What happened to the Google Glass?
Introduction
It’s 2012/2013. The most exciting, new innovation at the time is the Google Glass. What was it? Google Glass was presented as an interactive display in the shape of normal glasses on your face that you could interact with just motions of your hand, bringing convenience and efficiency, quite literally at the blink of an eye. Some technological features that it introduced were live GPS systems, the ability to record exactly what you see, emails, and a feature called “World Lens,” which was basically Google Translate but on your face. All of which could be triggered with hand motions or voice use, Okay Glass.
So, some of the downsides: the camera feature, which was one of its main attributes but also its most controversial aspect because of the concern of being able to record any situation without the permission of others (like recording someone using an ATM); the battery life with the need to fit on your face, the battery couldn’t be that big; the price at a whopping $1500 for a potential gimmick piece of tech was a risk not many were willing to take. And now it’s 2022, so what’s the deal with Google Glass now? There are plans to revitalize the project as many have said that the product was too ahead of its time and many past flaws can be fixed.
The Plight of Glass
A post from 2 years ago detailed the journey of the Google Glass and its initial target of the consumer market to the enterprise/business sector. In the post’s conclusion, Essentially, the product was too ahead of its time with the novel function of being able to record activities of day-to-day life without the need to indicate when the device is recording. Another feature that made it too ahead of its time was that since it was made to be worn on your face for an extended period of time, it often felt bulky and uncomfortable to wear with many often saying it felt more like a prototype than a finished product. As well as the battery life not being too good, it did not feel to be worth the $1500 price tag. The original Glasses did not have any specific target demographic and felt like a gimmick when most of its features can be done on a smartphone at the time. And the project was mostly shelved. In 2019, Google decided to revitalize the product and shifted the focus from the consumer side to the business/enterprise side with a more functional product and a lower price of $1000.
Glass in 2022
Now it’s 2022. With Facebook Meta’s creation of the metaverse and Microsoft’s HoloLens, it breathes in new life at a new potential for the trend that every major tech company is now chasing. Instead of going down the route of virtual reality like Meta or Microsoft, Google has opted in returning to AR glasses. (The difference between VR and AR is that VR completely changes the surrounding you are in, while AR adds on to real life). Rumors of this started when Google acquired the company North for $180 million dollars in 2020, the company specializes in creating Smart Glasses that can pair with prescription lenses. With the two working together, they are working a project, codenamed Project Iris, with plans to ship in 2024. Instead of focusing on hardware aspects, Google has opted to focus on improving software and implementing things like a visual search engine and AR directions on Google maps, and introduce aspects of Project Starline (which was basically video chatting with a 3D model of the person you’re talking with). Project Iris would be a wireless device similar to the Glass, and would use external outward-facing cameras similar to current VR technologies. And instead of relying on internal hardware, would utilize cloud computing and have the heavy-duty processing done from an external location. Supposedly “looking like a pair of ski goggles”.
Many of the physical issues and constraints of the first generation of Google Glass have been mended with time, like battery life or the weight of the device. but many social aspects still linger, such as, the concern for privacy. In the first iteration of the Glass, there were many concerns of ethics of constantly recording with many of the users of the original Glass being asked “are you recording me?” and being reprimanded subsequently. “For millennia, if you’re in a crowd, you have relative privacy because people wouldn’t be able to recognize you [and] might forget that you were there… With always-on cameras, that difficulty sort of disappears.” But if you think about it, individual privacy is close to an end with technologies with cameras built in are showing up in every place, from things like the Ring Doorbell in almost every household and in a recent or entering your details online and only for companies to secretly sell it. How much information are you already giving up before giving up on a new potential upcoming technology that could be the next big thing?
Speculation and Reality Check
Some speculation for the future of the upcoming revitalization of the Glass: one of the biggest concerns of the original pair of the glass was its ability to record without anyone knowing that you were recording. An immediate fix that I can think of is to have a little red indicator on the device, similar to how traditional laptops have such an indicator that shows that you are recording. The World Lens feature from the original conception of the Glass is already existent on our smartphones through Google Translate and it works as about how you would normally expect it to work from a machine-translated piece of work. It works by literally translating the piece of text without any ability to see the actual context, so what you get from the app is basically ranging from either a jumbled mess of something barely comprehensible to being able to get the general concepts from a direct translation of a given piece. So for the World Lens of the Glass, I’d say that the bones/framework for this application exists but since the base version of Google Translate is still being fleshed and improved on today, I doubt that the World Lens will have any significant changes to what is already present in the present time.
Now for some pros, the GPS and navigation of Google Maps is currently very accurate and displays reliable information, even being able to accurately predict what times public transportation is supposed to arrive at. I would say this aspect of the Glass is currently achieved and would be done well if integrating it in its current state. A potential future would implement the AR with the ability to see vehicles in the vicinity and show in on the map in AR. All in all, the future of Glass has its potential with loads of ups but a couple of downs, seeing how the proposed features can differ from the reality of the product, although a lot can change in two years so I’ll be keeping an eye out for the new and improved glass.
