It is difficult to avoid sounding vulgar, somehow, when discussing the future of facial computing. There is something inescapably crude, isn't there, about the prospect of everyone walking around with computers on our faces?
And yet I suspect the world may adopt face computers anyway, and not long from now, perhaps even within the coming decade. People in tech have long been wondering what might succeed smartphones as the next dominant computing platform. For a long time I've thought that nothing would — that phones would remain our primary computers for the foreseeable future. In the past few months, though, I've begun to face the fact that our faces are … in trouble.
The face computer is coming — brace yourself for an onslaught of "smart" glasses, virtual-reality headsets and other devices that connect your eyes to the digital world.
So far there have been only a few such machines, most famously Google's failed digital specs, Google Glass. Facebook and Ray-Ban recently unveiled camera-enabled sunglasses; Snap, which makes Snapchat, also has such a device. The sunglasses let you photograph life in the moment, from your eyes' point of view; when you're building sand castles at the beach with your kids, you can tap your specs to capture the memory while you're living it rather than reaching for your phone with sandy fingers.
Facebook and Microsoft are making virtual-reality headsets, too. These function as powerful personal computers mounted to your eyes, creating an enveloping digital experience — video games and movies surround you, the real world replaced by the machine.
Though none of these devices has been a huge success, the tech that powers face-mounted computers is getting quite good quite fast. It is probably only a few years until a face computer hits big — perhaps when Apple releases the one it has been reported to be working on.
There are enormous social, cultural and legal reasons to worry about face computers becoming ubiquitous. Such devices could turn your eyes into constantly recording dashcams, superimpose Instagrammy toxicity over your real-life conversations and add a layer of reality-bending computer graphics to everything you see. It doesn't help that they are being developed by some of the most intrusive, least trustworthy corporations in the world.
But if creepiness posed a fatal impediment to success in tech the industry, we wouldn't have smartphones or Facebook. Here's the thing about face computers: With the right design, when their components inevitably become small and powerful enough, these machines could make computing much more visceral and accessible, which most likely means more irresistible, too. I worry about the sudden inevitability of face computers — that, as happened with smartphones, they could become ubiquitous before society begins to appreciate the way they might be altering everything.