ar glasses

7/27/2019 Ar Glasses

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Society | DOI:10.1145/2461256.2461264 Paul Hyman

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it Sarp fcsThe possibility o a new $200-billion-plus industryhas cloud security experts bracing or the ramifcations.

and other information overlaid on the

wearer’s view.

By all indications the Microsoft

glasses are not yet in production, butthere is speculation that should they

come to market, they might also plug

into existing Microsoft hardware, per-haps to produce combined gaming ex-

periences with Xbox and Kinect.Similarly, Apple’s device is also

under wraps. Its patent indicates it

is designed to incorporate a head-up

display (HUD) in front of both eyes—

not just one, like Google Glass—andto connect to an external device with

a 16:9 aspect ratio, possibly an iPhone

or TV. Johns Hopkins’ Green believes the

main reason the competition to de-

velop an AR glasses technology has be-come so hot and heavy is the same rea-

son other mobile technologies—like

I

F CLoUd sECUrity is an issue

to be reckoned with today, the

problem will only worsen asmore and more data is saved

and backed up to the cloud,

say experts.Indeed, a new consumer productbeing developed by such players as

Google, Microsoft, Apple, and others

will likely generate more data—per-haps by an order of magnitude—than

today’s smartphones and media tab-

lets combined. Augmented-reality (AR) glasses,

also known as “wearable computers,”

are designed to display informationhands-free in smartphone-like format

and to interact with the Internet via

natural language voice commands. According to Matthew Green, as-

sistant research professor at the Johns

Hopkins Information Security Institute,

AR glasses “will be collecting every-thing you see, everything you say—and

potentially not just backing up all that

information but sending it in real timefor services like Google to process and

to respond with relevant information.

This is a big leap in data collection.”Of course everything depends on

how popular the devices become, but

Google’s version—branded as GoogleGlass—already has been dubbed by

Time magazine one of the best inven-

tions of 2012, even though it is not

expected to be available to the publicuntil 2014. Meanwhile, last July, Apple

applied for a patent for its own version

of AR glasses that the press is calling “iGlasses,” and, four months later, Mi-

crosoft did the same.

All three prospective competitors were contacted to comment on their

projects and their business models; all

three declined to be interviewed.

Microsoft’s device, of which there is

no public prototype, seems to be a bitless ambitious than Google Glass, ac-

cording to a recent TechCrunch article.

Rather than being intended for all-day use, the Microsoft glasses are designed

for use in a stationary position, such as

at a baseball game, where the glasses

might display scores, pitch speeds,

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the law says they can do whatever

they want with it. So, it doesn’t matter

what your technology is or what you

use to stop misuse o that data. Theanswer is not to give them the data in

the frst place.”

Yet AR glasses are likely to be the“next big thing” and have the mak-

ings o becoming a $240-billion-plusindustry, according to Steve Mann, aproessor at the University o Toronto’s

Department o Electrical and Computer

Engineering and the general chair(and a keynote speaker) at this month’s

IEEE 2013 International Symposium

on Technology and Society. The coner-

ence’s theme is “the social implicationso wearable computing and augmented

reality in everyday lie.”

No one is likely more amiliar with

the technology than Mann, having in-

vented AR glasses—which he calls hisEyeTap Digital Eye Glass—back in 1978

to assist the visually impaired, and

then attached a set to his head perma-nently, which he has worn ever since.

In the 1980s, Mann came up with

what he called “lie-glogging,” cap-turing and streaming his lie 24/7 to

the Internet by bringing his own in-

rastructures with him wherever he went. When he traveled to dierent

countries, Mann updated his radio li-

cense to operate in that location and

put his servers on the rootops o tallbuildings to permit wireless connec-

tivity. He migrated the project to the

World Wide Web in the early 1990s,and started a community o lie-

gloggers that has grown to more than

200,000 users.“It’s become a very interesting re-

search project that’s generated a lot o

interesting conversation,” he observes.

smartphones and media tablets—have

become so proftable.“The commercial value o the glass-

es is to enable these companies to sell

more services and products to consum-ers,” he says. “The glasses will collect

data about where you are and what

you’re seeing, then flter that through

search engines like Google or Bing,and ultimately respond with useul in-

ormation—along with targeted adver-

tising. For a company like Google, orexample, which is one o the world’s

largest advertising companies, it sure

makes a lot o sense or them to be inthat space.”

Green, a computer security expert,

is mainly concerned that the compa-nies will use a portion o the data these

products capture in whatever way is

useul to them today, but also that they will retain that data or analysis lateron, or use in ways that perhaps they

have not thought o yet.

“That introduces another risk,”Green says, “which is that all your data

is sitting on servers waiting or some-

body to steal it. Ater all, the cloud is just a lot o computers in data centers

and, while they may use best-o-breed

technology, any computer security ex-pert will tell you that, unortunately,

nothing is completely secure.”

At BT, chie security technology o-fcer Bruce Schneier believes the riskso cloud storage—a topic he requently

blogs about—are already considerable,

and the popularity o AR glasses willincrease those risks only slightly. To

Schneier, AR glasses are no dierent

rom any other product or applicationthat stores data in the cloud.

“Almost everybody has all their e-

mail going through the cloud. Many people store their iles in the cloud.

Your address book is there, your cal-

endar is there, all your socializationlike Facebook is there, as is your loca-tion and your phone inormation,” he

says. “The real worries are not about

any one thing, but about the totality o everything.”

As a security expert, Schneier ad-

mits it is impossible to know the extentto which the data in the cloud may be

at risk, because the security issues are

social, not technological, having to domore with laws and social norms.

“Facebook has your data because

you gave it to them,” he says, “and

Milestones

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20

news

er science answer to that problem.”

Steve Mann calls that a valid con-

cern or consumers, who ought to be worried about the integrity o their

own data.

According to Wikipedia, Mann last year “teamed up with the IEEE and the

ACLU” to generate support or a Mann-

Wassel Law that would be presented to

the New York State Legislature. Howev-er, that proposal, which ocuses on se-

curity and privacy issues surrounding

individuals’ use o recording technolo-gies (including AR glasses) or “sous-

veillance” (the recording o an activity

by a participant in the activity) has notmade any progress.

“We certainly have opinions about

how companies ought to treat theircustomers’ data and their privacy,”

says Jay Stanley, a senior policy ana-

lyst at the ACLU, “and we might be

willing to suppor t legislation as timegoes on as situations warrant it.

But we don’t agree the legislation is

ready to be proposed. There are some very complicated issues here, and we

need to do more thinking on them

beore we would be in a position topropose legislation.”

An IEEE spokesperson says the pro-

essional association “will not com-

ment at this time” and that “IEEE hasnot taken an ocial position on this

pending legislation.”

In the meantime, Mann suggestsmaking the security issues known

to consumers, who can then choose

to purchase rom the company thatmakes strong security a selling eature.

“Let the market determine which

brand is most successul, perhaps by

being the product that is most secure,”

he says.

He has this recommendation or

entrepreneurial computer scientists:begin thinking about secure servers

and services that can be oered i AR

glasses become popular.“It might be necessary to have a se-

cure program running on the glassesthat encrypts the data beore upload-ing it to the cloud,” he suggests. “So

you either have to buy glasses that

do that—and I’m sure some manu-acturers will take that more seri-

ously than others—or there could be

third-party providers that might oer

services associated with the glasses.Eventually astute customers may

seek out and choose an operating

system, like Unix, and an encryption

protocol that is secure.”

Furter Readig

“Cloud Computig,” a blog by Bruce

Sceier, publised Jue 4, 2009 at ttp://

www.sceier.com/blog/arcives/2009/06/

cloud_computig.tml

“Feudal Security,” a blog by Bruce Sceier,

publised December 3, 2012 at ttp://

www.sceier.com/blog/arcives/2012/12/

feudal_sec.tml

“Desig ad Wriklig Beavior of a Cotact

Les Wit a Itegrated Liquid Crystal

Ligt Modulator,” a paper by J. De Smet,A. Avci, Roel Beeraert, Dieter Cuypers,

ad herbert De Smet, publised i May,

2012 i te Journal of Display Technology

at ttp://8.18.37.105/jdt/abstract.

cfm?uri=jdt-8-5-299 (abstract)

“A liquid crystal-based cotact les

display,” a video posted Oct. 31, 2012 by te

Cetre for Microsystems Tecology, Get

Uiversity, Belgium at ttps://www.youtube.

com/watc?v=-btRUzoKYEA

“Troug Te Glass, Ligt,” a article

by Steve Ma, publised Fall 2012 i

IEEE Technology and Society at ttp://

ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.

jsp?tp=&arumber=6313625

“Steve Ma: AR eyeglass ad wearable

computig,” a video posted December,

2012 by Steve Ma at ttp://vimeo.

com/56092841

“Wearable Computig: A First Step Toward

Persoal Imagig,” a article by Steve

Ma, publised i Computer , Vol. 30,

no. 2, February 1997 at ttp://eyetap.org/

wearcomp/ieeecomputer/r2025.tm

Paul hyma is siene nd tehnolo writer bsed ingret Nek, Ny.

© 2013 acm 0001-0782/13/06

Meanwhile, subsequent technolog-

ical advances may mimic the public’s

ondness or replacing their intru-

sive and unashionable glasses withcontact lenses. Indeed, computer re-

searchers at Ghent University in Bel-

gium have built an LCD screen into acontact lens using conductive poly-

mers and molding them into a very thin, spherically curved substrate withactive layers.

At the moment, all the lens does

is fash a dollar sign, but Ghent Ph.D.student Jelle De Smet and his team

oresee the lens could unction as an

HUD that could superimpose an image

onto the user’s normal view. This kindo screen-on-the-eye technology could

displace smartphones as the dominant

way people access the Internet and

connect to each other.De Smet describes the lenses as pro-

viding inormation in ways similar tohow Google Glass operates, but with-

out having to wear glasses, which some

people do not like to do.“The unctionality we oresee could

comprise reading email and text mes-

sages, turn-by-turn directions, inor-

mation about your surroundings, or a work situation where your hands need

to be reed up, such as patient inorma-

tion or surgeons or a diagram or as-

tronauts doing repairs on a satellite,”De Smet says.

He anticipates it will take another10 years beore there will be a prototype

with an acceptable number o pixels.

Regarding cloud security, De Smet

says, “Each wireless technology is po-tentially prone to security issues,” he

says. “It just depends on how well your

encryption techniques work.” Johns Hopkins security expert Mat-

thew Green sees two potential prob-

lems ahead. The rst is that, even with

the best technology, computer scien-tists have been unable to stop hackers

rom periodically stealing data. Themore relevant issue, he says, is that

the companies selling the glasses are

specically designing them to provide

themselves with ull access to all data.“In other words, there’s no way to

hide the data because these companies

are the ones that are processing it,” heexplains, “and they are doing it or ree

in exchange or getting your inorma-

tion. As long as you allow their systemsto have access to it, there is no comput-

“eac wrlsstclgy ssstally prt scrty sss.

it jst dpds w wllyr crypttcqs wrk.”



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