Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors.
Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted.
Shopping: price comparisons in physical shops will be automatic, and no longer make you look like a dick.
Sports: Any team sports will be changed by the immediate knowledge of where all your team is. Any endurance sport will change with the zero-effort monitoring of your vital statistics[1].
Dating: All those "mobile dating apps" that work in theory but kind of fail in the real world might actually have a chance (assuming people get used to people wearing Glass and no longer laugh at them)
By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more.
By way of analogy, one could say a car was a faster horse-and-buggy, but an airplane was something new & different. A telegram was a faster form of mail, but a telephone was new & different.
A good example of the lack of insight that kind of question leads to is the apocryphal quote[1] by IBM's CEO Thomas J. Watson: I think there is a world market for maybe five computers. Even if he didn't say it, the point was that those who shared that view had labelled computers as "massive calculating machines". That was true, but missed the bigger picture.
"By its very nature that question constrains the possibilities of Glass by attempting to label it. Falling into that trap leads to less insight, not more."
Haha, that's a nice piece of rhetorical sophistry.
It is good to keep an open mind on the different possibilities. However, the art of strategic thinking requires you to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Until you can fill in that blank, you can't make decisions right now and place your bets.
That is the point of this exercise. There is a key insight in the article, and it can be applied to something like the Google Glasses. If you cannot discern it, you're more likely to be running off of unexamined emotions instead of a vision of what's to come.
Everything. There's never been a portable computing platform as aggressive in integrating with the physical (albeit visual) environment before. It will make what mobile disruption did to desktop computing look like what electronic typewriters did to their mechanical predecessors.
Anything that people currently use their eyes for can and probably will be disrupted.
Shopping: price comparisons in physical shops will be automatic, and no longer make you look like a dick.
Sports: Any team sports will be changed by the immediate knowledge of where all your team is. Any endurance sport will change with the zero-effort monitoring of your vital statistics[1].
Dating: All those "mobile dating apps" that work in theory but kind of fail in the real world might actually have a chance (assuming people get used to people wearing Glass and no longer laugh at them)
[1] No more http://chrisfroomelookingatstems.tumblr.com/