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After Google Glass' early demise a couple of years ago-as many of us foresaw-the optical mounted display has suddenly made its comeback!

This time though, it is not worn by any of Diane von Furstenberg's models on the runway-it's worn by those who will most likely compose its largest user base: factory workers.

Google Glass is considered one of Google's greatest failures. While it caused quite an international stir back in 2015, people who were enticed to buy the product realized that the $1,500 USD tech piece was not as cool as what was advertised.

The odd-looking glasses failed to live up to the hype. Google's purported 'revolutionary' eye device encountered issues and did not work as planned. Eventually, after being flocked by complaints and criticisms, Google Glass died a natural death-or so we thought.

But now there's reason to check out Google Glass once again!

#GoogleGlass is alive and well #enterpriseedition Click To Tweet

Google Glass: the Rise and Fall

Google Glass was the brainchild of Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google and now President of Alphabet Inc., Google's parent company.

Brin spearheaded the development of the Glass in Google X, a division of the company that is solely devoted to technological advancements, on 2011. The first prototype of the Glass was said to weight 8 pounds, a setback during the early stages of its development.

Eventually, Google engineers were able to reduce the weight of the spectacle, making it wearable. In 2012, Google Glass was publicly announced by Brin while sporting its prototype in an event at San Francisco.

The following year, the lighter Explorer Edition of Google Glass was made available to the US Google I/O developers for $1,500 USD.

Developers were invited to use the Twitter message and hashtag #IfIHadGlass to qualify as an early user of the then 'limited beta' version of the Glass. Those who qualified were dubbed as 'Glass Explorers.' Around 8,000 individuals were invited to visit the Los Angeles office of Google and pay $1,500 for the unit.

After its release, the product failed to satisfy the interest of the people. Complaints about the high price, privacy, health issues, and poor public image plagued Google Glass. In 2014, instead of the promised public release of the product, Google announced that it would move to a 'more open beta' program that will allow non-developers to try the product.

In January 2015, just two years after the Glass was introduced to the public, Google announced the end of the Explorer Program.

Google Glass Program: the Return

While we were all lead to believe that Google Glass was already dead, it appears that the infamous eye wear is very much alive!

On Tuesday, Alphabet announced the newest version of the Glass dubbed as Glass Enterprise Edition (EE). According to Wired, Alphabet commissioned a small group of researchers and engineers to develop a version of Google Glass for the workplace.

In a blog post by Jay Kothari, Glass project leader, the Glass has been in use for the few years by businesses such as AGCO, DHL, Dignity Health, NSF International, Sutter Health, The Boeing Company, and Volkswagen.

According to Kothari, they spent the last two years working with more than 30 expert partners to build customized Glass software and business solutions for people deployed in different fields of industry.

#GlassEnterpriseEdition is so epic!Bravo #Alphabet! You finally got it right! Click To Tweet

Some of these fields include manufacturing, logistics, field services, and healthcare. The team also made the new Glass more lightweight and comfortable to wear.

In AGCO, an agriculture solutions provider, the Enterprise Edition helps workers reduce the amount of time spent accessing checklists, viewing instruction manuals, or sending photos from tablets or laptops. Apparently, Glass successfully reduced the company's machinery production time by 25 percent and inspection times by 30 percent.

According to Peggy Gulick, AGCO Director of Business Process Improvement:

"Employees are now working smarter, faster and safer because they have the information they need right in their line of sight."

The Glass Enterprise Edition has a camera button found at the hinge of the frame. The button acts as a switch that enables the removal of the electronic unit part or Glass Pod from the frame. After that, the Glass Pod can now be connected to any compatible safety glass frames for the factory floor.

Other new features found in EE include faster and more reliable WI-FI connection, beefed-up processor, longer battery life, camera upgrade from 5MP to 8MP, and a green light indicator that goes on when a video is being recorded.

With its announcement, Alphabet also lifted the non-disclosure requirements on its Glass EE partners. This move by the company gave other businesses the opportunity to join the Glass program.

Has Alphabet learned from the mistakes of Google Glass? Will the Glass Enterprise Edition survive as a feature of factory workers and gain success this time around?

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Look out! Google Glass is Back With Enterprise Edition

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After Google Glass' early demise a couple of years ago--as many of us foresaw--the optical mounted display has suddenly made its comeback! This time though, it is not worn by any of Diane von Furstenberg's models on the runway--it's worn by those who will most likely compose its largest user base: factory workers.

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This piece originally ran on May 10. We're re-running it for Dark Futures week, in which we explore how dystopias have been imagined in popular culture.
Dystopian fiction is having something of a renaissance these days, and The Handmaid's Tale, a powerhouse speculative-fiction tale about a totalitarian theocracy in America, is the latest to captivate and terrify audiences. But it's far from alone on the small screen. The last decade has been rife with dystopian TV shows that reflect our growing anxieties about surveillance, climate change, the erosion of civil liberties, and the end of the world as we know it. Below, Vulture picks out the shows that defined the modern TV dystopia.

Although The 100 started off as very CW show - cue teens from space romping on an irradiated Earth while the Imagine Dragons song "Radioactive" plays behind them - it's become one of the most interesting sci-fi shows on TV. As the remainder of humanity makes it way back to Earth a century after nuclear war rendered it unlivable, they encounter unexpected survivors on the ground who turn their homecoming into a ruthless survival drama. The teenage characters are routinely scarred by the unthinkable moral decisions they are forced to make, a hallmark of any worthwhile dystopian fiction.

Wealth inequality gets a dystopian workup in this Brazilian show about a society where the top 3 percent live in luxury in a paradise called the Offshore, while everyone else is trapped in poverty and squalor. At the age of 20, everyone gets a shot at making it into the 3 percent through a competition called the Process, supposedly making this a just "meritocracy," because that line of thinking has never gone wrong before. The Process is designed to be difficult, revealing, and even potentially lethal, pushing the characters to their limits with often unexpected results.

Adventure Time
Although this whimsical cartoon about boy named Finn and his talking dog Jake might not seem like a post-apocalyptic story, it surely is. Finn and Jake live in the Land of Ooo, a world that we slowly learn has formed in the ashes of a cataclysmic nuclear conflict called the Great Mushroom War that wiped out almost all of humanity (and presumably cleared the way for its anthropomorphic candy people and flying unicorns to flourish). Sometimes the references are subtle - the show's cheery opening theme features blink-or-you'll-miss-them shots of nukes - and sometimes they're much more obvious - flashbacks to scenes with cities full of skyscrapers on fire - but it's oddly affecting to realize that the show's fanciful adventures take place on the charred bones of millions of human corpses. Oh my glob!

Granted, Battlestar Galactica doesn't take place on Earth - or does it? - but this story about the scrappy survivors of a robot holocaust struggling to stay alive and find a new home has all the hallmarks of a classic dystopian tale. Although the show goes off the rails toward the end, its blend of technological terror and mysticism makes for very compelling TV, particularly when it explores the blurry lines about where humanity ends and where the personhood of advanced technology begins.

Sometimes described as the modern-day successor to The Twilight Zone, Charlie Brooker's sci-fi anthology series explores the dark side of technology and how it might warp society in disturbing ways. Although Black Mirror occasionally strays into the realm of the truly fantastical, its most chilling episodes are the ones that take familiar technological experiences - online harassment, virtual reality, and social media - and take them one step down the road to true horror.

Instead of nukes, plagues, or Nazis, Colony looks beyond the stupidity of mankind for its world-ending catastrophe. After a vastly advanced race of aliens known as the Host conquers Earth, the surviving humans live in militarily controlled cities now ruled by their human collaborators - who often seem to think they're doing good, or at least preventing the complete extinction of the human race. We follow the occupation through the eyes of the Bowman family in the Los Angeles "bloc," as they make life-or-death decisions about where their loyalties lie.

If you ever wished that The X-Files were more sci-fi than supernatural, this show about an FBI team that investigates weird phenomena is right up your alley. It starts out as a paranormal procedural series, but the subsequent seasons take a hard left turn into parallel universes, alternate realities, and time travel that completely upend the show again and again in thrilling ways.

In this Canadian-American drama by Babylon 5 alum J. Michael Straczynski, a deadly virus has killed nearly all humans over the age of 13, throwing the planet into chaos. Set 15 years after "The Big Death," we meet the young survivors of the plague - including Luke Perry as the titular Jeremiah - who are now grown up and trying to rebuild the world on their own.

After a nuclear attack wipes 23 major American cities off the map, the inhabitants of a small Kansas town struggle to survive, find answers about the destruction of their world, and create a new civilization. Although Jericho became a cult-favorite show - complete with a "save our show" campaign that involved mailing peanuts to CBS executives - it was canceled after two seasons and continued its story as a comic-book series.

The rare post-apocalyptic sitcom, this series set in 2020 focuses on a man who believes he is the sole human survivor of a deadly virus that swept the Earth. He soon encounters other survivors, however - including Kristen Schaal and January Jones - and quickly proves that relationships get even more complicated and absurd when only a handful of humans exist and some of them hate you.

The Man in the High Castle
What if Nazi Germany had won World War II? One of the most popular alternate-history thought experiments of the last century takes fictional form in this Amazon adaptation of the Philip K. Dick novel. In a fascist America cleaved in two by the Japanese and the Nazis, a San Francisco woman discovers a film reel that seems ripped from a different reality - one more like our own - and sets out to uncover its mysteries.

Samurai Jack
Yup, another cartoon! Jack, the eponymous samurai in this Cartoon Network show, gets sent to a dark version of the future ruled by an evil wizard named Aku, and sets out to defeat the wizard and make his way back to the past. Gorgeously animated and sometimes quite dark, often exploring mature themes of guilt, death, and regret, this is quite simply one of the greatest animated shows ever made.

I'm not going to pretend that I watch The Walking Dead anymore, for the simple reason that it is so unrelentingly committed to its nonstop parade of human suffering that it feels like sticking your head in the pain box from Dune. But, hey, they call it misery porn for a reason - a lot of people get off on it. While most zombie flicks provide a quick, exciting slice of life after the undead apocalypse, The Walking Dead dares to ask: What happens after that? And after that? And after that? Spoiler: absolutely nothing good.

The Handmaid's Tale: A Beginner's Guide to the Universe

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The 13 Shows That Defined Dystopian TV Before The Handmaid's Tale

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This piece originally ran on May 10. We're re-running it for Dark Futures week, in which we explore how dystopias have been imagined in popular culture. Dystopian fiction is having something of a renaissance these days, and The Handmaid's Tale, a powerhouse speculative-fiction tale about a totalitarian theocracy in America, is the latest to captivate and terrify audiences.

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Ideas regarding negative impact of tech e.g. social media/platforms:

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Ideas regarding negative impact of tech e.g. social media/platforms:

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1. decrease in face to face communication
2, loneliness
construction of reality which may be far from the truth
3. increase in narcissism
increase in insecurity: body image, popularity...
4. loneliness
5. depression
6. superficiality of relationships

Other ideas:
invasion of privacy
virtual reality vs real reallity
genetics

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Top 6 futuristic clothes you can wear right now

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Futuristic design once meant flying cars and sentient computers but with emerging user interfaces that reality is increasingly near

Futuristic design once meant 3D screens and sentient computers; with emerging user interfaces, that reality is increasingly near

When thinking about the future of UX desig n, and tech in general, images of Minority Report might spring to mind. Floating 3D touch screens, voice UIs and retina scanners were just a few of the technologies used in the film which have been realized in modern life.

But when it comes to futuristic design, what will define UIs of the future? And which UIs will become more prominent? Justinmind is always curious about UI trends (especially when it comes to building the prototypes of the future!), so we took a closer look at futuristic designs you might well be using in a few years. Get in line, John Anderton!

Natural user interfaces

Imagine a world without the need for a mouse, a keyboard or even a remote control. A world where a wave of the hand can change a song, or a nod can make a purchase. Well, that's where natural user interfaces come in.

NUIs are interfaces which adapt to your needs and preferences instead of the other way around. NUIs seek to create environments which are most comfortable for humans to use. Take McDonald's - you can either order your meal from a server or use their new touchscreens. The touchscreen lets you manipulate, move and change objects using your fingers. Or the Nintendo Wii, where moving your body shows a change on the screen when you play.

NUIs are all compassing, meaning there are other types of user interfaces included within the natural user interface umbrella. For example, Siri is a natural user interface and a voice recognition interface. There is much cross over among different types of natural user interfaces.

The big benefits of natural user interfaces is that they are easy to use and they respond to our natural movements - they're fun and feel as though the future has arrived.

NUIs also take advantage of abilities and skills we've used all our lives thereby reducing the cognitive load.

In fact, when it comes to futuristic design, design will focus less on how something looks and more about how we interact with an interface, if at all.

There are principles that can be used when it comes to designing natural user interfaces. According to Joshua Blake, they are:

Instant expertise

Progressive learning

Direct interaction

Cognitive load

Designers will have to master these principles to create natural user interfaces that make sense. The aim with NUIs is to create seamless user experiences between user and machine almost mitigating the need for an interface at all.

Prototype the designs of the future with Justinmind. Download now.
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Speech interfaces

Speech is already on its way to being one of the preferred methods of communicating with our electronic devices. Just look at the rise in popularity for speech enabled devices such as Alexa or Google Home. Amazon has sold 20 million of its Amazon Echo devices that it now dominates the smart speaker market.

Over the last few years the technologies behind speech interfaces and voice user interfaces have come a long way. This advancement, made possible thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning, has transformed speech interfaces from a use-once-and-never-again gimmick into a serious way of interacting and using technology. Google, for example, now gets 19 out of 20 words right when you talk to it.

Design of the future is likely to continue exploiting already-learned behavior and natural ways of interacting with the world, only this time applied to technology.

Voice UIs are also versatile. There's more to speech interfaces than asking Siri lewd jokes, speech interfaces allow users to say aloud their shopping list or send a text message without lifting a finger. We're using already learned behavior to reduce stress: we all know how to use our voice.

Speech UIS are useful. In fact, it's faster to talk to your device than to type a long search query into Google. This alone helps to boost the user experience and the VUI's utility means that they're likely to become more popular as the technology improves.

However, this does bring with it a set of drawbacks, namely speaking about private interactions in pubic. While a conversation among friends on a busy train might not cause stress, telling your VUI to schedule a personal doctor appointment in your calendar may ignite a different response.

Although, as VUIs become more normalized and popular, this concern is likely to disappear as more users become accustomed to interacting with their devices in this way.

When you consider how frustrating it is to just correct a typo on your phone, speech interfaces may provide much needed rest for our worn-out fingers. Especially since VUIs type at a much faster speed than us humans.

Thinking of designing your own VUI? Don't miss this UXers guide.

Virtual and augmented reality

Augmented reality and virtual reality are growing in popularity and have been doing so for over the last 5 years.

As VR headsets improve, so do the user experiences. Virtual reality and augmented reality can offer immersive and tactile experiences in ways that traditional UIs can't.

Imagine going on holiday to a big city that you've never been to. With VR and AR technology, it would be possible to project Google Maps onto the road before you.

This sort of interaction is entirely new and highlights a departure from screens, which can limit the user experience. Instead with VR and AR, a whole new 3D world can be created.

Christophe Mallet argues that within 10 years industries, such as the health sector and real estate, will have their own hardware ecosystems for people to use and experience. In fact, Mallet goes on to say that within 10 years hardware such as VR headsets will be as commonplace as the screens we look at today.

No interface

When thinking of futuristic design, or rather the UIs of the future, trends indicate that no interface will be the interface of tomorrow. Technology will go full circle back to zero. This is because interfaces will focus on what humans can already do.

Golden Krishna postulates that people don't want more screens, they want fewer. It makes little sense as to why there is such celebration regarding screen-based solutions. He goes on to make the point that designers should be trying to make our lives as easy as possible and that doesn't necessarily require screen-based thinking.

This should be a sigh of relief for designers. Instead of designing for multiple, disparate groups and screens, there can be a focus on designing around the behavior that humans already have, such as speech and movement.

Humans are already experts in this so creating interfaces (or having no interface) which can use these behaviors will already change the user experience entirely. Whether those experiences are good or bad remains to be seen.

And what will happen to web and mobile prototyping in the future...?

Futuristic design may not yet be as outlandish as what we see in science fiction films. There's a long way to go before we really do live in the world represented in Minority Report.

If one thing is certain, though, it's that prototyping tools will have to keep up with futuristic design. A basic wireframe today may be made of simple lines and boxes but tomorrow it could be a voice user interface. In Justinmind, you can already prototyping fully responsive UIs, mockup chatbot interactions and include audio in your interactive prototypes. Come on future, we're ready for you!

Conclusion

It is evident from the vast improvements to once niche and esoteric technologies that soon we'll be interacting with our devices in a very different way than we do now. The futuristic design of tomorrow then will not rely on the aesthetics of device or size of screen but instead with no device and, perhaps, no screen.

Whatever comes of tomorrow's interface, one thing will remain constant: that all interfaces should focus on the user's needs and goals and making them as seamless and easy as possible for wider adoption.

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Futuristic design: top design tips for UIs of the future

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Futuristic design once meant flying cars and sentient computers but with emerging user interfaces that reality is increasingly near When thinking about the future of UX desig n, and tech in general, images of Minority Report might spring to mind.

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Image via screenshot

On Wednesday, the minds behind Black Mirror released a new website that will tell you and your loved one just how long your relationship will last-because nothing is more romantic than arguing about the life span of a relationship on Valentine's Day, right?

The site, www.coach.dating, is based on Black Mirror's standout season four episode "Hang the DJ," where some kind of futuristic Tinder pairs single people up using a terrifyingly complex dating algorithm called "The System." The app's faux-Siri "coach" will even tell you how long you and your date are destined to stay together, if that's something both partners want.

Dystopian dating world aside, "Hang the DJ" turned out to be one of the few Black Mirror episodes with anything resembling a happy ending. But don't expect the real-life version to do much besides ruin a nice Valentine's Day dinner.

The coach.dating website gives you a custom URL to share with your Valentine, so the two of you can get the chance to find out your "expiry date"-the exact length of your relationship together. If that insane desire is something you and your partner both share, you must each click the site's button on your computers at the same time.

Unfortunately, if you don't click in unison, things will take a pretty dark turn, just like in the episode, and the site will start shaving years off of your relationship's future.

Sure, the whole site is just a cute tie-in to Netflix's sci-fi series and can't actually make an accurate prediction about your romance or whatever, but still, be careful. Valentine's Day can be dark enough as it is without a website inspiring a conversation about how long you and your significant other will last. You've been warned.

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This 'Black Mirror' Website Tells You When Your Relationship Will Fail

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Image via screenshot On Wednesday, the minds behind Black Mirror released a new website that will tell you and your loved one just how long your relationship will last-because nothing is more romantic than arguing about the life span of a relationship on Valentine's Day, right?

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Dark Ambient Dystopian Cinematic Electronic Music - Mentality