Hello,大家好~ AceJ的处女贴终于与大家见面啦,由于我在IT业工作,所以对科技公司的信息会比较感兴趣,今天的主题自然就是最近相当火爆的新玩意 “Google Glass“,希望大家会喜欢。如果你是像我一样对科技产业比较敏感的童鞋,那么这期小分队相信你会很感兴趣,anyway,hope all of you have fun ! 
Plus,我在Speed每一篇后都加了一个小问题,感兴趣的同学可以在读后看看自己能否回答这个小问题,如果可以,恭喜你,理解很到位。
Part I: Speaker [Rephrase 1]
Why Google Glass?
[Speech, 7:45]
Source: TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/sergey_brin_why_google_glass.html
Part II: Speed Augmenting reality: Google Glass and the future of business ByChristopherBarnatt
[Time 2] Two decades ago virtual reality was the next frontier. In fact, in the pre-Dot Com days of the early 1990s, many technologists were confidently predicting that most people would soon be spending their days in computer-generated worlds that would be accessed by donning a virtual reality helmet.
While mainstream virtual reality (VR) may have gone the way of the dodo, its half-cousin of augmented reality (AR) is starting to attract significant interest, thanks in part to the hype around Google Glass. In contrast to VR, AR overlays digital data on its user's vision of the real world. People are therefore free to interact with 'reality' and the digital realm simultaneously, with a visual link being established between the online and offline worlds.
Most early forms of mainstream AR were smartphone or tablet applications including Layar, Junaio and the Wikitude World Browser. All of these apps are still available, and can overlay information on a real-time view of the real world as seen through a smartphone or tablet's camera. Utilizing the device's GPS location and orientation, this makes it possible to hold up a phone or tablet and to locate restaurants, properties for sale, post boxes, Tesco stores, available hotel rooms, local Twitter users, or even single people looking for dates! Alternatively, a logo, barcode or QR code can be scanned and relevant information located online and overlaid.
[227words] Q1: what is the difference between VR and AR?
[Time 3] While handheld AR is all well and good, it is not terribly convenient or even always safe to hold a computing device in front of your face. Because of this, many next-generation AR systems will make use of dedicated heads-up displays. Most notably, Google has developed Google Glass. This is a cross between a lightweight headband and a pair of spectacles, and positions a tiny, refractive projection display in front of one eye. For those who wear spectacles, prescription Google Glass hardware is in the pipeline.
In addition to its tiny projection display, Google Glass has an integrated camera and wireless Internet connectivity. There is also a bone-conductive speaker in the part of the hardware that rests behind the ear alongside the battery.
When wearing Google Glass a user can see perfectly normally through both eyes. But via a tilt of the head, a swipe on the side of the display, or a spoken command, an overlaid computer image can be conjured into view. The result is a glowing, colour display that floats in space, and which is supposed to be visually equivalent to a 25 inch screen viewed from eight feet away. On this display all manner of content can be called up, including e-mails, information on the weather, travel directions, or the results of a voice-initiated Google search. There's also language translation functionality and the ability to take photos or record video.
[234words] Q2: List at least three scenarios in which Google Glass can be used now?
[Time 4] Already Glass is not the only AR headset, with competitors including the Ora from Optinvent, and the Wrap 1200AR glasses from Vuzix. The latter are more like a 'traditional' virtual reality headset, with an LCD screen positioned in front of each eye and stereo cameras to capture 3D video of the real world. In time we may even see AR contact lenses. So far, a team led by Babak Parviz at the University of Washington has developed a contact lens with a crude display that is fed data and power wirelessly. Such future AR hardware could even allow us to access digital content with our eyes closed, and perhaps even when we are asleep!
While it may be novel to be able to read social media content without holding up a traditional computing device, the business application of AR remains in its infancy and is ripe for innovation. Not least, for surgeons, mechanics and others who perform complex tasks with their hands, the opportunity to see digital information overlaid on their real-world vision could prove invaluable. In Germany, BWM has already developed a concept for an AR system that can help a mechanic disassemble and reassemble a car. Meanwhile, in their 'digital accelerator lab', Philips have demonstrated how Google Glass headsets can be linked to their Intellivue patient monitoring technology in order to provide surgeons with real-time readouts during an operation.
[231words] Q3: Has the business application of AR like Google Glass been used widely?
[Time 5] Taking an entirely different approach, others companies have integrated AR hardware into the real world. Perhaps most notably, Lego has developed an AR 'mirror' that is now in use in some of its stores. Potential customers take a box of Lego up to the device, where they see a reflection of themselves and the box in their hand. An AR, animated overlay of the model that can be made from the contents is then superimposed on the top of the box, and can be inspected from any angle just by rotating the packaging. In New York, Bloomingdale's has developed a similar AR window that lets passersby try on sunglasses, and has also trialed other fashion applications.
Ultimately, the extent to which AR matters for business will depend on how keen the general populace are to further embrace the digital world. Back in 1995 when I published the book 'Cyber Business', many people told me that hardly anybody would ever want to carry a mobile phone, let alone socialize online. And yet these are both now incredibly mainstream behaviours.
In a decade or so, there must therefore be at least a possibility that many people will regularly wear AR headsets or contact lenses that will provide them with a continuous stream of overlaid digital information. And if this does prove to be the case, almost all companies will have to get themselves and their products as visible and accessible in AR as possible. Just as today no company can avoid having a website, so in ten years time an AR presence may be a prerequisite for business success.
[267words] Q4: How will AR matter forbusiness in a decade as the author predicts?
Source: Management-issues http://www.management-issues.com/opinion/6775/augmenting-reality-google-glass-and-the-future-of-business/
Congress to Google: Glass Privacy Issues Must Be Taken Seriously ByJasonFell
[Time 6] Given one's ability to inconspicuously take pictures and record video while wearing Google Glass, it was only a matter of time before lawmakers demanded answers concerning people's privacy. That time has come.
Eight members of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Caucus have sent a letter to Google chief executive Larry Page asking what "proactive steps is Google taking to protect the privacy of non-users." The letter comes as Google hosts its I/O developer's conference in San Francisco this week.
The committee's concerns about privacy go beyond using Glass to simply take pictures and video of people without their express consent. The letter points to the eventual possibility of using facial recognition technology to "unveil personal information about whomever … the user is viewing." It also inquires about Google's plans to address privacy issues when approving new apps for Glass and how the device could collect and store people's private data.
Related: Customer Privacy: What You Need to Know About Social Media, Passwords and Transparency
“We are thinking very carefully about how we design Glass because new technology always raises new issues," Google said in an emailed statement. "Our Glass Explorer program, which reaches people from all walks of life, will ensure that our users become active participants in shaping the future of this technology.”
A recent Wall Street Journal article also raised privacy concerns. "It will be only a matter of time until you’ll be able to aim the lens of your [Google Glass] device at his or her face, and using face recognition technology get the individual’s address, work history, marital status, measurements and hobbies," the article said.
Google Glass can also provide users with directions when traveling and even translate foreign languages via a display that sits above the wearer's right eye. Winners of Google's Glass Explorer contest are testing the computerized glasses, but the device is not yet available for purchase to the general public.
[317words] Q5: What does Congressional Privacy Caucus concern about privacy issues in Google Glass?
Source: Entrepreneur http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/226722
Part III: Obstacle Privacy Looks Different Through Google Glass By Stephen L.Carter Jun 14, 2013 6:20 AM GMT+0800
[Paraphrase 7] No sooner had Google Inc. (GOOG) yielded to popular pressure to bar facial-recognition applications from Google Glass than techies split into two factions: those who called the ban an outrage that would hurt law enforcement and medical care, and those who said the ban would make no difference because sooner or later the wall was bound to fall.
The original concern rested on the notion that wearable facial-recognition technology would constitute a threat to privacy -- the privacy, for example, of those who would prefer to walk the streets unrecognized. Google’s position continues to be that privacy concerns about Glass are overblown. I think the long run will prove Google right, for reasons less technological than generational.
Glass is essentially eyewear connected to a processor and the Internet, with an interior display that looks to the wearer like a television screen. This sounds so cool and space-agey that it’s at first hard to see how the privacy issues arise.
Certainly the claim that the famous have a “right” to wander the streets incognito seems thin, and Google initially seemed inclined to ignore it, preferring to tout the obvious utility for, say, police officers able to identify suspects at a glance. The company might never have done its about-face had not the disclosure of the scope of National Security Agency’s data-mining program (and Google’s own unclear participation therein) brought privacy to the forefront of public conversation.
But there are other privacy issues. For example, Nick Bilton of the New York Times was startled to encounter Google Glass wearers in the men’s room, immediately after being reminded that “one of the gadget’s greatest features is the ability to snap a photo with a wink.”
Creepy Glasses
Creepy indeed. But privacy as traditionally understood encompasses far more than photographs in the bathroom or recognition on the street. Privacy is fundamental to life in liberal society, where, as the philosopher Judith Shklar argued, our fear of abuse of authority should lead us to establish constraints on both government and private power -- so that we are free, in almost everything we do, to make our choices without worrying about retaliation.
Ten years ago, in a report titled “Bigger Monster, Weaker Chains: The Growth of an American Surveillance Society,” the American Civil Liberties Union gave an example of privacy in this traditional sense: “A woman who leaves her house, drives to a store, meets a friend for coffee, visits a museum, and then returns home may be in public all day, but her life is still private in that she is the only one who has an overall view of how she spent her day. In America, she does not expect that her activities are being watched or tracked in any systematic way -- she expects to be left alone.”
That familiar cultural understanding has been upended -- not all at once by post-Sept. 11 anti-terror measures, but gradually, as more and more of our lives are lived out digitally. The woman in the ACLU’s example might use GPS, thus revealing her location as she drives. Perhaps she talks on her mobile phone, stops to buy gas or pays for coffee with a credit card. All of these activities leave digital traces. To imagine that those traces simply vanish, unrecorded, is no longer reasonable.
And reasonableness is very much the word to think about. When we conceptualize privacy as a right, our thoughts turn naturally to the Constitution. According to the judges, the measure of what is private turns on what a reasonable person would expect to be private. But the reasonable person is a shifting target, her expectations informed by culture and mores and actual practice.
Once everybody knows what so many already suspected -- that the federal government eavesdrops extensively on the people it purports to represent -- our expectations suddenly shift. One might be a passionate opponent of the programs, or one might accept their grim necessity; either way, the reality of their existence necessarily changes the way we think.
Cool Glasses
How much has the digital world changed the conception of privacy? A recent study by the Annenberg Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California concluded that the so-called millennials -- those ages 18-34 -- don’t share the fears of their elders about online privacy. In particular, the rising generation seems willing to trade privacy for other gains. They are, for example, “more receptive than older users to accepting targeted advertising when their personal information is required.”
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been widely criticized for making essentially this very point, but the data suggest he is right. The millennials do indeed tend to have a different view of where one draws the privacy border. As a headline several years ago in New York magazine declared: “The future belongs to the uninhibited.”
A recent Washington Post-Pew Research Center survey purports to show that those ages 18 to 39 are slightly more worried than their elders about the NSA program. But the same poll indicates that this group is far less likely to have paid close attention to the story. The episode seems to be rolling off their backs, perhaps because the young always assumed that somebody was cataloguing their telephone calls, Internet searches and credit-card transactions.
According to the companies that market to them, millennials are quite sophisticated in using privacy controls to limit access to their online data. But they seem to worry a lot more about keeping their online activities from parents and teachers than from corporations and government.
The point is that the reasonable person and her expectation of privacy are reconstructed in every generation. Criticizing Google for supplying what is certain to be heavy demand for so cool an advance as Glass is no way to hold a serious conversation. And a serious conversation is what will be needed -- not among us Baby Boomers, but among those who follow us.
That will be an intriguing challenge. It’s important for members of the rising generation to be active in shaping their expectation of privacy, and so demand law and practices that strike a reasonable balance. The alternative is to drift along, allowing their expectations to continue to be shaped for them, by the twin determinisms of technology and security.
(StephenL. Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a professor of law at Yale University. He is the author of “The Violence of Peace: America’s Wars in the Age of Obama,” and the novel “The Impeachment of Abraham Lincoln.”) [1087 words]
Source: Bloomberg http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/privacy-looks-different-through-google-glass.html
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