Early Google Glass user describes it as ‘creepy-looking,’ says it’s likely to fail

The common knock on Google Glass has been that it’s far too dorky-looking for normal people to want to wear. David Pogue, writing at Scientific American, says that he got a chance to play around with Google Glass recently and came away with a somewhat different take: Google Glass is too creepy. In particular, Pogue says that people who are wearing Google Glass instantly make everyone else around them uncomfortable if they’re not also wearing the headset. Pogue came to this realization after he “ran into a Google employee wearing it in public” and had a “screamingly uncomfortable” conversation with her.

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“There she was, wearing this creepy-looking, faux-futuristic forehead band — with a built-in video camera pointed at my face,” Pogue writes. “For all I knew, it was recording me… This puts Glass wearers in a position of control. They can take pictures and videos, post things online and even possibly use face-recognition apps to identify strangers in a crowd.”

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Given that Glass wearers are already being called “Glassholes,” Pogue thinks that Glass is in serious danger of being remembered as this decade’s version of the Segway, “another stunning technology achievement, ultimately doomed to nichehood by the pure awkwardness, the attention-grubbing self-centeredness, of using it in public.”

This article was originally published on BGR.com