16 ms·

Google discontinues Google Glass for enterprise

321 points by alsodumb 4y ago

geenat 4y ago
Glass seemed so far ahead of it's time when one considers how much microsoft is investing into augmented reality and hololens.
- monocasa 4y ago
  I'm not sure Microsoft is investing all that much at the moment: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effectively-kills-off-mixed-reality-projects https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...
- IshKebab 4y ago
  Glass was nothing like Hololens. It was basically a smart watch in the corner of your vision. Hololens is full 3D AR. Much more impressive. The only issue with Hololens was it had a really tiny field of view.
senttoschool 4y ago
More than 10 years later, it's still not good enough for business adoption? Wow. When it was first released, it was really neat. I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  Google Glass wasn't really AR, more like a smart watch taped to your face, so I can imagine there being little business adoption. HoloLens seems much more promising, but development still seems to be slow. I'd love to see AR succeed but with the current price I doubt it'll gain popularity in the near future.
  - hbossy 4y ago
    Microsoft has laid off entire HoloLens team. It's dead.
    - jeroenhd 4y ago
      Sad to hear it, but not too surprising with how little advancements Microsoft seems to have made in the space since the first release of HoloLens. I'm sure AR will be back eventually, maybe all the factors align next time.
    - sofixa 4y ago
      Bummer, I visited a museum* using HoloLens to bring a command bunker to life, and even though it felt a bit gimmicky, it was really interesting and I could immediately see it being super useful in tons of other museums (e.g. seeing dinosaurs, explain physics/astrology concepts, show vehicles that no longer exist, etc. etc.) * Musée de la Libération de Paris - musée du Général Leclerc - musée Jean Moulin - yes, that's actual full name
    - dev_daftly 4y ago
      This isn't true...
      - elsewhen 4y ago
        https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effectively-kills-off-mixed-reality-projects https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      Announcement?
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  >I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now. Am I the asshole here for being happy that future never came to pass? People are already zombies addicted to their phones, tracked and monetized to hell by advertisers, so I feel like gluing it to their eyes with cameras constantly scanning everything they look at, is some dystopian nightmare I never want to see.
  - lifeinthevoid 4y ago
    I would be very surprised if this weren't the case within 5-10y tops.
    - bryan0 4y ago
      Yeah this, for better or worse, seems inevitable as the computers in our pockets inch closer and closer to our brains where we can use them seamlessly and continually.
      - falcor84 4y ago
        Yep, and I suppose it's even more likely now that GPT4 can take images as inputs.
  - jojobas 4y ago
    What's worse, same as with most emails going through google and people tagging each other on photos, you can be as savvy as you want and your image will be on other people's video feed all the time.
  - deutschepost 4y ago
    I think that content producers are very interested in technology that closes the analog hole more and more. The first step were streaming services so that you would not be able to own content anymore. The second step is wide adoption of technology that gets closer and closer to your brain. First there were cinemas then TVs then smartphones then AR glasses and in the future there will be DRM enabled brain implants so that you are personally locked out if you don't pay these companies. And over time, people will get used to it more and more. Just like today you have to pay 6 different subscriptions to watch the movies you like. Or install spyware if you want to play a game you paid for. It sure might be a dystopian hellhole. But at least some shareholders got rich.
- cm277 4y ago
  There were some decent use cases I've heard off; supplier compliance got quite big during Covid and AFAIK stayed big. Instead of flying out a team to inspect a factory, just ask someone to walk around the factory wearing Glass. Zero notice, much less chance to cheat, waaaay cheaper. That and documentation lookup should have made for decent enterprise sales. Probably not big enough to satisfy the big G.
  - senttoschool 4y ago
    Why can't you just make the person wear a GoPro or some kind of live camera? I'm sure there are other solutions cheaper than Google Glasses for this.
- tootie 4y ago
  It's not that it's "not good enough" it's that it doesn't solve any real problems. I used to work at an agency with vertical dedicated to immersive tech. We did a ton of experimentation, prototyping and building demo experiences for AR visors and lots of related devices. Companies paid us loads of money to build glitzy experiences and come up with clever uses for their tech. We made a lot of neat gimmicky things that were fun for a minute or two but nothing that anyone would ever want to deploy at scale. Phone-based AR is basically already deployed at massive scale and we haven't seen any followup to Pokemon Go in over 5 years. AR just isn't a useful idea. Maybe another order of magnitude improvement in the visual quality and battery life would breath new life, but otherwise it's just a dead end.
jgrahamc 4y ago
I really hope Apple can do something interesting with AR. I've tried all the major AR things (HoloLens, HoloLens 2, MagicLeap) and tons of the "smart glasses" and there's so much room for improvement.
- GeekyBear 4y ago
  One of the things we can expect from Apple is to keep on iterating on a new product category over the long haul instead of doing one or two iterations and giving up.
- bobisbit 4y ago
  Any you would recommend or is it still too early?
banjodebanks 4y ago
[dead]
egorfine 4y ago
In other words, Google Glass still existed.
yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
Somewhat related, a question for HN people: Is there a product — perhaps some kind of goggles — that I can wear on my face which will simulate the experience of watching a big television? I don't want virtual reality or augmented reality or anything like that. I just want to be able to sit on a long-haul flight and isolate my eyes and ears in such a way that it feels like I'm sitting alone in a dark room watching a movie. The movie should play from my iPhone.
- nicky0 4y ago
  Any VR headset will do that; I know you said no VR but get over that. VR headsets are a head mounted display & audio tech that you can buy. (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stream-movies-in-vr/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stream-movies-in-vr/)
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  This used to exist, in the 90s (!), in the form of the Sony Glasstron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron They stopped making them at the end of that decade.
- MikusR 4y ago
  That's what Quest2 is. You even don't need an iPhone. It's standalone.
  - tazjin 4y ago
    You probably don't want to wear a Quest for a full long-haul flight. They're not that comfortable, even with third-party straps. There's also the whole thing where Quest 2 is quite a bit worse than Quest 1 in some aspects that relate to comfort, such as the lack of precise eye distance settings.
- Normal_gaussian 4y ago
  You can get "headsets" that your phone slots into for less than $50. Pair it with some decent headphones.
brianmorris10 4y ago
[flagged]
- butterNaN 4y ago
  How would you design a smart glass?
  - scarygliders 4y ago
    1) Take all the bits off the Google Glass frame. 2) Somehow redesign them so they are attachable to your usual glasses. 2a) For those who don't normally wear glasses, they can either use the original, or I dunno, some alternative which doesn't look so embarrassing. I've no idea why someone hasn't thought of that already.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    I'd design it to painfully electrocute anyone who tried to use it in the shower. https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases-robert-scoble-for-nude-google-glass-photo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases...
- ungamedplayer 4y ago
  Anyone else remember that apple used this same angle to anti promote google glass. I guess either it has basis in truth or people just repeat rhetoric.
notlukesky 4y ago
I actually thought that the enterprise use case would survive when coupled with computer vision applications like for surgery assistance or manufacturing assembly line QA. RIP
throwaw12 4y ago
At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to 100. I feel like, if this was a startup which highly depends on the success of product for their existence they could have pivoted or come up better ideas for adoption. Maybe, Magic Leap was that company, or they got too much investment and thought they will exist for a quite while
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Just don't put the founder's mistress in charge of marketing, so nobody can criticize or question their outrageous ridiculous decisions or silly "Ok, Glass" slogan without being sacked. https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistress-1219044247?rev=1377743363 https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistre...
- xorcist 4y ago
  > Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an existing one which is in use without disturbing traffic, if the car analogy can be forgiven. I think the situation here has more to do with Google culture where the are too scared to stop throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
  - bruce511 4y ago
    You're right, support is difficult. But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous. Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? So it's not just google (although magnified there.) It's everywhere. You remember who _invented_ the light-bulb, but you've no idea of the people who developed that into a product, with manufacturing, distribution, sales and developed bulb-connector-standards and so on. In our business it's the same. Here's a new wizz-bang feature. 100% glory. Maintaining feature for the next 20 years, adapting to ever-changing world requirements, keeping customers happy, and using it - anyone can do that. (and nobody wants to - it's too much like hard work.)
Gustomaximus 4y ago
Side note: As a marketeer I feel Google need to lay off 'the next big thing' launches. Set up some alpha/labs environment so tech interested people can go there and not allow launches til products hit a critical user number. Credibility and excitement for Google launches is massively reducing ever since the G+ debacle and something, I feel at least, they should try to get back.
asim 4y ago
Innovators dilemma. You were early to market, you did all the work, and no one wanted the product. What do you do? Keep going? Or give up from exhaustion? This is the unfortunate situation with many who tackle new spaces like Mobile, VR and AR. Google will no doubt re-enter the space, but only after it's been validated. And that's totally fine. Expect Google to produce quality hardware and software at a time when the market is ready, I don't expect them to innovate. Apple as a market leader has shown that they know how to pull off new hardware trends and drive that to mass market. Others struggle with this significantly. It was a valiant effort by Google, one that I applaud, but now it's time to move on. Things like Starline are where Google will shine for now. They can come back to AR.
- bullfightonmars 4y ago
  I would pur a starline in my home today if it were available.
  - asim 4y ago
    Exactly! Absolutely phenomenal and I think we'll see this in many places. Knowing Google, it will start in the office and then end up dispersed elsewhere, potentially purchasable in the home, but just imagine finding these booths anywhere you could use. We used to have telephone booths! Imagine Starline booths.
    - brookst 4y ago
      Wouldn’t that take several years of investment with little to no return?
- Reason077 4y ago
  Starline, really? While this sounds like neat technology, I'm not sure if it has mass-market potential in the same way that VR/AR does. Is every company going to be clamouring to outfit their meeting rooms with Starline units? Is every kid going to want a bulky Starline set in their home/bedroom? How much is it going to cost relative to the sort of cheap mass-market headsets that are likely to be available in 5 years time? Remember, Google is a company that shuts down even some of its relatively successful products, so it's hard to imagine Starline ever succeeding as an actual Google hardware product.
sam_goody 4y ago
I, for one, am happy that this failed for Google, and will be even happier if it would fail for Meta. Whenever this tech matures (and it will eventually), I rather it not be done by the company whose only goal is to capture even more data about you (and whose OS will be full of other, 3rd party, spyware). If done by a startup, there is a chance, however tiny, that they can create enough market that a non spyware version of AR glasses will be available for those that want it. If Google or Meta (or MS) create the AR glass first, they will somehow promote a unhealthy walled in network, and people will not even understand what is wrong till after the next Holocaust.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  The sad thing is this isn't even that hot of take given what happened with Facebook and the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar...
neom 4y ago
Looked pretty good actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4 I had Glass in 2014 and I used it a bit but people continually bothered me when wearing it so I retired it after a couple of weeks. Couldn't do half the stuff the Enterprise edition apparently could.
bborud 4y ago
I wish they had spun it off so it wouldn't just have died within Google. It seems that any project that isn't wildly popular is just starved of talent inside Google. Outside Google with a little bit of money and a dedicated team, I don't see why this couldn't have been a success. What I would really like was a product that was developed to be affordable, fairly open so you can easily integrate it into your own system, write applications that can run on the device without need to call home to the mothership etc. There are lots of situations where it would have been very convenient to have access to an affordable, ruggedized, light-weight product that provides both a head mounted display, a decent quality camera and a user interface that can be operated while wearing gloves. For instance, right now I'm involved in a project where we help build a huge piece of machinery (the size of several intercity trains in terms of size and mass). The team is spread all over the world while the building of the actual machine takes place in a backwater that takes about a 24 hours to travel to. It would be really useful if the onsite engineers could stream video of what they see while working on the machine rather than having to use handheld mobile phones. It would also be useful if they could see telemetry and parameters in the display as they work on the machine without having to move to look at the various displays. Perhaps also see the video stream of other engineers working at the same site.
- CharlieDigital 4y ago
  Check out apprentice.io The founder initially fell in love with Google Glass and went on to build an AR/VR startup around it. They are life sciences focused, but I see no reason it couldn't fit your use case.
  - bborud 4y ago
    Interesting, but I think the device is a bit too bulky and sticks too far out to work in my use case. The environment where we'd use this is essentially a giant machine shop where you have to wear a hard-hat, it is noisy and dirty and you often have to get into tight spaces with cabling and piping everywhere. Besides it doesn't look like they are primarily focused on selling the device itself. For a device to work for us it would either have to be so small it can be worn with a hard hat, and not stick out beyond the helmet and incorporate safety glasses, or it would have to be a lightweight helmet mounted system that can be folded out of the way when not in use so people don't have to change helmets. With a helmet mounted device you could incorporate the camera(s) in the helmet and perhaps even include an IR camera as well. For the stuff we work on on that project, having an IR camera, would actually be of immense help. Both for on-site work (being able to see what temperature different parts of the machine are with some accuracy), for remote observation and for documenting.
Sol- 4y ago
Figured that they'd hop on the techno-utopian bandwagon that's currently being pushed and double down on bringing the glassholes back instead. People are also seem more desensitized to privacy concerns nowadays, so they might have a chance of bringing the ubiquitous AI-enabled surveillance to the masses.
farseer 4y ago
Why not open source the hardware design, BOM, software and dump it on GitHub?
- bruce511 4y ago
  Because it's not a self-contained thing. Any cloud-device is integrated to back-end servers. Which at google means linked and locked into all kinds of internal things which are not open.
- ElfinTrousers 4y ago
  Why would they? Just to be nice? Since when do large companies give things away?
lynx23 4y ago
Google Glass, Google Car, Google Plus... Its always the same pattern. A lot of pre-release advertisment, followed by a release of a beta version and another press release declaring the end of the product. At this point, I wouldn't adopt any Google offering because I sort of expect by default it will go away in 6 months or 12.
- devrand 4y ago
  Isn’t that exactly not the case here? This product existed for over a decade.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    The Glass Enterprise Edition 2 came out in 2019.
    - lynx23 4y ago
      I must have missed that, me not being a company and all that. All I remember was a lot of glass hype, followed by the message that Google has actually stopped selling glass for "normal" customers... So at least in my world, the pattern still fits.
- dgrin91 4y ago
  Google Car as in Waymo? Isn't that still growing and getting expanded? Obviously self driving is harder than everyone thought, but its not abandoned by any means.
  - dev_daftly 4y ago
    I still don't understand why everybody thought self-driving was so easy. It was clearly always going to be decades, not years for them to be ready for the mass market but so many people were acting like normal cars were already obsolete.
    - godshatter 4y ago
determined 4y ago
[dead]
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Another one bites the dust Another one bites the dust And another one gone, and another one gone, Another one bites the dust
sgt101 4y ago
I did some work on a project using these last year. My findings were: - couldn't get them onboarded into intune/active directory - camera wasn't good for task past 1.5m or so - screen was too low res for required use (see features on a chart) They were cheaper than the latest iPhone... I think this is the error that they made - if they had gone for a top of the line device then they would have been closer to the expectations that our customers had.
onetokeoverthe 4y ago
[dead]
jacooper 4y ago
Now watch apple trigger red alerts in Google's and Samsung's HQ by releasing their AR glasses. As much as i hate Apple products, I can't deny that most of the time they are the leaders and the rest are just copies.
- kilroy123 4y ago
  It sounds like that is dead in the water for the next decade... I predict that work will continue at other startups and will be acquired in the future by Apple.
- dev_daftly 4y ago
  Leaders when they are releasing ar glasses well after other major players have? Microsoft will be on their third iteration by the time Apple releases theirs.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    Mainstream leader*
- ProAm 4y ago
  > that most of the time they are the leaders and the rest are just copies. Apple is almost always a follower and rarely an innovator. They take something that exists, and polishes it. They are very successful at it, but a leader definitely not.
rvz 4y ago
Not even a SINGLE mention of North glasses in this thread. [0] Highly likely the reason for closing this down since they already have the IP and technology. So why would Google want to run two teams (Glass and North) in parallel when they can discontinue Glass and merge both teams into one? It would be news if they closed down their newly acquired AR glasses by North [1], but they are still in the AR glasses race. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmented-reality-glasses-start-up.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen... [1] https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-ar-glasses-translation/ https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-ar-glasses-translat...
- 908B64B197 4y ago
  North is really a footnote. It acquired the Intel Vaunt [0] tech and patents and tried to bring it to market[1]. It failed to do so and was acquired for a little bit less than it raised [2], suggesting Google only valued the patents. The company failed to retain talent and trimmed it's workforce aggressively before the acquisition. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart-glasses-announced-ar-video https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-intel-vaunt-patents-ar-glasses https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-in... [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fades-alphabet-buying-canadian-smart-glasses-pioneer-north/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fa...
  - rvz 4y ago
    My point is, Google Glass has been replaced by North's AR glasses technology. Whatever happened to North when it was an independent business is not Google's problem. It would be a total failure for Google if they discontinued all their AR glasses products; signalling their exit from the AR glasses race in general. Thanks to that acquisition, that is not the case.
    - 908B64B197 4y ago
      > My point is, Google Glass has been replaced by North's AR glasses technology. Intel's tech. And it hasn't replaced it. No announcements as of yet for their future roadmap. We don't know if it'll replace or supplement the in-house tech Google has. All we know is they are shutting down their existing sales channel for AR glasses. It's impossible to buy a pair with either tech on it at the time. For all we know, they could bundle these patents and sell them to Samsung or Xiaomi or any other OEM.
sebivaduva 4y ago
so all 3 enterprises had to give up their hardware?
jpm_sd 4y ago
Glass just wasn't very good. Tiny low resolution display, poor quality camera, uncomfortable to wear, terrible battery life. Pivoting to "for Enterprise" was just a half-assed attempt to make back some of the $$$ wasted on development without putting much more effort into R&D. Not a surprise that adoption was limited. (I worked at X 2013-2015.)
- wetpaws 4y ago
  More reasons to iterate on it.
- Gareth321 4y ago
  It was a first gen AR product released almost 10 years ago. They needed to keep working on it, but like all Google products, they stopped very soon after launch.
  - jayd16 4y ago
    It wasn't even AR. It was just a hud.
- deelowe 4y ago
  There was a lot of really impressive tech in glass. Especially for 10 years ago. I have no doubt that with continued focus and funding, they could have build something truly impressive. Unfortunately, glass was a pet project of Sergey's and he decided to exit stage left fairly quickly once some of his unsavory behaviors started becoming known publicly. This was just a few months after the launch. Once he was no longer hands on, the entire endeavor was left the languish without clear direction.
  - sleepytimetea 4y ago
    Unsavory behaviors with Google Glasses ?
    - deelowe 4y ago
      No. He got caught up in some me too type stuff and quietly disappeared from the limelight as rumors started surfacing.
avsteele 4y ago
What left out there similar to this? I want to provide remote instruction and see through a user's eyes to help them fix/debug hardware. 2D AR is good enough. Hololens is winding down. What's the next best thing?
- rtkwe 4y ago
  Magic Leap? I haven't looked at it much to be honest they're far too expensive for me to play with.
philistine 4y ago
Everybody on here seems to be talking about the Google perspective, but what about the people and companies who were using the product? How do they feel? What is their take on this? Must be weird.
throwoutway 4y ago
The Google apologists here usually say "they only kill consumer proudcts, they wouldn't do that for enterprise products", but here we are. I hope that doesn't look equally dismissive, but it's time that everyone realize Google is willing to kill almost any product that's not making enough profit.
ok123456 4y ago
It's hard to believe that there were people wearing these in public at one time.
- fallingmeat 4y ago
  haha well they did get that cool nickname
pmontra 4y ago
Google could spinoff those products and services. Some are probably unnoticeable at Google's scale and not enough employees want to tie gheir careers to them. However some of them could stand on their own legs if owned by a smaller company fully dedicated to them. A way to spin them off is to sell them to somebody. Did that ever happen and did any company ever offer to buy a part of Google?
skizm 4y ago
If I were to get one of these on ebay or somewhere used, is there any sort of dev ecosystem available if I wanted to hack around on them? Or are they pretty locked down?
- ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
  I have one of the original ones, and I will admit: for a dev-focused person, you could see A LOT of potential. But, now it is quite an ordeal to get things up and running... if you want to experiment with that kind of interface, something tells me you are better off buying an nreal or something like that and having an actual functional and supported device + something you can potentially hack on.
replwoacause 4y ago
I will never use Google products again.
siliconc0w 4y ago
If you have a money printer it's hard to care about other things.
- papito 4y ago
  Absolutely. Google products are not their primary business. These are corporate hobby project that keep the engineering plankton busy.
chucksmash 4y ago
I'd love to see a product that fills the "Google Glass: The Good Parts" niche. As much as I was on team "don't film me at the bar" when Google Glass was announced, there really IS the kernel of a neat idea there. Maybe it's just not possible to get the good parts without enabling the bad. There was a Black Mirror episode about (iirc) contact lenses that offered always-on, high fidelity recording. They were used to turn people into self-survelliance machines with no privacy, whose every experience was subject to review. I suppose any time a thought along the lines of "I'd like that thing from Black Mirror, but..." occurs, it's worth stopping to wonder if you've missed the point. I digress. I've had dozens of times in life where I wished I essentially had a dashcam for my face. It's such an appealing idea to be able to share "Let me show you just what I saw, as I saw it." Not all the time, but sometimes. And not with everybody, just with some people. The last time this desire occurred to me was during an early morning seven hour car + train + plane + bus + bike + (gratuitous) ferry + walk journey I was taking from North Georgia to Midtown Manhattan. Aside from the intentional bonanza of modes of transport, there are a ton of amazing vistas along the way; going from the woods in moonlight, rounding the curve to come into Atlanta lit up at night, seeing the sun come up over the clouds, the view of Manhattan on the final approach into LGA, etc. As it stands today, at points where I'm not biking or driving, I'll get out my phone to take a picture. "Look, here are three pictures I took" doesn't actually communicate what I want to communicate though. What I would really like is seven hours of footage, mostly played back at 50x speed, but slowing to closer to real time at the interesting parts. When those interesting parts are panoramas, those are the places I'd get out my phone for a picture today. There'd also be parts where nothing individually was particularly picture worthy (say, biking down Ditmars Blvd), but in toto it might be interesting to people. What I wish I had was something natural-ish looking (i.e. I don't want to take a video of what I see on this trip, not of people staring at a camera rig I'm wearing while trying to take a video of what I see on this trip), in a form factor that I can safely wear and passively use while biking and driving. It would also need the ability to capture seven plus hours of good looking video. And also somehow privacy respecting and not dystopic.
AlbertCory 4y ago
I should add that to my list of cancelled products: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enough https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug... explains how this happens (Hello, McKinsey!)
ozten 4y ago
The physics behind Glasses style augmented reality are impossible (or at least 50 years away), so the industry is moving towards MR mixed reality. Bigscreen VR's recent glasses show where things are headed - Micro OLED displays and smaller form factor. Speculation: Google is consolidating talent and doubling down on an internal VR/MR headset and metaverse to compete with Apple. It will be tethered to a "Puck" that runs android and clips to your belt or is in your pocket. It will be an important moonshot for AI, metaverse, and virtual Office. YouTuber Sadley It's Bradley is a great follow for Optics and inside baseball of this space.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  I'm sorry, but glasses style augmented reality is already possible. 50 years is even too long of a time span for when AR glasses are attractive enough to the general public enough to reach >1B users.
  - ozten 4y ago
    A line of text floating in your view is doable. Seeing 3D renderings in a dark environment with 30 minutes of battery is doable. The original vision of augmenting human vision without a bunch of caveats and limitations is not doable today. Spectacles by Snap is a cool accomplishment, but mostly the form factor is useful for recording video form a human's perspective and not augmenting one's vision.
    - charcircuit 4y ago
      You can do world locked 3D renderings in an lit inside room and have more a few hours of battery life. Yes here are limitations, but all technology has limitations. As time passes we will make them better and better. There is a bar we will have to pass before they become attractive to regular people and I'm not claiming we are there yet.
moi2388 4y ago
Is anybody surprised about Google discontinuing services instead of maintaining them, or god forbid improving them? It’s very simple; is it an ad? No? Then Google will scrap it.
perceptronas 4y ago
I've tried consumer Google Glasses once they were released. I was truly impressed. If I were to guess — camera & privacy concerns killed them. I see others say that its just another product Google killed. I have to disagree, >10 years is quite a long time to see if product works or not. This time its a bit different. Google is a cool company. Maybe not as cool as before, but certainly an order of magnitude better than Microsoft. I wish them all the best and hope they can come up with new exciting stuff
nr2x 4y ago
This is why Google Cloud has no chance against the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership. Google kills products randomly, has no clear direction or mission, and it’s business suicide to trust them for any core functions of your product. Whereas Microsoft will support you for decades and is a very safe bet for your business.
wrs 4y ago
Maybe there are literally no customers left for this, so it doesn’t matter, but calling it “Enterprise” and then killing it with six months of follow-on support…that is not a good look.

321 points by alsodumb 4y ago

Glass seemed so far ahead of it's time when one considers how much microsoft is investing into augmented reality and hololens.

monocasa 4y ago
I'm not sure Microsoft is investing all that much at the moment: https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effectively-kills-off-mixed-reality-projects https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...
IshKebab 4y ago
Glass was nothing like Hololens. It was basically a smart watch in the corner of your vision. Hololens is full 3D AR. Much more impressive. The only issue with Hololens was it had a really tiny field of view.

senttoschool 4y ago

More than 10 years later, it's still not good enough for business adoption? Wow. When it was first released, it was really neat. I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now.

jeroenhd 4y ago
Google Glass wasn't really AR, more like a smart watch taped to your face, so I can imagine there being little business adoption. HoloLens seems much more promising, but development still seems to be slow. I'd love to see AR succeed but with the current price I doubt it'll gain popularity in the near future.
- hbossy 4y ago
  Microsoft has laid off entire HoloLens team. It's dead.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    Sad to hear it, but not too surprising with how little advancements Microsoft seems to have made in the space since the first release of HoloLens. I'm sure AR will be back eventually, maybe all the factors align next time.
  - sofixa 4y ago
    Bummer, I visited a museum* using HoloLens to bring a command bunker to life, and even though it felt a bit gimmicky, it was really interesting and I could immediately see it being super useful in tons of other museums (e.g. seeing dinosaurs, explain physics/astrology concepts, show vehicles that no longer exist, etc. etc.) * Musée de la Libération de Paris - musée du Général Leclerc - musée Jean Moulin - yes, that's actual full name
  - dev_daftly 4y ago
    This isn't true...
    - elsewhen 4y ago
      https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effectively-kills-off-mixed-reality-projects https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/01/21/ms-layoffs-effect...
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    Announcement?
ChuckNorris89 4y ago
>I'd imagine that we'd all be wearing AR glasses by now. Am I the asshole here for being happy that future never came to pass? People are already zombies addicted to their phones, tracked and monetized to hell by advertisers, so I feel like gluing it to their eyes with cameras constantly scanning everything they look at, is some dystopian nightmare I never want to see.
- lifeinthevoid 4y ago
  I would be very surprised if this weren't the case within 5-10y tops.
  - bryan0 4y ago
    Yeah this, for better or worse, seems inevitable as the computers in our pockets inch closer and closer to our brains where we can use them seamlessly and continually.
    - falcor84 4y ago
      Yep, and I suppose it's even more likely now that GPT4 can take images as inputs.
- jojobas 4y ago
  What's worse, same as with most emails going through google and people tagging each other on photos, you can be as savvy as you want and your image will be on other people's video feed all the time.
- deutschepost 4y ago
  I think that content producers are very interested in technology that closes the analog hole more and more. The first step were streaming services so that you would not be able to own content anymore. The second step is wide adoption of technology that gets closer and closer to your brain. First there were cinemas then TVs then smartphones then AR glasses and in the future there will be DRM enabled brain implants so that you are personally locked out if you don't pay these companies. And over time, people will get used to it more and more. Just like today you have to pay 6 different subscriptions to watch the movies you like. Or install spyware if you want to play a game you paid for. It sure might be a dystopian hellhole. But at least some shareholders got rich.
cm277 4y ago
There were some decent use cases I've heard off; supplier compliance got quite big during Covid and AFAIK stayed big. Instead of flying out a team to inspect a factory, just ask someone to walk around the factory wearing Glass. Zero notice, much less chance to cheat, waaaay cheaper. That and documentation lookup should have made for decent enterprise sales. Probably not big enough to satisfy the big G.
- senttoschool 4y ago
  Why can't you just make the person wear a GoPro or some kind of live camera? I'm sure there are other solutions cheaper than Google Glasses for this.
tootie 4y ago
It's not that it's "not good enough" it's that it doesn't solve any real problems. I used to work at an agency with vertical dedicated to immersive tech. We did a ton of experimentation, prototyping and building demo experiences for AR visors and lots of related devices. Companies paid us loads of money to build glitzy experiences and come up with clever uses for their tech. We made a lot of neat gimmicky things that were fun for a minute or two but nothing that anyone would ever want to deploy at scale. Phone-based AR is basically already deployed at massive scale and we haven't seen any followup to Pokemon Go in over 5 years. AR just isn't a useful idea. Maybe another order of magnitude improvement in the visual quality and battery life would breath new life, but otherwise it's just a dead end.

jgrahamc 4y ago

I really hope Apple can do something interesting with AR. I've tried all the major AR things (HoloLens, HoloLens 2, MagicLeap) and tons of the "smart glasses" and there's so much room for improvement.

GeekyBear 4y ago
One of the things we can expect from Apple is to keep on iterating on a new product category over the long haul instead of doing one or two iterations and giving up.
bobisbit 4y ago
Any you would recommend or is it still too early?

banjodebanks 4y ago

[dead]

egorfine 4y ago

In other words, Google Glass still existed.

yakshaving_jgt 4y ago

Somewhat related, a question for HN people: Is there a product — perhaps some kind of goggles — that I can wear on my face which will simulate the experience of watching a big television? I don't want virtual reality or augmented reality or anything like that. I just want to be able to sit on a long-haul flight and isolate my eyes and ears in such a way that it feels like I'm sitting alone in a dark room watching a movie. The movie should play from my iPhone.

nicky0 4y ago
Any VR headset will do that; I know you said no VR but get over that. VR headsets are a head mounted display & audio tech that you can buy. (see e.g. https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stream-movies-in-vr/ https://www.wired.com/story/how-to-stream-movies-in-vr/)
LeoPanthera 4y ago
This used to exist, in the 90s (!), in the form of the Sony Glasstron. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasstron They stopped making them at the end of that decade.
MikusR 4y ago
That's what Quest2 is. You even don't need an iPhone. It's standalone.
- tazjin 4y ago
  You probably don't want to wear a Quest for a full long-haul flight. They're not that comfortable, even with third-party straps. There's also the whole thing where Quest 2 is quite a bit worse than Quest 1 in some aspects that relate to comfort, such as the lack of precise eye distance settings.
Normal_gaussian 4y ago
You can get "headsets" that your phone slots into for less than $50. Pair it with some decent headphones.

brianmorris10 4y ago

[flagged]

butterNaN 4y ago
How would you design a smart glass?
- scarygliders 4y ago
  1) Take all the bits off the Google Glass frame. 2) Somehow redesign them so they are attachable to your usual glasses. 2a) For those who don't normally wear glasses, they can either use the original, or I dunno, some alternative which doesn't look so embarrassing. I've no idea why someone hasn't thought of that already.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  I'd design it to painfully electrocute anyone who tried to use it in the shower. https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases-robert-scoble-for-nude-google-glass-photo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/15/4333656/larry-page-teases...
ungamedplayer 4y ago
Anyone else remember that apple used this same angle to anti promote google glass. I guess either it has basis in truth or people just repeat rhetoric.

notlukesky 4y ago

I actually thought that the enterprise use case would survive when coupled with computer vision applications like for surgery assistance or manufacturing assembly line QA. RIP

throwaw12 4y ago

At this point, I think issue is not about products Google build, it is about how Google put their incentives in place. - Build new shiny thing -> promoted - Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it This type of culture is influencing future direction of Google products, they put together awesome team, solve problem and get from 0 to 1, then team moves on, others don't have incentive to make 1 to 100. I feel like, if this was a startup which highly depends on the success of product for their existence they could have pivoted or come up better ideas for adoption. Maybe, Magic Leap was that company, or they got too much investment and thought they will exist for a quite while

DonHopkins 4y ago
Just don't put the founder's mistress in charge of marketing, so nobody can criticize or question their outrageous ridiculous decisions or silly "Ok, Glass" slogan without being sacked. https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistress-1219044247?rev=1377743363 https://valleywag.gawker.com/meet-the-google-founders-mistre...
xorcist 4y ago
> Support shiny thing -> it's not difficult, everyone can do it Sometimes people say those things, but I can't understand for whom it rings true. What's especially hard about new things? Maintenance on the other hand, can be much more tricky. Especially when taking backwards compatibility in mind you really have to think about every step going forward. It's much easier to build a brand new highway than repairing an existing one which is in use without disturbing traffic, if the car analogy can be forgiven. I think the situation here has more to do with Google culture where the are too scared to stop throwing stuff at the wall and see what sticks.
- bruce511 4y ago
  You're right, support is difficult. But there's no "glory" in support. there's glory in making something new, everyone being amazed, world-is-changed-forever. Of course that is pretty much 1% of the journey. Turning that light-bulb moment into an actual product, getting mass market adoption, finding the killer app, that's hard. And anonymous. Keeping customers happy is hard. But again, anonymous. Are you more impressed with a CV that says "invented iphone" or one that says "worked on iphone 2 to make it better than iphone 1"? Or worse yet "accumulated customer feedback to improve iphone 1, worked with team developing iphone 2"? So it's not just google (although magnified there.) It's everywhere. You remember who _invented_ the light-bulb, but you've no idea of the people who developed that into a product, with manufacturing, distribution, sales and developed bulb-connector-standards and so on. In our business it's the same. Here's a new wizz-bang feature. 100% glory. Maintaining feature for the next 20 years, adapting to ever-changing world requirements, keeping customers happy, and using it - anyone can do that. (and nobody wants to - it's too much like hard work.)

Gustomaximus 4y ago

Side note: As a marketeer I feel Google need to lay off 'the next big thing' launches. Set up some alpha/labs environment so tech interested people can go there and not allow launches til products hit a critical user number. Credibility and excitement for Google launches is massively reducing ever since the G+ debacle and something, I feel at least, they should try to get back.

asim 4y ago

Innovators dilemma. You were early to market, you did all the work, and no one wanted the product. What do you do? Keep going? Or give up from exhaustion? This is the unfortunate situation with many who tackle new spaces like Mobile, VR and AR. Google will no doubt re-enter the space, but only after it's been validated. And that's totally fine. Expect Google to produce quality hardware and software at a time when the market is ready, I don't expect them to innovate. Apple as a market leader has shown that they know how to pull off new hardware trends and drive that to mass market. Others struggle with this significantly. It was a valiant effort by Google, one that I applaud, but now it's time to move on. Things like Starline are where Google will shine for now. They can come back to AR.

bullfightonmars 4y ago
I would pur a starline in my home today if it were available.
- asim 4y ago
  Exactly! Absolutely phenomenal and I think we'll see this in many places. Knowing Google, it will start in the office and then end up dispersed elsewhere, potentially purchasable in the home, but just imagine finding these booths anywhere you could use. We used to have telephone booths! Imagine Starline booths.
  - brookst 4y ago
    Wouldn’t that take several years of investment with little to no return?
Reason077 4y ago
Starline, really? While this sounds like neat technology, I'm not sure if it has mass-market potential in the same way that VR/AR does. Is every company going to be clamouring to outfit their meeting rooms with Starline units? Is every kid going to want a bulky Starline set in their home/bedroom? How much is it going to cost relative to the sort of cheap mass-market headsets that are likely to be available in 5 years time? Remember, Google is a company that shuts down even some of its relatively successful products, so it's hard to imagine Starline ever succeeding as an actual Google hardware product.

sam_goody 4y ago

I, for one, am happy that this failed for Google, and will be even happier if it would fail for Meta. Whenever this tech matures (and it will eventually), I rather it not be done by the company whose only goal is to capture even more data about you (and whose OS will be full of other, 3rd party, spyware). If done by a startup, there is a chance, however tiny, that they can create enough market that a non spyware version of AR glasses will be available for those that want it. If Google or Meta (or MS) create the AR glass first, they will somehow promote a unhealthy walled in network, and people will not even understand what is wrong till after the next Holocaust.

MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
The sad thing is this isn't even that hot of take given what happened with Facebook and the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar...

neom 4y ago

Looked pretty good actually: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IK-zU51MU4 I had Glass in 2014 and I used it a bit but people continually bothered me when wearing it so I retired it after a couple of weeks. Couldn't do half the stuff the Enterprise edition apparently could.

bborud 4y ago

I wish they had spun it off so it wouldn't just have died within Google. It seems that any project that isn't wildly popular is just starved of talent inside Google. Outside Google with a little bit of money and a dedicated team, I don't see why this couldn't have been a success. What I would really like was a product that was developed to be affordable, fairly open so you can easily integrate it into your own system, write applications that can run on the device without need to call home to the mothership etc. There are lots of situations where it would have been very convenient to have access to an affordable, ruggedized, light-weight product that provides both a head mounted display, a decent quality camera and a user interface that can be operated while wearing gloves. For instance, right now I'm involved in a project where we help build a huge piece of machinery (the size of several intercity trains in terms of size and mass). The team is spread all over the world while the building of the actual machine takes place in a backwater that takes about a 24 hours to travel to. It would be really useful if the onsite engineers could stream video of what they see while working on the machine rather than having to use handheld mobile phones. It would also be useful if they could see telemetry and parameters in the display as they work on the machine without having to move to look at the various displays. Perhaps also see the video stream of other engineers working at the same site.

CharlieDigital 4y ago
Check out apprentice.io The founder initially fell in love with Google Glass and went on to build an AR/VR startup around it. They are life sciences focused, but I see no reason it couldn't fit your use case.
- bborud 4y ago
  Interesting, but I think the device is a bit too bulky and sticks too far out to work in my use case. The environment where we'd use this is essentially a giant machine shop where you have to wear a hard-hat, it is noisy and dirty and you often have to get into tight spaces with cabling and piping everywhere. Besides it doesn't look like they are primarily focused on selling the device itself. For a device to work for us it would either have to be so small it can be worn with a hard hat, and not stick out beyond the helmet and incorporate safety glasses, or it would have to be a lightweight helmet mounted system that can be folded out of the way when not in use so people don't have to change helmets. With a helmet mounted device you could incorporate the camera(s) in the helmet and perhaps even include an IR camera as well. For the stuff we work on on that project, having an IR camera, would actually be of immense help. Both for on-site work (being able to see what temperature different parts of the machine are with some accuracy), for remote observation and for documenting.

Sol- 4y ago

Figured that they'd hop on the techno-utopian bandwagon that's currently being pushed and double down on bringing the glassholes back instead. People are also seem more desensitized to privacy concerns nowadays, so they might have a chance of bringing the ubiquitous AI-enabled surveillance to the masses.

farseer 4y ago

Why not open source the hardware design, BOM, software and dump it on GitHub?

bruce511 4y ago
Because it's not a self-contained thing. Any cloud-device is integrated to back-end servers. Which at google means linked and locked into all kinds of internal things which are not open.
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
Why would they? Just to be nice? Since when do large companies give things away?

lynx23 4y ago

Google Glass, Google Car, Google Plus... Its always the same pattern. A lot of pre-release advertisment, followed by a release of a beta version and another press release declaring the end of the product. At this point, I wouldn't adopt any Google offering because I sort of expect by default it will go away in 6 months or 12.

devrand 4y ago
Isn’t that exactly not the case here? This product existed for over a decade.
- charcircuit 4y ago
  The Glass Enterprise Edition 2 came out in 2019.
  - lynx23 4y ago
    I must have missed that, me not being a company and all that. All I remember was a lot of glass hype, followed by the message that Google has actually stopped selling glass for "normal" customers... So at least in my world, the pattern still fits.
dgrin91 4y ago
Google Car as in Waymo? Isn't that still growing and getting expanded? Obviously self driving is harder than everyone thought, but its not abandoned by any means.
- dev_daftly 4y ago
  I still don't understand why everybody thought self-driving was so easy. It was clearly always going to be decades, not years for them to be ready for the mass market but so many people were acting like normal cars were already obsolete.
  - godshatter 4y ago

determined 4y ago

[dead]

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Another one bites the dust Another one bites the dust And another one gone, and another one gone, Another one bites the dust

sgt101 4y ago

I did some work on a project using these last year. My findings were: - couldn't get them onboarded into intune/active directory - camera wasn't good for task past 1.5m or so - screen was too low res for required use (see features on a chart) They were cheaper than the latest iPhone... I think this is the error that they made - if they had gone for a top of the line device then they would have been closer to the expectations that our customers had.

onetokeoverthe 4y ago

[dead]

jacooper 4y ago

Now watch apple trigger red alerts in Google's and Samsung's HQ by releasing their AR glasses. As much as i hate Apple products, I can't deny that most of the time they are the leaders and the rest are just copies.

kilroy123 4y ago
It sounds like that is dead in the water for the next decade... I predict that work will continue at other startups and will be acquired in the future by Apple.
dev_daftly 4y ago
Leaders when they are releasing ar glasses well after other major players have? Microsoft will be on their third iteration by the time Apple releases theirs.
- jacooper 4y ago
  Mainstream leader*
ProAm 4y ago
> that most of the time they are the leaders and the rest are just copies. Apple is almost always a follower and rarely an innovator. They take something that exists, and polishes it. They are very successful at it, but a leader definitely not.

rvz 4y ago

Not even a SINGLE mention of North glasses in this thread. [0] Highly likely the reason for closing this down since they already have the IP and technology. So why would Google want to run two teams (Glass and North) in parallel when they can discontinue Glass and merge both teams into one? It would be news if they closed down their newly acquired AR glasses by North [1], but they are still in the AR glasses race. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmented-reality-glasses-start-up.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/30/google-acquires-north-augmen... [1] https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-ar-glasses-translation/ https://9to5google.com/2022/05/11/google-ar-glasses-translat...

908B64B197 4y ago
North is really a footnote. It acquired the Intel Vaunt [0] tech and patents and tried to bring it to market[1]. It failed to do so and was acquired for a little bit less than it raised [2], suggesting Google only valued the patents. The company failed to retain talent and trimmed it's workforce aggressively before the acquisition. [0] https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart-glasses-announced-ar-video https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/5/16966530/intel-vaunt-smart... [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-intel-vaunt-patents-ar-glasses https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/17/18144221/north-focals-in... [2] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fades-alphabet-buying-canadian-smart-glasses-pioneer-north/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-a-vision-fa...
- rvz 4y ago
  My point is, Google Glass has been replaced by North's AR glasses technology. Whatever happened to North when it was an independent business is not Google's problem. It would be a total failure for Google if they discontinued all their AR glasses products; signalling their exit from the AR glasses race in general. Thanks to that acquisition, that is not the case.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
    > My point is, Google Glass has been replaced by North's AR glasses technology. Intel's tech. And it hasn't replaced it. No announcements as of yet for their future roadmap. We don't know if it'll replace or supplement the in-house tech Google has. All we know is they are shutting down their existing sales channel for AR glasses. It's impossible to buy a pair with either tech on it at the time. For all we know, they could bundle these patents and sell them to Samsung or Xiaomi or any other OEM.

sebivaduva 4y ago

so all 3 enterprises had to give up their hardware?

jpm_sd 4y ago

Glass just wasn't very good. Tiny low resolution display, poor quality camera, uncomfortable to wear, terrible battery life. Pivoting to "for Enterprise" was just a half-assed attempt to make back some of the $$$ wasted on development without putting much more effort into R&D. Not a surprise that adoption was limited. (I worked at X 2013-2015.)

wetpaws 4y ago
More reasons to iterate on it.
Gareth321 4y ago
It was a first gen AR product released almost 10 years ago. They needed to keep working on it, but like all Google products, they stopped very soon after launch.
- jayd16 4y ago
  It wasn't even AR. It was just a hud.
deelowe 4y ago
There was a lot of really impressive tech in glass. Especially for 10 years ago. I have no doubt that with continued focus and funding, they could have build something truly impressive. Unfortunately, glass was a pet project of Sergey's and he decided to exit stage left fairly quickly once some of his unsavory behaviors started becoming known publicly. This was just a few months after the launch. Once he was no longer hands on, the entire endeavor was left the languish without clear direction.
- sleepytimetea 4y ago
  Unsavory behaviors with Google Glasses ?
  - deelowe 4y ago
    No. He got caught up in some me too type stuff and quietly disappeared from the limelight as rumors started surfacing.

avsteele 4y ago

What left out there similar to this? I want to provide remote instruction and see through a user's eyes to help them fix/debug hardware. 2D AR is good enough. Hololens is winding down. What's the next best thing?

rtkwe 4y ago
Magic Leap? I haven't looked at it much to be honest they're far too expensive for me to play with.

philistine 4y ago

Everybody on here seems to be talking about the Google perspective, but what about the people and companies who were using the product? How do they feel? What is their take on this? Must be weird.

throwoutway 4y ago

The Google apologists here usually say "they only kill consumer proudcts, they wouldn't do that for enterprise products", but here we are. I hope that doesn't look equally dismissive, but it's time that everyone realize Google is willing to kill almost any product that's not making enough profit.

ok123456 4y ago

It's hard to believe that there were people wearing these in public at one time.

fallingmeat 4y ago
haha well they did get that cool nickname

pmontra 4y ago

Google could spinoff those products and services. Some are probably unnoticeable at Google's scale and not enough employees want to tie gheir careers to them. However some of them could stand on their own legs if owned by a smaller company fully dedicated to them. A way to spin them off is to sell them to somebody. Did that ever happen and did any company ever offer to buy a part of Google?

skizm 4y ago

If I were to get one of these on ebay or somewhere used, is there any sort of dev ecosystem available if I wanted to hack around on them? Or are they pretty locked down?

ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
I have one of the original ones, and I will admit: for a dev-focused person, you could see A LOT of potential. But, now it is quite an ordeal to get things up and running... if you want to experiment with that kind of interface, something tells me you are better off buying an nreal or something like that and having an actual functional and supported device + something you can potentially hack on.

replwoacause 4y ago

I will never use Google products again.

siliconc0w 4y ago

If you have a money printer it's hard to care about other things.

papito 4y ago
Absolutely. Google products are not their primary business. These are corporate hobby project that keep the engineering plankton busy.

chucksmash 4y ago

I'd love to see a product that fills the "Google Glass: The Good Parts" niche. As much as I was on team "don't film me at the bar" when Google Glass was announced, there really IS the kernel of a neat idea there. Maybe it's just not possible to get the good parts without enabling the bad. There was a Black Mirror episode about (iirc) contact lenses that offered always-on, high fidelity recording. They were used to turn people into self-survelliance machines with no privacy, whose every experience was subject to review. I suppose any time a thought along the lines of "I'd like that thing from Black Mirror, but..." occurs, it's worth stopping to wonder if you've missed the point. I digress. I've had dozens of times in life where I wished I essentially had a dashcam for my face. It's such an appealing idea to be able to share "Let me show you just what I saw, as I saw it." Not all the time, but sometimes. And not with everybody, just with some people. The last time this desire occurred to me was during an early morning seven hour car + train + plane + bus + bike + (gratuitous) ferry + walk journey I was taking from North Georgia to Midtown Manhattan. Aside from the intentional bonanza of modes of transport, there are a ton of amazing vistas along the way; going from the woods in moonlight, rounding the curve to come into Atlanta lit up at night, seeing the sun come up over the clouds, the view of Manhattan on the final approach into LGA, etc. As it stands today, at points where I'm not biking or driving, I'll get out my phone to take a picture. "Look, here are three pictures I took" doesn't actually communicate what I want to communicate though. What I would really like is seven hours of footage, mostly played back at 50x speed, but slowing to closer to real time at the interesting parts. When those interesting parts are panoramas, those are the places I'd get out my phone for a picture today. There'd also be parts where nothing individually was particularly picture worthy (say, biking down Ditmars Blvd), but in toto it might be interesting to people. What I wish I had was something natural-ish looking (i.e. I don't want to take a video of what I see on this trip, not of people staring at a camera rig I'm wearing while trying to take a video of what I see on this trip), in a form factor that I can safely wear and passively use while biking and driving. It would also need the ability to capture seven plus hours of good looking video. And also somehow privacy respecting and not dystopic.

AlbertCory 4y ago

I should add that to my list of cancelled products: https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enough https://albertcory50.substack.com/p/when-talent-is-not-enoug... explains how this happens (Hello, McKinsey!)

ozten 4y ago

The physics behind Glasses style augmented reality are impossible (or at least 50 years away), so the industry is moving towards MR mixed reality. Bigscreen VR's recent glasses show where things are headed - Micro OLED displays and smaller form factor. Speculation: Google is consolidating talent and doubling down on an internal VR/MR headset and metaverse to compete with Apple. It will be tethered to a "Puck" that runs android and clips to your belt or is in your pocket. It will be an important moonshot for AI, metaverse, and virtual Office. YouTuber Sadley It's Bradley is a great follow for Optics and inside baseball of this space.

charcircuit 4y ago
I'm sorry, but glasses style augmented reality is already possible. 50 years is even too long of a time span for when AR glasses are attractive enough to the general public enough to reach >1B users.
- ozten 4y ago
  A line of text floating in your view is doable. Seeing 3D renderings in a dark environment with 30 minutes of battery is doable. The original vision of augmenting human vision without a bunch of caveats and limitations is not doable today. Spectacles by Snap is a cool accomplishment, but mostly the form factor is useful for recording video form a human's perspective and not augmenting one's vision.
  - charcircuit 4y ago
    You can do world locked 3D renderings in an lit inside room and have more a few hours of battery life. Yes here are limitations, but all technology has limitations. As time passes we will make them better and better. There is a bar we will have to pass before they become attractive to regular people and I'm not claiming we are there yet.

moi2388 4y ago

Is anybody surprised about Google discontinuing services instead of maintaining them, or god forbid improving them? It’s very simple; is it an ad? No? Then Google will scrap it.

perceptronas 4y ago

I've tried consumer Google Glasses once they were released. I was truly impressed. If I were to guess — camera & privacy concerns killed them. I see others say that its just another product Google killed. I have to disagree, >10 years is quite a long time to see if product works or not. This time its a bit different. Google is a cool company. Maybe not as cool as before, but certainly an order of magnitude better than Microsoft. I wish them all the best and hope they can come up with new exciting stuff

nr2x 4y ago

This is why Google Cloud has no chance against the OpenAI and Microsoft partnership. Google kills products randomly, has no clear direction or mission, and it’s business suicide to trust them for any core functions of your product. Whereas Microsoft will support you for decades and is a very safe bet for your business.

wrs 4y ago

Maybe there are literally no customers left for this, so it doesn’t matter, but calling it “Enterprise” and then killing it with six months of follow-on support…that is not a good look.