Image via Flickr/Wilbert Baan
Google glass app development has reached the logical next step with the rather self-evidently titled “Sex with Glass.” That’s right, after you’ve Facebook-stalked your partner and impressed them with your creepy knowledge of their personal information, you can now bed them beneath your goggled glare.
The app was made as part of a wearable tech hackathon in London a few months ago, but it doesn't seem to be (just) a joke; it’s been in development since and the makers promise an iPhone app version while users wait to get their hands on Glass (we don’t yet know if the app will be officially allowed by Google). The creators explained the project, “We want to change the way people experience things. We love using design and strategy to disrupt at scale. So when we asked ourselves the question ‘How can we make sex more awesome with Google Glass?’ We came up with ‘Sex with Glass.’”
It’s easy to mock the idea, but at least it’s an example of technology actually trying to make sex better—and hey, if it works for some, I say go for it.
Here’s how it'll work: you both don Glass and get things going with the seductive murmur, “Ok glass, it’s time.” That launches the app and streams what you see through your glasses to your partner’s. So basically, you can swap POVs. While it sounds like a pretty neat idea in theory, I’m not sure the real-time function would work all too well in practice. There’s no preview of how this might actually look to the user, but I’m imagining a Skype-like scenario where your eyes keep flicking to your own image to make sure you look all right and you end up missing out on the actual communicative experience.
There are also some additional features: For those less confident in their bedroom abilities, Sex with Glass can give you a few pointers. You just say, “Ok glass, give me ideas,” and it’ll suggest some positions so you can mix things up. Other commands will apparently allow you to change the music and lights to set the mood.
It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but so far the app seems pretty harmless and potentially amusing. However, it’s obvious that the main point of having sex with a camera on your face isn’t to enjoy the moment (James Deen already showed us how glass-fogging and hair-tangling issues can somewhat diminish the intimacy) but to make a record of the affair for later viewing. Sex with Glass does this, and even gives you the option of connecting your phone to film from another perspective, so you can “watch yourself from any angle.”
But as with most apps, and especially when it comes to Glass, the major problem with this is privacy. Sex with Glass is clearly aware of this concern and tries to address it with a feature that deletes your steamy videos after five hours. But far from an adequate solution, that just seems rather puzzling. In the first place, who wants to play back a naughty home video straight after the event? And more pertinently, does anyone think that feature will actually keep their videos 100 percent private? Even if they’re completely deleted after five hours—something Snapchat failed to deliver on—a lot of damage can be done in that time, whether via online sharing, hacking, or your partner just passing the device around their mates. At the end of the day, this app will rely on something that’s failed time and again to protect users from people exploiting their NSFW selfies: human trust.
In a world of revenge porn, the inability to keep private material from unwanted eyes is always going to be a problem—especially for women. According to the Verge, the app’s site originally touted the privacy feature as “for all the ladies out there,” which serves as a painful reminder that, in our society, these things undoubtedly end up coming back to haunt women more than men (that particular line has since been removed, though the site still features mainly images of naked or scantily clad women, not men).
That’s why Sex with Glass would frankly be better without Glass, or at least without the playback function. I have nothing against a sex app; it's a ripe area for innovation. But as soon as you press record, as we've seen so many times before, things can get dark. And without the camera, there's little point using this app on Glass as opposed to your smartphone. You could keep the useful pointers and the lights/music options without running the risk of your private activities being made public. Hell, if you really want to keep the goggles, you could maybe even use the POV livestream.
But in case there are people out there who haven't got the message yet, creating any digital record of yourself in a compromising situation is probably a bad idea.