http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/386578/google-unveils-smart-contact-lens-to-help-diabetics

Cool - all I am waiting for is the night vision / telephoto version of these

Its a shame that they also show adverts in a scrolling diplay infront of your eyes

How long before we find out they're 'accidentally' tracking people's movement and providing ads based in the types of shop people have been in?

Keh, GPS? Old tech. if you're wearing Google Lenses it could pattern recognise the things you're looking at and record how long you focus on them. So then they actually know with absolute accuracy what you're interested in and can tailor ads accordingly.

I think that is on its way via smart phone ads.

The saddest part of this is the recommendation for diabetics to avoid contact lenses.
An impressive FAIL.


edit- in reply to Jonbwfc below. Yes so did I

http://gigaom.com/2014/01/17/one-diabet ... ct-lenses/

I did read an opinion piece about this kind of thing recently. The writer proposed the position that Google are too geeky and engineering centric. The things they are putting a lot of their R&D into are things that on the surface seem quite 'cool' to your typical computing/engineering type, but frequently there's massive culture clash when they butt up against the mainstream. This is one of those times where they've looked a technology and thought "we can do this! It's amazing! Let's tell everyone!" without asking anyone who isn't an engineer what they think about it.

Google glass are a patent example of this - the engineer would say "look, we can take your glasses and put a heads up display in there and a camera, and we can hook it up to the internet, and you can have voice recognition and it'll be like you'll have all the information in the world available to you all the time! It'll be great!" whereas the general public said "OK, so you can record me without me knowing about it? And then you can look up all sorts of stuff about me while you're talking to me? That's really creepy".

Always ask someone who isn't an engineer.

The tracking part has been happening for ages.
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablo ... igh-street
http://arstechnica.com/business/2011/11 ... ting-data/

What’s interesting so far is that there is no way to ping an advert to a shopper while they are browsing. There have been BlueTooth marketing campaigns _ remember one in Liverpool Street Station in London. The problem with it being that you were being asked to switch BlueTooth on to receive the adverts. I don’t know how many devices have BT on, but I don”‘t recall seeing many people respond to their phone when in the hot zone.

What’s interesting, is that I (and other people who have responded to my Tweets about this) have noticed BT being switched on after iOS updates. Hmm.

You're aware of iBeacon, I assume?

iBeacon could be very useful, even in the home. Though interestingly I do not carry my phone around my home. I do need to have BT turned on my phone because my Withings Pulse communicates with my phone that way.