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I’ve been read­ing all the excite­ment sur­round­ing Google’s new aug­mented real­ity project, Google Glasses.

In case you missed it, these are essen­tially Oakley-style sun­glasses with a lens-mounted HUD (the head-up dis­play fighter pilots use for alti­tude, vec­tor, tar­get­ing etc.). Wear­ing a pair, you can read and com­pose emails, view cal­en­dar events, check the weather, take phone calls and, accord­ing to the promo video accom­pa­ny­ing the launch, learn to play the ukulele.

While this all may appear like great fun, it’s being touted by some quite seri­ous tech journos as noth­ing less than the nat­ural replace­ment for the smart­phone as our pri­mary com­mu­ni­ca­tions device.

They’re dead wrong.

Infor­ma­tion isn’t mov­ing to the bridge of your nose. It’s mov­ing to the end of your arm. Even peo­ple who wear glasses don’t always wear glasses. Whereas, for most peo­ple at least, a watch is some­thing you feel naked with­out. We even sleep and shower wear­ing them.

And, if this is to be the next infor­ma­tion inter­face, at least in con­junc­tion with the smart­phone in your pocket, shouldn’t it be where most peo­ple have most access to it most often?

Now, before you start bring­ing up the fact that smart-watches have been attempted before – Microsoft SPOT any­one? – I’d remind you that tablets had also been around for years before some­one made them the hottest tech on the planet.

Sooner or later, sci­ence always catches up with the con­cept. Power is bet­ter man­aged, sil­i­con is made smaller and more pow­er­ful, promise becomes reality.

But it isn’t solely the dis­play of at-a-glance infor­ma­tion that makes watches the per­fect com­mu­ni­ca­tion accessory.

Near-field is near.

Despite all the false-starts, NFC is going to hap­pen. And, when it does in earnest, it’ll spread like a fire at a match fac­tory. It will offer new appli­ca­tions by the hour, literally.

Nowhere will this shift be more tec­tonic than in replac­ing things you hand over. Using your hands. And that makes a watch a far bet­ter option than a phone or pair of glasses.

Think about it, you’re get­ting the train home after some Christ­mas shop­ping. You have half a dozen bags on each arm and your griz­zly six-year-old has totally lost their sense of fes­tive won­der and wants car­ry­ing – too bad your train leaves in less than two minutes.

So you hur­riedly approach one of only three bar­ri­ers not dis­play­ing a red diag­o­nal cross and, while try­ing not to lose your first-born in the sea of fel­low trav­ellers, you attempt to shift all the bags onto one arm and fum­ble past your heavy coat for the pocket con­tain­ing your NFC-enabled smartphone.

Once you’ve got hold of it, you pop it between your teeth and start pat­ting down lit­tle Alfie for his. You’re going to be really pop­u­lar with every­one at this point.

Of course, if you’re wear­ing smart-glasses, and pre­sum­ing you don’t have to get them out of their pro­tec­tive case first, you could sim­ply bend over at the waist and place your face close enough to the sen­sor to open the gate.

Then, when you regain con­scious­ness after being knocked into the bar­rier by the onrush­ing com­muter behind you, you can mar­vel at how easy this new tech­nol­ogy has made your life.

How much more prac­ti­cal it would be if you were sim­ply to wave your hand, Jedi-like, and have the gate obe­di­ently open up before you. No fum­bling, no awk­ward bod­ily adjust­ments, no trauma injury to the head.

While Google hasn’t implied that their space-age specs will even utilise NFC, if they’re talk­ing about them replac­ing the mobile phone – and they are – then they’ll have to. Peo­ple don’t want to carry any more devices than nec­es­sary, as the decline in sales of dig­i­tal cam­eras, mp3 play­ers and PDAs will attest.

Well you can now add tra­di­tional watches to technology’s death-row.

Your next watch is going to be your Oys­ter card, your wal­let, your work secu­rity pass, your Tesco Club­card, your train tick­ets. Fol­lowed before long by your car and house keys.

These are things you use mul­ti­ple times daily – and they don’t belong on any­thing that has to be taken out of your pocket or off your nose. They belong on the end of an emi­nently dex­ter­ous appendage that can quickly, accu­rately and nat­u­rally place a chip inside a near-field bub­ble with a sin­gle, effort­less motion.

The clues are out there.

I’m pretty sure Apple’s seem­ingly off the cuff sug­ges­tion at the launch of the 6th gen iPod nano in 2010 – that it could be used as a wrist­watch – wasn’t a casual com­ment at all.

Instead, it was the first move in get­ting peo­ple used to the idea of a watch as an exten­sion of a smart­phone or tablet.

Already, at least a dozen third par­ties make straps for it. But just wait until it comes with every­thing NFC offers, and Blue­tooth so you can read texts and emails from the smart­phone in your pocket. Bung in a wire­less head­set and you’ll be able to place calls from it. Change the strap, and you’ll have an always-on heart monitor.

Clearly, you’re never going to want to read the FT, play Angry Birds or watch the director’s cut of Aliens on the thing; but it accom­plishes enough well enough to jus­tify itself as a new, truly use­ful adjunct where noth­ing existed before.

I might be going out on a limb, pre­dict­ing that next-gen com­mu­ni­ca­tors are going out on a limb. But I feel that nature sides with me on this. Your hands have evolved on the end of long, multi-pinioned arms for a rea­son: to allow them to move effort­lessly through a mul­ti­tude of dif­fer­ent positions.

Why would we assume to sec­ond guess this nat­ural selec­tion by putting the most essen­tial of tools on your face?

Besides a few cute appli­ca­tions, like turn-by-turn direc­tions and watch­ing porn on your daily com­mute, the idea of forc­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion into a pair of glasses is an idea des­tined for extinction.

It sim­ply lacks vision.

Related posts:

1. High­lights from our Mobile Huddle