Every couple of years, a “revolutionary” product just seems to appear out of nowhere. The company behind it is marketing it as “the next big thing”, but just as quick as it popped up, everyone forgets about the product. One of these products is the Google Glass that was introduced in 2012. Its demo at Google I/O was phenomenal and unlike anything the public has ever seen. The media coverage on it was huge, and everyone probably heard from it at some point. But, not everyone can exactly tell you what exactly happened to this idea and why no one is talking about it anymore.
How did Google Glass start?
In 2010, Google founded a company now known as X Development. The company just has one mission: improving the lives of people by tenfold. They spend most of their time on projects that may carry some riskiness during research and are very ambitious. Their first project was the self-driving car project which now known as Waymo and after that they started to experiment with a variety of different products such as Google Glass, Google Brain and GCam. Not all their products were as successful as others, which is to be expected of a company that basically only does Research and Development work. If you keep this in mind, you can already form an idea about why Google Glass disappeared so quickly.
What was Google Glass again?
Google Glass was meant to be a tool to enhance our daily lives. However, it was unclear which part of our daily lives it was supposed to improve. Within X Development there were disputes on whether Glass was supposed to be used as a fashionable device to improve our day-to-day routines or be used for purely utilitarian functions like in the workplace.
It was hard to say which one of those two roles the Glass was going to fulfill, so its early prototype was released and tested in the public. It was advertised as an early adopter of Augmented Reality (AR) and a piece of wearable technology that could make your daily life easier. The promises about this product were plentiful. You could read your messages, you could get interesting image recognition results and you could be taking a picture without even taking your phone out.
But this also raised a lot of questions. Why would you want to be bothered by all your messages all day? What image recognition results could possibly be interesting enough to wear the Glass all day? Would the people around you be comfortable with you wearing a camera all day? All of these things were valid questions and were also reasons why people rejected them.
Aside from these practical issues, it was also clear that the Glass was very much a luxury product. The device retailed for around $1500, which could also buy you a very nice smartphone at that time. Maybe even two. On top of this, the functionality of the product did not necessarily reflect upon the price. Because it was such an early version of this kind of product, it did not perform its tasks very well.
Was all this work on the Glass for nothing?
Yes, the Glass looked like a big flop for most of the consumers. It was to be expected that such an early prototype was going to be lacking. After all, that is what R&D is all for.
However, there is still a use case for the Glass. In manufacturing settings, the Glass is being used to help making jobs safer. That product now falls under the Glass Enterprise Edition and enhances the manufacturing workflow. Aside from a standalone pair of glasses, the Glass can also be clipped on safety glasses to provide workers with information without it being a distraction.
Will this technology ever be useful to the regular consumer? Maybe, maybe not. But in my opinion, it is still a cool piece of technology and the world of technology has definitely learned from it.
Thank you for this interesting post! I have never heard of these glasses before. It kind of reminds me of the development of the AR contact lens. It also made me question if people, who are far/short-sighted, are able to wear the Google Glass comfortably? Like, do they need to wear the Glass on top of their normal glasses? But this question also goes for the AR contact lens. Like can it be used by everyone (comfortably)?🤔
Hmm, I actually have not thought about this. I think you should be able to wear your own glasses underneath if I look at the pictures on the Google Glass Enterprise edition website
I always found Google products so funny as I never imagine Google to have products. For a 12 year old me, Google was nothing more than a search engine and something that I have to put my thoughts into and I will be able to access Youtube. But, when I saw one of my relatives with a Google phone, I was amazed, confused to say the least. There is google watches, cameras and speakers and they are a moderate price. The Google Glass is indeed an interesting thing to add to the collection and it is disspointing to see it not being as successful, but I think that is highly due to the lack of interest of the audience! Maybe Google products see better days in future?
With the hype for Glass, then the disillusion because of the technological limits and societal impacts, then again the apparently endless possibilities of Microsoft’s HoloLens and again the failure for those to actually be implemented, it seems like we’re in a neverending rollercoaster on the Gartner hype cycle.
I do hope someday accessible AR technology like the Glass can become an actually useful and powerful reality — all those science fiction worlds where AR is ubiquitous have really made me want something like that
Oh, I completely forgot that Google Glass existed! I remember it being pretty big news, like you mentioned in your article. It is a little bit of a shame that it flopped, since the concept is so cool!
Perhaps it laid the groundwork for a similar product in the future, since AR tech is becoming more and more developed and detailed as time goes on!
It’s fun (or is it) to see how virtual reality has become much more popular than augmented reality. You can buy affordable VR headsets for gaming or for the metaverse (writing this hurts a bit), but it is really hard to find an affordable and public-use AR headset. When you look at the usage possible between VR and AR, AR offers much more liberty than VR; You can go outside with it, you don’t need a NASA computer, and it looks way cooler than a VR headset.
Like you wrote, the market and users weren’t ready for the GGlass, but I secretly hope for an AR come-back that isn’t only Pokemon Go!
I don’t know about you but I’m actually kind of glad the glasses have not worked out so far. Although the idea seems very cool, I think society will take quite some time accepting it. I think that because we have been forced to be on our phone most of the time during the pandemic and I’m seeing way more people complaining about their phone addiction.
So if we can’t handle something that is not “stuck” to our face, I don’t think we are ready to use the glasses comfortably.
– there are some interesting hypothesis suggesting that technology is developing too fast for our body/brain to digest which may play into it!
interesting read, I never knew what ended up happening. I know that google has had many projects that got discontinued, but with google glass, considering the amount of hype they created for it, I expected more. I think part of the inflated hype was also the fact that it sounded pretty exciting to a lot of people, being one fo the first AR devices that people expected could become mainstream. Youve mentioned a lot of fair issues with it though, not suprised it didnt get to be adopted.