They’re looking at you, but are they talking to you?

Last spring I tried out Google Glass – the eyeglass computer that let you read The New York Times and monitor your Twitter feed while carrying on a conversation. One of Google’s eyewear evangelists took me through a demonstration.

“You just have to put it on and figure out how it works,” she said.

I tried, “My visual cortex is learning how to superimpose your face at will over the screen.”

“Excellent,” she said.

“I wish I could concentrate on what you were saying,” I said.

It was very cool. Yet, Google Glass has all but disappeared.

Is it because wearable technology is dead? No way. It’s now entering the next generation.

“This is our prototype. It’s about six times the resolution of a Google Glass, but it still looks like a normal pair of sunglasses.”

A company called Innovega has unveiled a system that looks like a pair of ordinary sunglasses, but is in fact a computer that sends images to a display which is hidden – guess where:

“We have taken all the optics away from the eyewear and put it inside the contact the lens.”

So you can superimpose anything on the scene in front of you.

Unfortunately, the human brain’s old-school operating system, despite billions of years of evolution, can still only focus on one thing at a time.

So we have a problem.

I think humans need to evolve a ring tone of our own so we can alert the person taking a call on his contact lens that we have something to say.

“Ding A Ling A Ling – I’m here!”

Heck, what was Ray Rice doing when Janay finally decided she’d had enough? He was taking a phone call instead of paying attention to her. Imagine when you can make a phone call on your contact lens.

Today, if you want to have an uninterrupted conversation with someone, the worst place to be is directly across from them.