I will be using Google Glass to capture scenes from our travels in Europe, now under way aboard Ingvi, a spanking new longship owned by Viking River Cruises. We arrived yesterday from Denver and boarded the boat (or is it a ship? not sure) in Basel, Switzerland. Our Casper, Wyoming, friends Tom and Tish Atkinson are traveling with us, and in fact Tom is the one who had the idea for this adventure last fall. Brilliant!
During dinner last night we noticed that the river and shore were moving, which meant we were leaving Basel to begin the journey. I felt disoriented at first, because the big room had seemed like a restaurant that wasn’t going anywhere until just a few moments before.
Leaving Market Street bus station in Denver. (Photo by Deb)
Our cabin is on the lower level, and we can see the river from a wide, narrow window at about eye level. It’s a tiny room, not much bigger than the queen-size bed, but everything is immaculate and new. The miniature bathroom has a shower and plenty of light. The closet and bureau space is well designed, with real coat hangers. The movement of the boat during the night was gentle and soothing for sleep, but I still woke up at 4:30 too excited to get a full night’s rest. I am sitting in a lounge area with a cup of coffee taking care of online business while most of the 150 passengers sleep. Breakfast will be in about an hour, and then a tour somewhere but I can’t remember the details.
I can tell by the blurriness of my mind that a power nap is in order down in the cabin, and then breakfast with people who get up at a normal hour.
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The first-person visual experience in motion is a little disorienting, very much as it is in cinema sequences. But the big budget productions perhaps have a gyro to steady the movement a little to minimize the seasickness effect. Walking into the river cruise setting was truly eye-opening, but necessarily involved a little too much head movement (checking footing and scanning for the desired path of walking). Incidentally Glass is open to new ‘explorers’ one-day only for US residents over 18 (for $1500). Product stories and signup page is http://www.google.com/glass/start/how-to-get-one/
Len – these posts are totally cool. Love the quality of the Google Glass video. We’re looking at different river cruse options and seeing your video is far better than watching the promotional video produced by the cruise line. Have a wonderful time and i hope you can continue to find enough bandwidth to keep posting.
Steve, I have more video and photos to post later. The Wi-Fi on the ship turned out to be very poor, and the final few days nonexistent. Sorry I couldn’t keep regular posts to the blog, but I should have some more fairly soon. I can say this has been a fantastic adventure, highly recommended!