Google Glass Is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses

I think the fundamental issue with Glass was putting a camera on it. Imagine if it didn't have a camera but was otherwise unaltered. It would have been a forcing function to actually find out more things to do with it than be a head mounted camera. Most of the social stigma would have been gone and it might be a thriving device now.

Get it going, add the "obvious" camera functionality on some models and off it goes.

Instead the camera was fundamental to the design, and to my knowledge represented about 90% of the use-cases demonstrated for the device...without even offering AR.

In the very first batch of paragraphs this article gets a very fundamental thing about Glass and the backlash to it wrong.

The article tries to claim that owners became known as glassholes because they wore computers on their face, and then tries to argue that less conspicuous implementations will be accepted more easily.

Meanwhile in reality people got upset because Glass owners had a camera on their face the entire time.

Edit: Turns out the entire article is in fact trying to claim that Glass is disliked because it's too obvious, and that it'll be just fine when it's near invisible.

It's dead with consumers. Business use cases can make sense, though. If you can make a warehouse picker 5% more efficient you can easily save the cost of the device, etc..

I like Thad Starner's other designs[0] a lot more than Google Glass.

Granted, they are bulky and dorky, but at least they had a keyboard and a hackable operating system (linux with an emacs-based ui if I remember well).

I wouldn't mind a setup with a tiny screen, a wire running from the back of my glasses to my pocket, connected to a raspberry pi or similar (heck, even my cell phone) and some sort of chorded keyboard that I can use without looking at it.

[0] for example http://www.innovations.gatech.edu/wearable/photos/ThadStarne...

This a bit of an aside, I have slight astigmatism, and I have some prescription glasses in a drawer somewhere that I haven't put on in ten years. Fixing my less than perfect vision is not worth the hassle of having to wear a device on my head all the time. I haven't worn a watch on my wrist since...probably elementary school--so the 70's. For a few years I carried a pocket watch, now my cell phone is my pocket watch, and that is a significantly better situation than wearing a piece of tech on my wrist. So it seems like the all the tech companies are trying to make me wear something that I have already concluded I don't want to wear.

In the case of watches it seems less strange--plenty of people love watches on their wrist. So Apple and Motorola can sell to them. But the only people who wear glasses are people with vision problems. They do their best to make them comfortable and fashionable, both I don't know anyone with good vision wishing they could wear glasses. So if Google can make a version that works with prescription lenses, and sell to people that need them, but it seems like it's going to be a much harder push to get people who don't wear glasses every day to commit.

Google Glass's biggest problem is really wrong timing. In fact, all of the wearables that are coming out now have the problem of wrong timing. We hardly have exhausted the applications of mobile computing. And the applications that do exist are only a version of desktop and big computing devices retrofitted onto mobile.

The true vision of what "a computer in every pocket" can do has hardly been scratched. Things like accepting credit cards on the spot with an iPhone or barcode scanning with mobile cameras are true examples of that kind of vision. 3D scanning, whenever it arrives, will be another example. Flashlight, pocket camera, video conferencing, and digital level are also great examples.

One of the great ways I hacked my life to use a "pocket computer" was using it as a digital briefcase where the phone would sync all my work files on my work computer the moment I connected to work wifi and sync it again to my home computer the moment I connected to home wifi. (I know it's not needed anymore.)

That kind of true innovation where you give the mobile phone actual mobile purpose is what makes the phone a great device. Retrofitting apps from desktop to mobile fits only in some (venture capital)/(mobile frontier)/(developing country) scenario.

To immediately warp speed to wearable computing and to retrofitting desktop or mobile apps onto wearable platforms is immature. There are some great uses of wearables like Google Glass in the areas of augmented reality. But very few companies are even thinking about it. Other uses for Google Glass are hindered because of privacy alarmists who cannot stop thinking about sinister uses. And of course there is the cultural stigmatism of having a computer on your face.

Wait, "dead"? Last I checked, the only thing you can get right now is the explorer edition (read: beta) device at the "no random consumers" price point of $1500. Google is on record as saying this is supposed to get another refresh and a lower price point in the future.

Seems mighty premature to call the device dead when it's both not out yet and the beta users are still getting updates.

I think it's easy to dismiss Google Glass because it's never been "necessary", in the entire history of human civilization, to have a computer on your face.

But in order to test the "is this a fad or is this truly transformative" question, my guess is that at its core there is no question this is a transformative technology. Here's how I've reasoned to this conclusion.

Having an unobtrusive computer on your face, where you get no-friction, continuous access to the user's basic senses of sight and sound while they're out living their lives (far more time than your typical person spends sitting in front of a computer), is what this is all about. If you can't imagine uses for computers unless we're sitting in front of them or holding them in our laps, my hunch is you're not very bullish on human innovation.

Hmm, as a techie I think its somewhat of a shame that Google Glass is dead. But as a person concerned about privacy I'm glad it's dead. Meeting people and speaking to those wearing them was just too non-human to be comfortable.

I don't necessarily think launching/announcing it in its beta state was the wrong thing to do (as opposed to launching a finished product like Apple does). Imagine if they spent all the resources to "finish" the product and then find out it was a failure?

They obviously learnt a lot from the initial public reactions and I am sure that a lot of Glass technology has made its way back to smart phones and smart watches (especially voice recognition).

A company I consult with has done a lot of research on Glass users over the past several months. I won't, and can't, share any of those insights, but I can say this: the office still has 40 glass devices sitting in boxes because not one of the employees is tempted to use one or take one home.

Most interestingly, Google is willing to simply write off "$70,000" in devices. Their budget is unbelievable.

I think the problem has more to do with mass production and marketing than it is with privacy concerns, etc.

If Google glass sold for $100~$200 price range and could be purchased everywhere (like Chromecast which I got in India for $40) it would have been a big hit.

I think the "killer apps" for Google Glass will require pairing the glasses with a Project Tango device.

I just hope the Google Glass project remains alive for long enough to see this happen.

Google is a search advertising company not a consumer products company. They haven't had one successful product in hardware yet.

Which makes the thought of Google actually executing on a driverless car pretty laughable.

I think this post is falsely trying to accuse Google of something.

Remember Google is a company that doesn't make money out of its products and a lot of their stuff are open sourced like Android for people to be able to keep them alive.

What happened with Google glass and its on the makings documentary about it, is that they wanted to make some breakthrough in technology. They never planned on making the glass work 100% or become and iphone that everyone would kill to acquire, because they are not looking into that kind of profit.

I find that post being on some short of a steak with google and wants to blame them for their own product and how its doing...