The most important parts of Intel’s new Vaunt smart glasses are the pieces that were left out.
There is no camera to creep people out, no button to push, no gesture area to swipe, no glowing LCD screen, no weird arm floating in front of the lens, no speaker, and no microphone (for now).
From the outside, the Vaunt glasses look just like eyeglasses. When you’re wearing them, you see a stream of information on what looks like a screen – but it’s actually being projected onto your retina.
This looks amazing. I’m not entirely sure if I, personally, have any use for this, but such basic, simple, handsfree information could be invaluable to, for instance, construction workers, farmers, police officers, or other people who do hard, dangerous work with their hands.
I don’t know. With Intel’s recent reputation, I wouldn’t want them getting anywhere near my retinae.
I don’t want my retinae to meltdown, causing me to start seeing spectres everywhere.
Imagine all those students with an ultimate tool to cheat on exams.
jpkx1984,
You know, I am not happy that we’ve created an incentive to hide information in the first place. At some point we as a society should consider ditching the notion that having information is cheating and instead encourage it as a legitimate tool to advance human capacity. Instead of grading us in an information void without tools & material, education should try and find ways to keep students challenged with technology. Rather than training our brains to do tedious repetitive tasks, we could focus on higher level abstractions and maximize our benefit from computers. If traditional classwork becomes too trivial with technology, then maybe classwork itself needs to evolve.
It’s just a thought, maybe one day not allowing technology on tests will be considered Luddite
Timed tests/exams for specific subjects rarely occur in the workplace so it’s funny how people think they can assess anything remotely close to workplace performance.
kwan_e,
This resonates with me. Regurgitating facts for a test is completely irrelevant to anything I’ve done on the job. Could just be me, but I kind of wish I experienced more real world scenarios in my educational years. Real world isn’t all roses of course, but I might have been better prepared to set expectations and evaluate job opportunities.
I think both of you are kind of missing the point(s) on memorizing & cheating:
(1) The big issue is not having access to facts but having somebody else take the exam at the other end of the line. Or several somebodies working in parallel… That in effect negates the purpose of testing (i.e. neither the ability to memorize, nor the ability to find/interpret facts of the person taking the exam is being tested – just their ability to copy.)
(2) Memorizing stuff does have its virtues – at the very least, speed of recall. Don’t take my word for it, just try reading any text while looking up every other word in a dictionary because you do not have to memorize words. You need a minimum amount of memorized info to carry out a meaningful conversation in any language (English, Martian, math, physics…)
(3) Back to cheating – at least until such technology becomes ubiquitous (or is school-provided), the ability of some students to afford better tech should not be allowed to give them an advantage during tests. When using external info on a test is allowed, it should happen in a controlled and equitable manner.
Finally, on creativity: I think it is overrated in the context of studying. While I do try to encourage thinking (and I do teach from time to time), creativity must come after you’ve learned a sufficient part of what others have done, so that you can push the boundaries. Otherwise it is just random rambling about – you might stumble on something interesting but most probably will not. (Same applies about drugs and music – I guess there are a lot more users than genius artists. It is just we do not pay attention to the negative cases.)
Then you missed the point of creativity. There is no order to acquiring creativity. Saying it must happen after something else is to miss the point entirely. Creativity is not subject specific. It’s the most general thing.
Creativity is not even about pushing boundaries. You can work within a predetermined framework and still be creative. In fact, most creativity comes from having to work within limits and current knowledge.
PeterS,
I assumed this would be a given, but yes absolutely it needs to be done fairly.
Bare in mind I didn’t specifically have doctors in mind in my original post, but as an experiment I think it could be interesting to have doctors trained under both schools of thought to see how well each group performs at treating patients
Edited 2018-02-09 02:32 UTC
I’m reading right now a book of ~scifi novels “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters” by Ursula K. Le Guin. In it, the author writes (I’m translating back from PL to EN…): “people who expand counciousness with the help of life, and not drugs, usually have more interesting things to tell”
zima,
Of course, cherry picking celebrity examples is inherently biased. Yet I don’t have to look that far in my personal life to find proponents of mind-altering drugs, some of whom make a better living than me. Based on that I find it hard to rationally criticize them for it.
Arguably, Steve Jobs or Ozzy Ozborne are examples in support of Le Guin text that I quoted – each of them had, first and foremost, a rather rich life.
Probably most examples of drug users are negative though… (at least I knew most of such examples)
PS. And of course “The Wind’s Twelve Quarters” is a book of short stories, not novels like I said (it was late and I mistakenly used “false friends” PL-EN word pair
)
Edited 2018-02-13 17:30 UTC
In high school, my physics instructor always had a sheet on the back of the test with all the equations and constants we’d need to solve the test questions (and usually a number of extraneous equations and constants).
His philosophy (and this was pre-internet), was that with things like the CRC handbook available, memorizing equations was a waste of time– understanding the problem, and thus knowing *which* equations to use, was more important.
In Western Australia, at least around my era of the TEE (the university entrance exam), all exams allowed anyone to take in one A4 sheet with notes on one side. It was up to you to choose what to put on it.
Of course, we also had graphics calculators and there were no limits on what programs you had.
Hi,
How would you feel knowing that the surgeon that’s about to cut you open learnt nothing during medical school and only passed because their friend fed them the answers during their exams?
– Brendan
Brendan,
Students still need to learn and surgeons would still need to be evaluated for competency, but why would it be a bad thing for them to learn and be evaluated based on the more realistic conditions that they’ll see in the real world?
I think if they’re denied the use of reference material on exams in medical school then there’s a very serious risk that tests end up promoting the wrong skills and doctors will become proficient at memorizing answers for the tests but quickly forget it later on. I’ve seen it first hand how some people can get high grades by memorizing the answers and still be highly incompetent.
Arguably the best doctors will be the ones who can make the best diagnoses regardless of how they find it. To the extent that they’re going to have access to technology on the job, then IMHO it makes the most sense for them to train and test with it so that finding answers among the mountains of knowledge becomes ingrained as second nature.
It occurs to me that I ignored the later part of your post “…because their friend fed them the answers during their exams?” and as such I may have answered a different question than the one you asked. Oops. I’ll leave what I already wrote, but I do agree that everyone should do their own work!
Edited 2018-02-08 03:08 UTC
Sometimes it is needed to learn the basics of a subject before you can build on top of it. This is in particular important in math.
Those tests can rarely be realistic as usually the basics are automated in computer programs and tools. If you allow someone to google the solution they will often find the answer, but that doesn’t mean they understand why the answer works or could create it from scratch.
dpJudas,
Sure, I agree with that, we need to understand how pieces fit together, but I would suggest this is a already a pre-existing problem in the way schools teach today (or at least as I experienced it). Grading incentives can encourage short term memorization over analytical thinking.
I doubt most teachers were ever trained to teach effectively with computers, but I actually think given the right tools it could be highly effective in increasing understanding of the subject over traditional pencil and paper and one way presentations. Even when you’ve learned the material enough to solve problems on a math quiz, a solid understanding of how variables interact with each other can remain elusive. For example, I “learned” the euler equations and tayler series in school but it was vague and I didn’t truly grasp them until later in life with better visualization tools at my disposal. I have more confidence in my own understanding of them than I had in school even though I was able to solve the equations.
For people like me who learn best with a hands on approach, there’s simply no textbook alternative to using a spreadsheet/numerical analysis/cad program to truly interact with the data. Personally, I learn better with technology than without; I suspect many people are the same way. Moreover, those who mastered problem solving with technology will be far better situated for the professional world than someone who’s merely book smart with formulas that can be looked up. I plan to teach my own kids complex math using computers, should they express any interest
You do raise valid concerns, but IMHO it’s nevertheless a net benefit. Anyways, enough of my opinion, I was curious what others think, thank you for your opinion! I totally hijacked the conversation, but I don’t have much to say about intel’s smart glasses haha.
Ben Carson (omg remember him?) proves that you can pass those tests and still not really be a good doctor, or intelligent.
Your example is actually a counter example to your point because it shows the assessment style is wrong for the job.
Surgeons, regardless of how well they pass exams, have to also demonstrate stamina and steadiness of the hand. Imagine how many people could be trained as surgeons if we assessed them based on how well they can perform long surgeries alone.
What we have now are overworked surgeons, because there aren’t enough, leading to more and more mistakes, driving up insurance for both patient and surgeon, leading to even fewer people able to become surgeons. Surgeons already have a contingent of doctors and nurses working alongside, so what’s one more person whose job is to know all the facts and can provide guidance during the surgery.
Funny, you’ve just described education as it currently is, medical included. So I don’t know, how do you feel about that?
I feel that you are wrong.
Ever spoken to a MD? They tend to know their shit and also understand how to apply their knowledge.
Before being put under ask your anesthesiologist what they use, how they use it, what they monitor and why and how they handle emergencies (allergic reactions, oxygen deprivation, heart problems++).
10+ years of training: know their shit.
Yes, 10+ years of training. Not 10+ years of just exams.
Brendan,
Yikes! How do you feel about that?
Always mount a scratch <strike>monkey</strike> retina.
Can you just see the accidents these things are going to be causing when idiots like Thom start paying more attention to what the data from the glasses are telling them instead of what their *EYES* are telling them (Hey, that Airbus really isn’t approaching me head-on……)
…or you can just have a continuous stream of ads on the lower right part of your field of view
They’d be truly targetted ads then!
Yes, because when I do hard, dangerous work with my hands I want some information popping up in front of my eyes, partially blocking my vision.
like a fighter pilot
Fighter pilots spend countless hours in simulators before they ever get in a real jet. And everything in a pilots HUD is constant. Quite different from someone driving their car and getting a sudden popup of a text message.
Yeah, I don’t think that’s a concern at least with the prototype. Its only red text that’s only visible when you look down.
I’m just concerned about the long term effects of shining a low power laser directly at my retina. I don’t think that’s been studied enough.
Agreed. And I’m not going to be the lab rat to find out what kind of damage it does.
The funny thing is that the ‘smart’ branding doesn’t exactly fit. They’re a highly specialized display system, but there’s no AI, no special functionality beyond the display, and to be honest not really all that much processing involved beyond the simple flattening to monochrome and planar distortion of the image to get it to look right (both of which are also done by regular displays). It’s like calling a TV a ‘smart TV’ just because it’s a rear-projection DLP system (which is essentially the equivalent of what these are doing based on how they’re described).
Love the focus on the basic features of just start by making proper smart glasses that works as a display first before trying to make them into creepy spyware.
The design is rather dorky though, more so than it needs to be, but I guess that can be easily fixed.
Agree strongly. Glasses should be display only, connected to smartphone which provides the smarts on what to display when.
There are two categories of users for such hardware.
Private customers, and business users. No microphone, no speakers, and no camera is only acceptable to first category.
For business users microphone and camera enables remote work for smaller tasks. Think, factory worker asking more experience worker for advice on dealing with unusual work, or same worker asking somebody else for ACK of his part of the job, etc.
I’m simply not excited about “smart glasses”. There’s nothing it can offer than isn’t already easily available to me by other devices, which, don’t project images directly onto my retina. It’s funny that the first application they show is gps. Really? Everything has built-in gps now. Every vehicle I own and my phone will either show me a map or speak directions to me. I guess that isn’t good enough so now they’ve made glasses to do the same thing.
I’m not convinced “smart glasses” offer anything new or better. Intel doesn’t seem to have an answer to that either and is relying on their “Early Access” program for developers to figure it out for them. Who wants to bet a Twitter feed app and a Facebook feed app will be among the first developed?
“Smart glasses” are a solution looking for a problem. I’ll pass.