week, many pointed out that it isn’t really a consumer product. If you want something that provides a simple body-mounted interface to your phone, smart watches like the Pebble are far more convenient. The only time you need a head-mounted display is if you can’t use your arms or hands, and that’s a pretty specialist case; it’s no surprise, for instance, that Oakley have pitched their smart goggles at skiers, or that surgeons featured prominently in early Glass demos.
Annoncering
Google’s goggles are merely the latest in a long line of ubiquitous computing devices – "smart" mobile, wearable or embedded products aimed at gobbling up information and shoving it in front of our distracted faces. Two assumptions drive these technologies: that more data is better, and that we want that data to be as visible as possible. The trend is more data, more of the time. If you could burn the current status of every home gadget onto people’s retinas, an engineer at a tech start-up with a stupid name like Squigloo or Globblee would be pitching the idea as a product to some venture capitalists.Some of these smart devices are more useful than others. Smart phones are bloody amazing. I can’t even remember how I lived before I had one – presumably because my life was so awful without my iPhone that I’ve blanked it all from my memory. Smart watches are still pretty cool, but not quite in the same league. Having a wrist-mounted interface to my phone is handy for checking texts and cancelling calls, or displaying information from Runkeeper, but it’s more luxury than must-have. Smart glasses – you’ve lost me.Over the last few months I’ve been using two "smart home" products, Loop and Cosy. Loop, which I bought for £30 from Amazon, sits underneath my electricity meter and monitors my flat’s electricity usage, storing data in the cloud and warning me if my usage goes over my weekly budget, recommending alternative energy providers and tariffs I might want to switch to. Cosy is a smart thermostat that controls my central heating, providing various settings and schedules, and allowing me to control my boiler from the internet or my smartphone. (I received a free test unit from the kind folk at Cosy, but they've reached their Kickstarter goal, so there are presumably more on the way.)
Annoncering
What strikes me is how little I use them both day-to-day. Leap gathers all kinds of data about my patterns of electricity usage, but I learned everything useful from it in the first week. Once I understood how much energy my flat was using, and which devices were having the biggest impact, what else did I need to know? I could sit and watch it like a hawk every day, asking it to send me alerts every time I climb ten watts over average, but I’m not sure it’s healthy to obsess about your energy usage, and I don’t need an email to tell me that putting the washing on is using electricity. I can literally see myself doing it.Cosy suffers from a similar problem. The interface is beautiful, both the physical device itself (which you can carry around the house with you) and the sleek web interface. Again, though, once I’d set up a schedule that worked in the first week or so, my interactions with it tailed off. That said, the one huge advantage it does have is that I can turn the heating on from under the bed covers on a cold morning – that alone is worth every penny.Monitoring your body is a bit more interesting than watching your utility meters, and activity monitors by Fitbit, Jawbone, Withings, Nike and a host of others have proven popular. However, like my smart home products, the volume of data produced greatly exceeds the amount of useful information, and the usefulness declines over time.
Annoncering
An activity monitor is great if you’re trying to change your lifestyle, but once you’ve worked out how to do your 10,000 steps and stuff the correct amount of calories in your face, what’s the point? And if you haven’t managed to change your lifestyle – well, you’ve spent a hundred quid on a little bracelet that tells you how shit you are every day until you dump it in a drawer.How smart do we actually want or need any of these things to be? The assumption of the tech industry is more – more data, more screens, more computing devices, more connections, more smart. The trouble is, most problems are pretty simple. I don’t need a massively over-engineered WiFi bulb to light my flat nicely, and while a web-enabled thermostat is kind of cool, it doesn’t solve any problem that I actually have in the real world.Then there’s our fixation with data. It’s very easy to fit devices with all kinds of sensors recording a dizzying array of variables in real-time, but more data doesn’t necessarily mean more actionable information. Having a fancy chart showing you the quality of your sleep minute-by-minute may be very interesting, but ultimately it doesn’t tell you much beyond “you got enough sleep” or “you didn’t get enough sleep”, and the chances are you already knew that. All those hundreds of data points translate into precisely no useful intelligence.I love data and I love technology, but sometimes it seems that they’ve become the ends rather than the means. That’s not to say that it’s all bollocks – all of these devices have their place, and all of them have the potential to be useful to people. There’s no doubt a long, interesting and profitable future for smart gadgets, wearable devices and even computers strapped to your face. I just wonder if we’re getting a little too obsessed with speed and quantity over substance – whether we’re in danger of having all the data we want, but not actually knowing anything at all.@mjrobbinsPreviously: Britain Is in Complete Denial About Its Obesity Problem