The glasses that the planet and your wallet need
Forget “a computer on every desktop”. Put the right glasses on every nose, instead.
Lenovo has recently announced “Smart Glasses” that can “show up to FIVE virtual displays”, while still looking “almost normal”:
According to the same articles, each pair of these glasses “can show up to five virtual 1080p displays and has an 8-megapixel camera that can provide 1080p video”. This is what the result should be like:
The first, main customers for these “virtual-multi-screen” glasses would be corporate or professional users, running applications like 3D visualization and augmented reality.
Cool. But that is NOT what I want to see with those glasses. Or WHO
It is just natural, and also necessary to cut prices, that high-end products like these are invented and optimized for enterprise customers before everybody else. But, unlike other stuff, this seems to me stuff that should reach the masses, especially the poor ones, as soon as possible.
I want to use glasses like those to not buy monitors anymore for my unglamorous, purely SOHO, that is “Small Office/Home Office” activities. I want glasses like those in school labs.
On a per-gram basis, glasses like those are surely not less polluting than usual computer monitors. But I want them, because they could make me, and countless other, non-corporate users, use much less physical resources.
If made as a monitor replacements for the masses, glasses like those would require, or generate, much less money, personal desk space, e-waste, general pollution and raw materials. We badly need such savings, if human-made stuff already weights more than everything alive on Earth.
Of course, to have such effects, those glasses will have to be:
- really interoperable, not just “Windows-only”, and easy to repair too
- removed from any data monetization. Avoid like the plague all the versions that “companies like Facebook and Apple will eventually try to sell us” (see Cnet)).
Looking forward from comments by Lenovo about this. And maybe, why not, even a pair of glasses to review, as long as they can work with Linux.