RIP Google Glass

Learnings from a Discontinued Device

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Google announced last week that its Augmented Reality headset, the Google Glass, was no longer available for sale, and from 15th September this year, will no longer be supported.

Folks who have followed the Glass device will have guessed that it has been circling the drain for a while now; everyone else probably thought it was long since gone anyway. I’ve had a pair for several years — bought for my company just before Covid hit and pushed to the side as other work got prioritised and we were all figuring out how to work at home. In the last few months however I’ve been experimenting with it, and even though it just got its death notice, I think it’s a nice little, flawed, device that can help us prepare for future AR devices.

What was bad about it?

• Display size and quality — the display is projected slightly above your right eye, so you can go about your business and glance up at it when needed. The display area is quite small, and can be difficult to read depending on the lighting conditions.
• No cellular option — you could connect to a phone’s hotspot or other WiFI, but I would have liked it to have had a standalone sim-card option, it would just be easier.
• The method connecting to WiFi was also slightly crazy — you needed to create a QR code on an online site with the details, then scan that with the device.
• Lack of support and development — there’s been basically radio silence from Google on the Glass for several years, with the official code examples on Github also mostly years without any updates.
• Lack of accessory support — we wanted to get a new set of frames, as we just had the default ones, but locating a pair to purchase was proving difficult, especially in Ireland where we’re based.
• It’s reputation — it had become a bit of a joke in tech circles, an example of a failed product; undeservedly I think. Yes, it was a failure, but it had a lot going for it aswell, which leads to …

What was good about it?

• Very easy to develop for — it ran a version of Android, so developing apps for the Glass was more or less the same as developing apps for an Android mobile device.
• The camera and video camera worked well — easy to use and easy to integrate with apps.
• Likewise with the voice recognition — it worked fine as a user control.
• The side trackpad, which allowed touch controls — via tapping or swiping also worked great.
• The device was comfortable to wear — unlike VR devices like the Oculus Quest, the Glass was lightweight and I never minded wearing it for extended periods of time.

New user interface paradigm

Most importantly however, I liked the Glass as it was a good way to try out a new user interface paradigm that will likely become more widespread if/when a much better device appears on the market (Apple!).

The concept of consumers (or enterprise employees) wearing a device on their face, that can display or gather information, and that uses controls like voice recognition or gesture recognition, is probably going to be something mainstream at some stage. Getting an early chance to experiment with building apps for such as device will hopefully prepare us better for future devices.

As an example, we built a small POC to hook up our Glass device to OpenAI — yes, basically a Tech Buzzword Extravaganza!

So, the user asks a question, the Glass sends that to a backend app on AWS, which sends it to an OpenAI API and gets the answer routed back to be displayed on the Glass.

Even now that the Glass has been discontinued, that user interaction — asking a question and getting an answer displayed back, via an AI-driven API, is likely one that will be repeated on future devices.

Conclusion

Google Glass had a lot of potential — it was a great piece of technology, but for what ever reason (potentially the lack of support & development, or incorrect marketing) it never caught on. There are multiple other similar devices in market currently, but no clear standout or ‘winner’. Let’s all hope for those Apple iGlasses to arrive soon!

If you’ve any thoughts or comments, please let me know below! You can also find me on LinkedIn.