Streets of Hope

So Google Glass kinda flopped hard. How did wearables stay relevant in the Hopeverse?

"As with most of everything post-World War One, blame the Karthians. 

They come from a society that made wearables and sensory augmentation an integral part of their culture. Going by Anastasius' memories, they'd long forgotten how to even make or use paper, seeing as they'd been using wearables and refining on code bases hundreds of years old, back on Telor. For a long time, they figured crashing on Earth meant they'd lose the ability to replicate their native tech, but the transistor revolution of the forties really pushed them. By the time you picked up your first 486 processor, we were using equivalents of your early-line Pentium dies. Proportionally, that means the whole fad surrounding wearables matured faster and grew out of those early Affluenza Gadget years. I mean, yeah, H&J's purchased a Taiwanese electronics manufacturer and shat out stuff like Jameson's wrist computer after a couple years of R&D, but her stuff is basically the Aston Martin of wearable tech. Betcha twenty bucks that she has a mini-HDMI connector tucked in there that allows her to dock her wristband to a conventional screen and turn it into a souped-up standard workstation. Y'know, Nintendo's Switch, only a crapton of times more powerful.

For the rest of us, wearables are now either tucked into artificial eyeballs like mine or packed in perfectly normal-looking eyeglass frames. Legislation caught on, making it illegal to wrap your eyes in gorgeous transparent 4K goodness while you're walking, driving or operating heavy machinery. Smart watches look a lot less like your average super-sleek Silicon Valley cruft and feel more like your average mature-looking stopwatch or fob watch. With immortals around, you just can't expect everyone to jump on the Pristine White Apple Bandwagon, after all.

On the whole, the same thing's happened with wearables that happened with Clank armatures or augmentations: people stopped giving a shit. The status symbols faded into the mainstream, and the idiots clamoring for preferential treatment because of their Google Glass addiction became morons everyone ignored. When everyone has a heads-up display, no-one has a heads-up display. Like I said, nobody cares."