About

Why Smart Glasses?

Smart glasses have serious potential to improve our lives – from simple tools like navigation, notifications, notes, and a web browser to new tools like conversational intelligence, memory augmentation, sensory upgrades, intelligent assistants, and more, smart glasses will fundamentally improve human capabilities and change what it means to be human.

We foresee a near future where smart glasses are as ubiquitous as laptops and smart phones are today. We view recent history as a series of information platform developments that rapidly enhanced human potential – including technologies such as books, telephone, television, personal computers, the internet, smart phones, etc. These technologies allowed humanity to do new things by giving us new ways to represent, access, collect, share, and manipulate information. Smart glasses are the next information platform because they allow us to interact with information in an entirely new way. Smart glasses provide information to users without the need to switch contexts, capture contextual information around and about users, and open the door to merging the physical and virtual worlds.

Smart glasses and their status as information platforms will be very important to the future of humanity. Eventually, these platforms have to come down to earth in the form of use cases. Personal computers were touted as the next big thing by many smart people, but they only took off when user-friendly spreadsheet software was released. The application that brings an information platform that is abstractly attractive but concretely unadopted is called a “killer app”. For smart phones, that was navigation, camera, and mobile search engines. Smart watches were mostly unadopted until biosensing use cases developed – their killer app. No one can say with certainty what the smart glasses killer app is, but there are a few strong candidates. 

To accelerate progress towards the development and adoption of smart glasses use cases that improve our lives, we maintain the world’s largest list of use cases that take unique advantage of smart glasses (i.e. the use case is only possible or 10x better on smart glasses vs. a phone or other information platform): smartglasses.community/smart-glasses-use-cases

What’s The Problem?

It’s clear the potential of smart glasses is incredible. So, what’s the problem?

The industry of people and companies building human-computer interaction devices, especially smart glasses, has been plagued by a separation between those using the system and those creating it. Google Glass developers left it sitting on their desk as they programmed it with screen copying. Other companies release hardware devices with no built-in valuable use cases for users. There is too heavy a focus on specs, resolution, sensors, optics, etc. with a lack of thought and focus on what users will actually do with these devices.

This has to change. We want to go past smart glasses demos of dinosaurs dancing on tables and checking the weather. The potential of smart glasses to improve our lives is incredible, but it will require foresight, hard work, and community to ensure that smart glasses remain a tool for humanistic self-empowerment.

What’s The Solution?

The solution to this problem is a community of people using and making smart glasses that places humanistic, cognitive enhancing use cases of smart glasses at the forefront.

H20 is that community. We are an open, inclusive place for all sorts of people using and building smart glasses to come together and communicate what they’re doing with smart glasses, what they want to do, what they’re building, etc. This is a place focused on real life people wearing glasses in their daily lives – in work, play, social situations, and more.

Specifically, some of the ways we’re working towards our mission are:

• Maximising information flow from industry to consumers

  • Monthly meetups with a diverse panel of presenters – presenters include users and industry

  • Newsletter covering all things smart glasses

  • Industry partnerships – we partner with companies to connect them directly to users

• Maximising information flow from consumers to industry

  • Crowdsourced market research through our community

  • Bringing together smart glasses owners in our Discord and meetup who are happy to voice their experience owning commercial smart glasses products

• Supporting use case technology development

  • Recognition and promotion of apps development and testing

  • Close partnership with TeamOpenSmartGlasses

H20

H20 stands for Human 2.0. We believe that using technology is how humans upgrades themselves. In the past 100 years, we’ve entered into a new phase of technological growth, where the technology that is developed in one’s lifetime can become adopted as a “way of life” within that same lifetime. The time from invention to adoption is only shrinking, and we believe that humans combined with enabling technologies like smart phones, search engines, AI, and smart glasses become something that is greater than the sum of its parts, something that has never existed before – humanity 2.0.

Get Involved

If you’re interested in smart glasses, join our community and become involved through weekly virtual meetups, watching/reading our smart glasses crash course series, discussion on Discord, collaborating on open source tools, reaching out to other members, and more.

More Information

If you want to learn more about why we do what we do, checkout the below resources:

• Listen to community member Cayden Pierce discuss the H20 Smart Glasses Community on The AR Show

• Sign up for our mailing list

• Come to a meetup

• Watch previous meetup recordings