The issue is not to ask your customers what they want today, but to try to imagine what the customer is going to want in a world where, for instance, their cellphone is in their glasses.
In the future, an artist will be able to perform for the entire world in one date. For the fan, it will be a fully immersive experience - through a pair of glasses or whatever the device.
What I envisioned back in the 1970s was this thing you would wear as 'glass' over your right eye, and you could see the world though that glass. The glass then reconfigures the things you see.
The future of screens isn't about the iPad. It's much, much bigger.
By 2009, computers will disappear. Displays will be written directly onto our retinas by devices in our eyeglasses and contact lenses.
The moonshot for Google Glass is to harmonize the physical and digital worlds. It is specifically to find a way to help people be naturally, elegantly situated, physical and digitally, at the same time.
By the end of this decade, computers will disappear as distinct physical objects, with displays built in our eyeglasses, and electronics woven in our clothing, providing full-immersion visual virtual reality.
I think we'll see, not only with Glass, but the watch wearables, with the contact lens, that each of these things have their own best purpose, but it will take more on our part and society's part to figure out what that is.
Google Glass is the wearable computer that responds to voice commands and displays information on a visual display.
One of my ongoing projects is to expand third-eye technology whereby two people can watch two different things on a screen or type in two different languages on the same surface - all they have to do is wear a pair of hi-tech glass spectacles.
There will be Apple Glass, and Google Glass, and RIM Glass. These companies are all working on glass. I think everyone is going to be making glass. I think we're also going to have a glass war instead of a smartphone war.
Maybe a day will come when we may have to just put on a pair of glasses and see sports events.
The Explorer edition of Glass wasn't for everyone, but the Explorer program pushed us to find a wide range of near-term applications and uses for something like Glass.
Today's clunky smart glasses will be replaced by smart contact lenses. We'll command them by voice, blinking, or even thinking, to interact visually in 3-D with the Internet.
You see kids walking to the bus, and they're watching product on their phones. I'm positive that my grandkids and their grandkids are going to put on a pair of glasses and watch something.
If we're going to build hardware, the thing we want to do is build reading goggles, so you can do hands-free reading.
Rather than thinking of ourselves as a computer, and trying to give you computer-like functionality, it's better to start from the understanding that this is a pair of glasses, and say, 'How smart can we make these glasses for you?'
Once you have an augmented reality display, you don't need any other form of display. Your smart phone does not need a screen. You don't need a tablet. You don't need a TV. You just take the screen with you on your glasses wherever you go.
