Using Google Glass for trading

Discussion in 'Trading' started by rolando87, May 3, 2013.

  1. As the title suggests. Can people think of ways wearing the glasses can help assist traders. It may seems a bit wild but let's keep an open mind shall we. Here are some ways I quickly thought of that might be useful for traders.

    Examples:
    -Quickly take a photo of what you are seeing on the trading screen.
    -Record video (up to a couple hours). This will be useful during crazy news events such as flash crashes or nonfarm days when you can quickly record so that you can replay that event and see what you did right or wrong or just study the action.
    -news feeds can apparently be read to you or have the text scrolling through your top right field of vision
    -twitter feeds
    -when you go to the bathroom you can stream your desktop or stock quotes
    -quickly send texts and alerts all hands free to other traders
    -stream cnbc
    -recieve emails have them read to you
    -this one might be impossible but to have a image recognition app which might detect similar chart patterns and alert you when the glasses see them

    Can anyone else think of other trading tools. For it costing 300-500 when they come out it might be bargain given it can definitely improve and assist your trading in a variety of ways.

    Discuss....
     
  2. southall

    southall

    Not just the bathroom.. but anywhere

    A device like Glass could free a trader from being tied to his trading desk, at least for the 'monitoring' stage of a trade. which is normally the most boring!

    You can do that with your smart phone and laptop today but its easy to get distracted by something or someone else. Before you know it, half an hour or more has passed since you last checked.

    A device like glass is always there infront of you. like being infront of your trading desk but you can walk around with it at all times with one eye on your positions.
     
  3. Yea good point. A lot of these things I posted are doable with a smartphone but its the fact that it's always there that makes all the difference. You won't have to holdup a phone for hours on end.

    Only downside is right now under heavy use it lasts 3-3.5 hours. With about 5 hour max battery life. But hopefully within a few years that will naturally increase. Not to mention you can always buy more than just one and keep the other one charging. That should last you an entire trading session
     
  4. S2007S

    S2007S


    A few years that will naturally increase

    Most of these new smart phones are lucky to get 5-7 hrs of battery life...if you leave on all the bells and whistles you are lucky to get 2-3 hrs of use....they seem to care more about giving the phone a better camera ...a larger screen ...but have failed over and over again to give the phone more than a days worth of battery....

    I know were talking about these smart glasses but even so you would think the price you are paying that they would at least give you more battery.
     
  5. Smart phones have crappy battery life because of two major factors. The first is the screen. It uses an exorbiant amount of energy and therefore ranks in the top spot for power draw. The second biggest power draw is WiFi. Because it uses an even higher data rate and spectrum allocation than standard cellular networks, it requires extra energy. It also does a lot more skipping from network to network and searching for networks that the cellular radios aren't doing as the overhead they have for a call/data path is much lower.

    Anyway, those two draws end up costing you phone over 70% of the total energy draw. Then instead of giving phones bigger batteries, they make them with small batteries to make the phone lighter. End product, an energy funnel with a tiny power source.

    Google Glass would require the same cellular and WiFi radios so it won't save power there. Where it will save a lot of power is the screen. In a phone you have an OLED based backlight. In Google Glass it should be using a laser based projection with the reflection medium being the glass block you see sticking out.

    While they can't fix a ton of the energy problems, a better choice for networking protocols is required. They need to look towards pushing a new standard that uses a low bandwidth channel with a small data pipeline but is suppose to be utilized exclusively for mobile devices such as tablets, phones, and accessories. If the industry pushed into this direction which allowed for a specialized 802.11 standard that was purposed in a lower power solution for mobile devices (since they don't need more than a 15Mbps connection at most), it could significantly increase time periods between recharges.

    If this was fixed, then Google Glass would be a MASSIVE hit and wearable tech would be the future. That said, I would love to get one to give me a screen for CNBC and the ToS chatrooms as I ran out of monitor real estate right after I setup my quad array and end up having to move my CNBC window around a lot.
     
  6. I think battery technology just hasn't kept up to pace to the demands needed for them. The energy storage per gram or cubic centimetre just hasn't made large advancements as say the rate of technological advancements in other areas such as say processors and all that. I think its one of those areas that if we make a major breakthru it will change a lot of things. (electric cars, phones, now Google glass).

    But anyways we are straying off topic. Can anyone else think of any other utlities for these glasses. I'm suprised not more people see the potential here. We just have to wait till its been released and apps start being built. As I mentioned before I think the application which tops the list is the recording video app. If you can replay tense moments you can see exactly how you acted, what parts of the screen you looked at etc. This info can help people study themselves, how they react and stuff. Imo this can help you study your weaknesses.

    As for the battery life its kind of irrlevant as you can quickly switch glasses. Not like a phone where you cant easily switch for a freshly charged one.
     
  7. How is batter life irrelevant? You're going to buy multiple pairs and swap them out when the battery dies? Yeah, that sounds economical.

    Tablets are marginally suitable for trading, phones are worse, and now some silly LED display on a pair of glasses will be worthwhile for trading? I wouldn't bother with this crap if it were free.
     
  8. First of all, the glasses don't use an LED display. They use a beam splitter (the angled surface inside the block of glass that juts out) and a series of lasers to draw a picture that your eye can see. This is significantly different from an LED because lasers are even more efficient in their energy consumption than an LED.

    Second, batteries haven't gotten better because there isn't a whole lot that can just be done to "improve" them. The microprocessor, when it was invented, was significantly improved upon because we were able to make the transistors smaller and smaller. Starting about ten years ago, moving smaller started to cost a significant amount more and took longer to get right. That's why microprocessors haven't gotten significantly faster in the past decade, they have simply figured out new ways to make the processors more energy efficient as well as give it the ability to micromanage tasks better (due to multicore).

    Unfortunately, batteries aren't the same as microprocessors and have to adhere to the laws of thermodynamics. Because all you're doing is transferring energy into a storage unit, then releasing it again, it means the process is incredibly inefficient and can't be improved upon greatly. A break through in battery technology could take another decade or two and require billions of dollars more just to juice another 10-15% of efficiency out of them.

    In reality, Google Glass will probably require it to look more like Geordi LaForge's visor (Star Trek: TGN) more than a pair of glasses, utilizing batteries on both sides of your head. Then, like I said, it'd need to have a special revision of 802.11 which would trade off bandwidth for energy consumption (very possible to do as I had been doing some research into this before I moved into financial trading).

    Considering wearable tech looks to be "the future", you're likely to see a special 802.11 standard branch out that's just for low power, low bandwidth (2-15Mbps) applications. All the same, with these types of improvements and adding a second battery, the device would still probably last only 7-8 hours at best without a microharvester inside to try and supplement the batteries.


    All the same, I wouldn't use it to trade on or watch quotes since I'd rather use nice large monitors that I can walk away from. Besides I already have a TON of information to watch and I don't think those tiny displays will ever be able to hit a resolution large enough to fit all the quotes and charts in at a definition high enough to really be of any good.
     
  9. Humpy

    Humpy

    Could be very useful at large Uni lecture halls where you can't make out what the Prof is writing on the blackboard or what he is mumbling !!

    Not much good for walking about with and tripping up all the time.