Google Glass and Sedentary Life

Are you the type of person who may be mistaken for a particularly starchy vegetable that when deep-fried, turns into a mouth-watering, artery-clogging American delicacy?  Yes, I’m talking about those who live sedentary lives, those who forgo all things motion, the stationary people who, like a sea sponge, just kind of go with the flow.  I’m talking about couch potatoes.  Now that I have your attention let me say that I too was a couch potato when I figured this very thing out.  Well not at first anyway…

So when I first got Google Glass I wore it everywhere at all times of the day.  I used it religiously for about a week before finals started.  Once finals week was over, I headed home for winter break.  I had a lot of aspirations with taking Glass home and showing it off to friends and family.  I also thought that it would be great to try and find new use-cases for Glass because I would be in a completely different setting.

And a different setting it was.  I did the usual carousel routine of: explaining how it worked, what I can do with it, how much I paid for it, when it was coming out, and if the person could try them on.  Like I said in my previous post, I wore Glass to WalMart a few times when going out with my parents to shop.  I wore it a few times to the local grocery store and then over time I just stopped wearing Glass altogether.  “But you spent $1500 on that piece of plastic!  Why would you not be wearing it?!”  Trust me, that thought kept bouncing around inside my skull for about a month.  It got to the point where I felt nauseous because I thought I had wasted a huge amount of money.  Especially for a college kid.  Why did this happen?  How did I get myself to the point where I just didn’t care to wear Glass?  It happened because I was sedentary.

Going home for the break meant that I didn’t have to do anything.  I did not have any assigned work and I did not have any obligations that I needed to do.  I slunk around the house like a zombie, endlessly looking for some sort of stimulation.  My daily routine looked like this: Wake up at 11:00a.m (because why not), shower, watch television while eating a brunch on the couch for a few hours, read the news or a book (only productive thing I did), eat dinner with family, watch tv with family (again, on the couch), wait until parents went to sleep to play Battlefield 4 on my PC, fall asleep myself….repeat.  Now for the first week it is “understandable”.  Most college kids are exhausted after finishing off the semester and just need to relax.  However, when it started carrying over to the second week, I knew I had a problem.

It was a good problem though for multiple reasons.  First it made me realize the type of user you have to be in order to get the most out of Glass and have it be considered “worth it”.  Second, because of this realization, I could now share it with you, the readers, of what to expect with Glass.  Finally, it was a wakeup call that I needed to get active again.

Before I was active, I was stationary.  I was like the guy in Toy Story 2, with Cheetos sprawled across my chest and passed out on the couch while a That 70’s Show rerun played on the television.  When I got to thinking about it, people who aren’t active have no use for Glass.  Why would I look up the New York Rangers score on Glass when I could just use the laptop sitting in front of me instead?  Why would I ask for bus schedules when there were no buses to be taken?  Why would I listen to music when my nice Sennheiser HD-25’s were right there?  Why would I take several random pictures of my cat?  Ok you caught me on that last one.  Basically, there really is no need to use Glass around the house…yet.

As an Explorer there are just not that many apps or uses for it within my own dojo.  Where Glass excels is out in the world.  It makes you get up and be out there.  Out there where you need relevant information while multitasking on some other thing.  Like going for a run and wanting to follow a certain path or finding when restaurants are open.  Right now it’s, as the name implies, for Exploring.

Eventually there will be apps for in the home like following food recipes in your eye for example.  I haven’t really needed to use the recipes app because let’s be honest, I’m a college guy living in an apartment with three other college guys.  Hot pockets, the occasional Stouffer’s mac ‘n cheese and pb&j’s are where it’s at.  But again, apps will come.  When the consumer version is out and there is a dedicated app store, very creative people are going to come out with very creative apps for in the home.  Right now you’re better to save your money and wait, unless you want to be one of those creating the great new apps of the future.

Get off the couch, stay active, and grab a Glass of life.