Farhad Manjoo, the author of True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society (2008), is a technology contributor to National Public Radio, the New York Times, and Slate. The following selections from his July/August 2012 Technology Review article capture his interview of Thad Starner, a Google project manager and technology designer.

1

At first glance, Thad Starner does not look out of place at Google. A pioneering researcher in the field of wearable computing, Starner is a big, charming man with unruly° hair. But everyone who meets him does a double take, because mounted over the left lens of his eyeglasses is a small rectangle. It looks like a car’s side-view mirror made for a human face. The device is actually a minuscule° computer monitor aimed at Starner’s eye; he sees its display — pictures, e-mails, anything — superimposed° on top of the world, Terminator-style.

2

Starner’s heads-up display is his own system, not a prototype° of Project Glass, Google’s recently announced effort to build augmented-reality° goggles. . . . Google says the project is still in its early phases; Google employees have been testing the technology in public, but the company has declined to show prototypes to most journalists, including myself. Instead, Google let me speak to Starner, a technical lead for the project, who is one of the world’s leading experts on what it’s like to live a cyborg’s life.° He has been wearing various kinds of augmented-reality goggles full time since the early 1990s, which once meant he walked around with video displays that obscured much of his face and required seven pounds of batteries. Even in computer science circles, then, Starner has long been an oddity. I went to Google headquarters not only to find out how he gets by in the world but also to challenge him. Project Glass — and the whole idea of machines that directly augment your senses — seemed to me to be a nerd’s fantasy, not a potential mainstream technology.

3

But as soon as Starner walked into the colorful Google conference room where we met, I began to question my skepticism.° I’d come to the meeting laden with gadgets — I’d compiled my questions on an iPad, I was recording audio using a digital smart pen, and in my pocket my phone buzzed with updates. As we chatted, my attention wandered from device to device in the distracted dance of a tech-addled° madman.

4

Starner, meanwhile, was the picture of concentration. His tiny display is connected to a computer he carries in a messenger bag, a machine he controls with a small, one-handed keyboard that he’s always gripping in his left hand. He owns an Android phone, too, but he says he never uses it other than for calls (though it would be possible to route calls through his eyeglass system). The spectacles take the place of his desktop computer, his mobile computer, and his all-knowing digital assistant. For all its utility, though, Starner’s machine is less distracting than any other computer I’ve ever seen. This was a revelation. Here was a guy wearing a computer, but because he could use it without becoming lost in it — as we all do when we consult our many devices — he appeared less in thrall° to the digital world than you and I are every day. “One of the key points here,” Starner says, “is that we’re trying to make mobile systems that help the user pay more attention to the real world as opposed to retreating from it.”

5

By the end of my meeting with Starner, I decided that if Google manages to pull off anything like the machine he uses, wearable computers seem certain to conquer the world. It simply will be better to have a machine that’s hooked onto your body than one that responds to it relatively slowly and clumsily. . . .

6

This wasn’t possible 20 years ago, when the technology behind Starner’s cyborg life was ridiculously awkward. But Starner points out that since he first began wearing his goggles, wearable computing has followed the same path as all digital technology — devices keep getting smaller and better, and as they do, they become ever more difficult to resist. “Back in 1993, the question I would always get was, ‘Why would I want a mobile computer?’ ” he says. “Then the Newton came out and people were still like, ‘Why do I want a mobile computer?’ But then the Palm Pilot came out, and then when MP3 players and smart phones came out, people started saying, ‘Hey, there’s something really useful here.’ ” Today, Starner’s device is as small as a Bluetooth headset, and as researchers figure out ways to miniaturize displays — or even embed them into glasses and contact lenses — they’ll get still less obtrusive. . . .

7

You could argue that the glasses would open up all kinds of problems: would people be concerned that you were constantly recording them? And what about the potential for deeper distraction — goofing off by watching YouTube during a meeting, say? But Starner counters that most of these problems exist today. Your cell phone can record video and audio of everything around you, and your iPad is an ever-present invitation to goof off. Starner says we’ll create social and design norms for digital goggles the way we have with all new technologies. For instance, you’ll probably need to do something obvious — like put your hand to your frames — to take a photo, and perhaps a light will come on to signal that you’re recording or that you’re watching a video. It seems likely that once we get over the initial shock, goggles could go far in mitigating° many of the social annoyances that other gadgets have caused.

8

I know this because during my hour-long conversation with Starner, he was constantly pulling up notes and conducting Web searches on his glasses, but I didn’t notice anything amiss. To an outside observer, he would have seemed far less distracted than I was. “One of the coolest things is that this makes me more socially graceful,” he says.

9

I got to see this firsthand when Starner let me try on his glasses. It took my eye a few seconds to adjust to the display, but after that, things began to look clearer. I could see the room around me, except now, hovering off to the side, was a computer screen. Suddenly I noticed something on the screen: Starner had left some notes that a Google public-relations rep had sent him. The notes were about me and what Starner should and should not say during the interview, including “Try to steer the conversation away from the specifics of Project Glass.” In other words, Starner was being coached, invisibly, right there in his glasses. And you know what? He’d totally won me over.

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