Tag Archives: smart cities

what’s going on with smart glasses?

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Real augmented reality is one of those technologies that always seems around the corner but never seems to quite arrive, at least in a widespread commercial way. It just seems silly that we are still walking around looking at these tiny screens as they give us data about our surrounding environment. I thought this would be built into car windshields by now, and at some point glasses/goggles/visors of some sort.

This article in futurism.com about Meta’s entry is negative, focusing on potential privacy risks. And of course those do exist. But the technology itself is neutral in my view. Sure, ICE can use it to track me down and beat me if they want to. I can also use it to follow directions without tripping and falling in a hole or wandering in front of a bus. It could be really useful for tourism, understanding the past history or possible future of whatever place you happen to be at this point in time. If it is eventually deployed on all or most human-operated vehicles, I really think it could control intersections much better than the antiquated stoplights and pedestrian signals that haven’t improved much over the last century.

The article suggests that Meta’s smart glasses are widely commercially deployed and that people like them. If this is the case, I simply hadn’t noticed. If it is being marketed to me at all, I hadn’t noticed. Maybe it is just deployed in California or geographic pockets other than where I am.

IBM’s Smarter Cities

What exactly has IBM been up to all this time with its Smarter Cities program? It’s been hard to figure out. The marketing hype and media coverage have seemed to die down a bit. But here is an article in Cities with some research on it.

An investigation of IBM’s Smarter Cites Challenge: What do participating cities want?

In 2010, IBM created the Smarter Cites Challenge to address critical issues of the 21st century through its digital expertise, in collaboration with city governments. Despite questions about the origin and intentions of IBM’s involvement, 130 cities from all around the world took up the challenge in the first five years. There is limited case study research available on a number of participating cities which has not been able to unpack cities’ rationale for working with IBM. This paper provides an index of all participating cities in the Smarter Cities Challenge, to understand the areas of interest in which urban governments have been seeking IBM’s consulting service. Findings present the state of smart city thinking in urban governments, and raise questions about the multidimensional integration, if any, across the areas of focus in which digital technologies are shaping contemporary cities.