Digital glasses pioneer Steve Mann was
enjoying a vacation in Paris with his family recently when staff at a
McDonald's there allegedly assaulted him for wearing his high-tech
headgear.
Google’s forthcoming augmented reality glasses
are set to change the way we interact with our environment, providing
new ways to deal with our surroundings, as well as allowing us to record
what’s going on around us at any given time.
However, if digital
eyeglasses pioneer Steve Mann’s recent experience is anything to go by,
the high-tech specs may be more trouble than they’re worth.
The
Toronto University professor, who’s been experimenting with various
head-based computer vision systems for over 30 years, claims he was
assaulted in a McDonald’s restaurant in Paris by a number of employees
for wearing his EyeTap digital eyeglass, a single eyepiece incorporating
a camera that improves the vision of its wearer – and which bears more
than a passing resemblance to Google’s
recently unveiled super-specs.
In an
account
of his experience posted on his blog on Tuesday, Mann said the incident
took place while he was on vacation with his family in the French
capital earlier this month. While waiting in line at a branch of
McDonald’s on the Champs Elysees, a person identifying himself as a
member of staff approached him and asked about the digital vision system
that he was wearing. In response, Mann produced various documentation
relating to the system, which included a letter from his doctor. The
employee then let Mann go about his business.
After ordering a
meal, Mann and his family sat at a table inside the restaurant. But the
next moment, things took a turn for the worse. A different employee came
over and, Mann alleges, assaulted him. “He angrily grabbed my eyeglass,
and tried to pull it off my head,” he wrote in his blog post. “The
eyeglass is permanently attached and does not come off my skull without
special tools.” It must have been quite a tussle.
Three employees
then spent some time taking a closer look at his documentation before
one of them “angrily crumpled and ripped up the letter” from Mann’s
doctor.
It won’t surprise you to learn that Mann captured the
incident using his well-secured headgear and posted some photos from the
incident in his post (below is one of the guy tearing up his letter).
The clarity of the photo is a testament to the awesomeness of his
high-tech device – although of course these are photos Mann would have
preferred not to have had to take.
So
why all the fuss? What had Mann done to upset the staff this much?
After doing some research, the professor discovered another person who
claimed to have been assaulted in a McDonald’s in Paris – for the
dastardly deed of trying to photograph the menu.
Goodness me, it’s
one thing to be asked to refrain from using photographic devices in a
particular location, but it’s something else altogether to have
employees trying to tear a photographic device from your head without
explanation.
Mann is now in the process of trying to contact
McDonald’s about the incident, but said that so far he’s received no
response from the fast food giant.
“I’m not seeking to be awarded
money. I just want my Glass fixed, and it would also be nice if
McDonald’s would see fit to support vision research,” he wrote at the
end of his post.
All in all a bizarre, as well as unsettling,
story, but hopefully not a sign of things to come if Google gets its AR
glasses marketed on a mass scale.
