Google Glass Enterprise Edition passes through the FCC with improved hardware | Hacker News Reader

Google Glass Enterprise Edition passes through the FCC with improved hardware

androidauthority.com

57 pointsjonbaer26 comments

On one hand: Glass is pretty cool hardware, and an improved version of it (relative to the Explorer Edition) would have a ton of potential. On the other hand: Google screwed Glass' early adopters, myself included, and in more than a year since they withdrew from the market, they've done nothing whatsoever to set things right.

(A summary I wrote last year of what happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8609412)

Yeah, there was a lot of potential here, and I had a lot of fun with mine at the time, but there was so many missed opportunities here.

The hinge on the Enterprise one is a huge improvement.

"So many missed opportunities here" is pretty much Google's motto.

And yet they put the platform out at all, which is more than can be said for a lot of other companies out there.

It's still the most compact headmounted viewer I've seen, and the fact it runs on Android (even modified Android) and not some off-the-wall one-off OS that you'd have to learn the libraries of from scratch is a huge boon. I still tinker with mine, even though it never lived up to the hype of being something you'd wear all the time.

Yeah, they heavily gimped the potential of it being an Android device though. Since all of the UI was in a closed, proprietary package, there was no meaningful ability to extend the device. Sure, you could flash a ROM on it, but you couldn't build anything with the Glass UI on such.

When I bought it, I figured the ROM community would be able to ensure I could do what I wanted with it, but the platform was too locked down for that to ever really happen.

I never had a problem developing on it [https://github.com/fixermark/nausicaa]; what sort of things were you hoping it would do?

I would've liked to see a lot of things. Glass's biggest strength was notifications, yet I couldn't even use it for on-call notifications from work because it didn't support any email addresses but Gmail (and nobody ever made a third party mail client). The Wear compatibility basically came after I'd already stopped using it, pretty much.

I would've liked to see keyboard input from my little Bluetooth keyboard accepted, even Googlers showed it using that keyboard with an Linux install, but there was no significant work on alternate input methods on stock. A lot of situations, voice was fine, but a lot of times it would've been nice to pull a discreet keypad out of my pocket instead.

Would've been better to have not been Android at all, actually. As it was, they offered up the usual Android APIs, but only as a trap: as the version numbers ticked up, they broke and removed them. I tried to develop that way, and it was one of the most incredibly hostile development experiences I've ever had.

I was also an "explorer", and the whole thing left a sour taste in my mouth. Did they ever explain why they didn't open source the whole thing after they pulled back? I also expected that some custom ROMs would eventually appear. Not sure why it didn't happen.

How have they "screwed" you? (Genuine question, I don't follow the Glass project much.)

The software was unusable, they abandoned the product in a broken state and they didn't provide source code. Whether that counts as "screwed" depends on what expectations you consider reasonable.

But did Google ever promise Explorers stable, non-beta software when they signed up? Did they ever promise open access to the code or hardware?

I get being upset if expectations aren't met. But I just don't understand what set these expectations to begin with.

They did quite a lot of things that set expectations which they failed to meet. First, obviously, a $1500 price tag carries with it an implied level of service. But it's not just that. Early in Glass' life, they swapped all their users' hardware with a new hardware revision. But when their software increased the memory requirements beyond what their deployed hardware had in it, they didn't do a second swap. They didn't communicate the fact that they had made a closed fork of Android (which is Apache licensed); I didn't realize that until I downloaded the source packages they were offering, and discovered that it only contained the kernel (which is GPLv2) and nothing else. They set up an app store, but put restrictions in the SDK license that fell only a tiny bit short of banning app development. (Specifically, it's GPL-incompatible and also bans charging money and advertising). They offered a usable API to develop against, then broke giant pieces of it and never fixed them.

Well, they DID take $1500 of cash to join the explorer program. At least they could make it easier for someone to use the hardware if they were going to abandon it.

yes.

no matter how much they slap Beta labels on something with one hand, they drown everyone on marketing videos and press releases with the other.

and that's not just glass. that's Google overall.

Glass cost $1500, which seemed at the time like a signal that they wanted to aim it at developers. My perspective is as a developer who wanted to do some projects on Glass, who bought it in November 2013 (when it was at software version XE11), which is when Glass was at its peak.

So first of all, they released a software update (XE16) that increased memory requirement beyond the capabilities of the hardware most of their users had, and didn't swap those units. This despite having previously swapped everyone's units for a minor sensor upgrade, setting expectations. They deceived their users about the cause of the problems; they told their support staff to instruct users who complained about crashes and slowness to uninstall any third-party software, which did work, but created the false impression that it was bugs in that software rather than out-of-memory conditions that were causing the problems. (My own Glass unit is one of the ones with 1GB memory, so it can't really run the latest version of the software. The only way to make it usable is to root, flash with an outdated version, and disable the auto-updater by getting a shell and deleting it from the filesystem.)

They took Android, an open-source operating system, and made a closed-source fork. But they did nothing to communicate what was still open and what was now closed, creating a public impression that the platform was more open than it really was. They repeatedly removed major functionality from the software, especially developer-oriented functionality, without notice or justification or in several cases even public acknowledgement. In particular, they removed support for bluetooth keyboards, touchpad gestures in regular Android apps, and video calling. The problem was greatly exacerbated by it being surprisingly closed-source; several of the issues would've otherwise been extremely easy fixes. There was a long period in which it seemed like a fix should've been just waiting for the next release, so as an outside developer with a project I wanted to do, I held on and invested a lot of time and energy into trying to find workarounds.

But they never fixed any of the major issues; development just sort of ground to a gradual halt and then they announced that they were cancelling it. So I've got a useless $1500 device, a hundred hours invested into developing on a platform that will never see the light, and a whole lot of frustration directed towards Google.

https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm...

Seems really irrational of them to have pushed for a "consumer" version first, which kind of pissed in the well for the whole product (and potentially for all of augmented reality, which is sad). This had to have been a stupid ego decision by management, not a rational product or marketing decision.

Did you use Glass? There really wasn't any AR potential there. It was and still is really little more than a glasses based notification monitor. There's no augmented reality no virtual reality, it's simply a prismatic notification monitor with some slight basic functionality.

Mostly agree with your point. Word Lens for Google Glass was the only functional AR app, but a good one.

Basically 50% use of my Apple Watch - which I'm more than satisfied with.

Apple Watch serves as a HUD with haptic feedback when vibration isn't good enough or it's too cold outside to pick your phone out of your pockets.

Preferably I'd love a HUD. I've always wanted a HUD ever since I played Doom. Count my ammo and check my reminders.

The other 50% is fitness/code related. I like the idea of putting my own stuff on the device which I wouldn't be able to do with a eg Fitbit.

From what I understand Glass had an SDK. It would/have such potential!

Augmented Reality has so much potential as an always available source of visible information. I'd love a real-time augmented counter of 'real life stuff'.

My apple watch provides convenient access to notifications, but it's not always visible. Especially in colder winter weather where a jacket or sweater covers the watch and makes it hard to interact with the watch at all.

It would be nice if this site could use an original source for once.

User-supplied links means you're getting information from the sources users actually read. If you want the original source, feel free to find it and add it in the comments here.

Also the original source (https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm...) is all tiny fonts, directory listings and PDFs. I hate blogspam but this isn't it: it's providing some actual value.

'Google Glass Enterprise Edition' / G2EE sounds like J2EE. I guess will come with a whole new vocabulary and design patterns.

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