Google introduced its monovision, LCOS display augmented reality (AR) Glass product in 2012, bringing it to maker in 2013 with a slick Apple-like marketing campaign that made many of us think we really wanted one. They were cool, geeky cool, and profiled the wearer immediately. And, they scared the hell out people who weren’t wearing them. Scared people run or fight. Those that chose to fight warded off this alien invasion of their bars by attacking the wearers—destroy anything you don’t understand, eat it if possible. The height of human evolution.
Then the flood of BS came out about privacy and intrusion. Seems it’s OK to make a video of someone you don’t know and post it on TikTok or two-facedbook, but it’s not okay to take a picture of someone unless you’re wearing neon colored Snap glasses. You can see the logic in that, can’t you?
But the social misunderstanding, although the ultimate cause of the downfall of Glass 1, was not the real reason we’re not all wearing them. The more important but not discussed problem is they suck. Who wants to talk to someone who is staring up into space and ignoring them? You want people to ignore you by looking down at their phone and saying ah huh. And the images in the 83-degree FOV monochrome 640 × 360 field sequential color liquid crystal on silicon display were hard to keep in view, especially while walking. And then there was the issue of manipulating the user interface (UI).
Ahead of its time? Yeah. A noble experiment? Yes indeedie. A fascinating product? You betcha. Expensive? Oh my god.
Let’s face it, Google Glass was an experiment that escaped from the lab and terrorized the population. So Google shut it down in 2015 and reassessed its situation and the market for AR. Two years later, the company had concluded that there was an AR market and that they did have a useful solution for several applications in medicine, industry, and maintenance, and so Google reintroduced Glass Enterprise in 2017—this time with ordinary-looking frames.
But it was the same upper right eye crappy 640 × 360 display, but upgraded to RGB. The camera was upgraded from 5Mp to 8MP. The enterprise version also had improved mics, but it all came down to a so what? The organizations that adopted them pretty much liked them; there just wasn’t enough of these organizations to sustain a business. And the support costs were horrendous. Each app had to be tailored specifically to Google’s design. When the recession hit in Q4’22, and FAANG started dumping its inventories and people, other areas of cost-cutting were pursued. Glass bubbled up to the top right away having never made a profit.
And so the Glass era is finally over. Google will stop supporting the product in September 2023, and there’s no more development on the product or technology. Everyone in Google who had boasted of being on the Glass project suddenly got amnesia and could not remember exactly what they did the last six months, but they were pretty sure it didn’t have anything to do with Glass.
I think Glass was cool. But I’m a geek, what do I know? However, I’m not enough of a geek that I would have worn one in public, and not because of a-holes in bars, but because Glass really is geeky looking. Rule one for a successful AR headset is it can’t be conspicuous. Rule number two is refer to rule one.
