Why Google Glass Broke | Hacker News Reader

Why Google Glass Broke

nytimes.com

95 pointskanamekun76 comments

I work in a capacity that reviews, tests, and develops proofs of concepts for new tech. We purchased 3 glasses when they came on the market. Our review:

1. pathetic battery life. You're going to have at most 6 hours of life. And that's with the GG radios off (and functionality at a nil).

2. You can't turn it off. it goes into a screen-off non-standby that still chews through battery. So when you think that youre conserving it for later... nope.

3. "Glass Overheating, shutting down". This showed up in the latter firmwares. Never fixed. It ruins the idea of recording video for lengths of time. I was trying to record a renaissance dance. Didnt work.

4. Forces a facebook style timeline. Horrible interface.

5. Has no use without wifi and bt on. The device is an Android... yet is completely dunb without data connections. Why werent there functionality built in that didnt need 24/7 internet access?

6. In order to use with a cell phone, you have to: turn on bt and pair, turn on WiFi tethering on the phone, allow data to tunnel through BT, and pair every connection from glass to phone. This, of course, eats battery. So, it was left at home, with the home WiFi, beating the purpose of with a cell.

7. Screen was offcenter and annoying. Itwas placed so you had to look up right to see it. Not to mention, it was askew on the face. That means recording video had an annoying 7deg tilt... unless you held your head like a dog.

8. $1500 . For "Google Quality". Not to mention, no support unless you count other people who wasted $1500 or more for the similar experience.

And, they took out one of the neatest features: facial recognition. Because of "privacy", yet the device consistently chatters to home base.

Yeah. Its a turd.

The "privacy" issue was not there to cover the privacy of the person with glass but the people around him.

I can totally understand that. Even if I know that there will be (are) ways around but as long as not everybody can do it, it's something.

You forgot one:

9. You look like an idiot.

It's the same thing as the smart watches. Suddenly everybody had one but now they become a joke. As well as the people who wear them to work.

They should throw in some more money and time and go for implants.

Unfortunately, most watch wearables are in the same class of "It's a watch that can display texts, emails, and has an accelerometer". Not to mention, they also have glaring holes in the BT communication, where they are easy to decrypt OTA.

One wearable I do like for the innovation is Thalmic's MYO. Before they opened up Raw data to the sensor array, it was pretty much a doorstop. After what I did, they came to their senses. http://hackaday.com/2014/11/18/thalmic-labs-shuts-down-free-...

There's a few other wearables in the class of "first of a kind". Those are the ones I'm interested in. Well, that and computer vision, ML, IoT, distributable computing, and other areas.

Maybe I'm revealing my lack of fashion sense but I picked up a smart watch and the only time anyone's noticed it, they thought it looked pretty neat. Picked up a Moto 360 on sale for $175 a month ago and so far I've enjoyed it. Is it a must-have game-changing productivity device? Oh hell no. But considering how many watches you can buy for easily $250 or a lot more, I didn't think $175 was terrible for a novelty/luxury item.

If only for the fact that I can change the face to look like any style of watch or display info in an appealing way, it's been cool. The notifications and voice commands are more like added extras IMO.

I just figure that if I can buy a Timex for $175, a Moto360 for $175 isn't the worst luxury gadget I could buy. The traditional watch has the benefit of years-long battery life whereas mine gets put on a dock when I go to sleep. But mine is also a "Fitbit" and I can put any number of faces on it or spend 30 minutes in Photoshop designing my own. As a gadget lover and hobbyist graphic designer, I'll take changeable faces with neat ways of displaying weather and fitness info even if it means I can't wear it on a multi-day camping trip due to battery life.

Most of those people who (still) have one of those, never wore a watch before.

And one last story regarding the Glass.

Google engineers came to us for a public demonstration. Now, our network has a secure component (WPA2-enterprise) and a non-secure component. However to use either, you need to register the MAC address with our system. Simple. No.

For a company that made Android, and focuses oh so much on security, they dont support WPA2-enterprise. Just doesn't work. So, we were relegated to the unencrypted network. Except, we needed the MAC addresses.

So, how do you get a MAC address on a Glass? You go in to settings and.... Just kidding! You don't get to see what the MAC address is on a Glass. You have to associate it to a AP and then look in the configs to see what MAC it has.

So... Google Engineers gave us a list of their GG mac addresses. Except, they got it wrong. But of course, they gave us this list 30 minutes before the demo.

Eventually, our network didn't work with GG. They ended up buying Aircards from some cell vendor.

That's what I call "Google Quality". No support. Worse than Alpha, except you paid retail 'production quality' for it. Google

Project Tango is also another turd, in the similar light of the GG. Except the 3d driver crashes regularly (every 3-10 minutes of use).

This is obviously an issue with Google Glass, but MAC address filtering is a waste of time. It offers absolutely no protection against a determined adversary. It is a perfect example of security theater.

You're assuming that it is the only defense. It isn't.

We look at security as one would look at an onion.

It makes you cry when you chop it wrong?

Brittle outer layers?

OP is right though. As far as the onion is concerned you better add more characters to the security pass-phrase, also make sure WPS is disabled on all routers etc.

Once someone has determined to break in, even minimally sophisticated they will spoof the mac address. It is good that you want to add extra security, but even as your story shows it just creates confusion, and make using the system harder.

Those decisions come the people in the glass room in the security office. Not much I can do to change global security policy.

I understand, it was more of a comment in general, or maybe the glass room people would stop by and read too ;-)

Do you also never use Padlock or Combination Lock or basic door lock because they also offer "no protection against a determined adversary" ?

Using MAC address filtering on unsecured WiFi is literally like locking your door and then hanging the key on a nice hook outside the door, where anyone can grab it.

The larger point is that if a device is going to work with multiple unknown future security systems (theater or not) it needs to be convenient to do so.

Expecting me to change my security to suit your needs is the height of hubris, when your device is not a necessity.

Nobody is expecting you to change anything. He agrees: your story highlights a problem with GG.

But mac filtering is a pet peeve for many of us. It is worth mentioning, as often as necessary: it's bollocks. Don't do it. Let everyone know that it's useless.

Read that post as if prefaced with: "On a tangent: ..."

Please remember that with, say, a macbook, one can easily monitor traffic between your access points and authorized clients of your wireless network.

From that, is simple to extract the mac address of an authorized client, configure your macbook wireless card with that mac address and join your unencrypted network.

This is why mac filtering is useless on wifi networks.

Why do people need to manually give you their MAC address for a non-secure network? Any "bad actor" could just sniff and copy an approved MAC address, so it does nothing for security. And while it's possible to look up the MAC address on some devices, it's not simple on any of them. This seems more like your shortcoming, not Google's.

Well, for one it would stop employees accidentally connecting to the 'public' wifi and generating support calls when applications which relied on being on the secure/internal network failed to work. Or from devices automatically switching over to the public wifi when they had connection issues with the secured network.

Anyone clever enough to spoof their MAC address is clever enough to not generate a support call in these cases.

> 8. $1500 . For "Google Quality".

I'm truly wondering whether you mean that Google usually makes high quality, or that they usually screw stuff up. I'm assuming the latter, because it's what I agree with (anyone ever used Maps or, say, Android <5?) but maybe I'm just weird that way.

Absolutely not. With Google, you're guaranteed quite a few things.

1. Lack of updates. Nexus 7 issue.

2. No support. Or read as "Community driven support" as in go to a forum and beg.

3. Beta = not even alpha.

4. Expected to pay retail production price for buggy crap.

5. Have to complain on HN or twitter to get any sort of response.

6. Every device chatters to home base constantly.

7. Updates end up downgrading features.

8. No safe fail-over when services halt (mailbox death with merge tool).

We also tested glass in the same capacity. I'd like to add one of our most important UX findings:

9. It gave ~10% of users a headache after approximately 10 minues of use.

At least we learned that User experience isn't all about pressing buttons.

> Yeah. Its a turd.

I bet that would've been a valid verdict for the first search engine way back then too, compared to all the neatly organized catalogs. Or the first android compared to the iphone.

Personally I'm still amazed that something like Glass is not only possible but can fit in a $1500 budget.

> $1500 . For "Google Quality".

Establishing that pricepoint is a monumental achievement by my account. It's well withing the grasp of us mere mortals and the way hardware prices tend to evolve will fit comfortably in any "why not try it" budget within just a few short years.

Novelty stuff like this usually costs one or two orders of magnitude more..

>And, they took out one of the neatest features: facial recognition.

Care to clarify who "they" is here? Last I heard, the local governments were going to pass legislation banning this feature. Google was more or less strong-armed by the state.

Yeah, its fun to give an overly-negative review of 1st gen dev platforms, but the reality is that a lot of whats happened with glass was more or less planned to happen. It was a test platform and part of google's largest wearables initiative. Glass may not even pan out, especially considering what MS is doing right now with AR, but it helped laid the groundwork for making wearables socially acceptable and helped make tech reviwers understand that wearables are going to be big. Glass opened the door for my Moto360. The Moto360 is opening the door for a million other things. I see Glass like owning a Vic-20; a largely unimpressive computer. The Macintosh was released a short three years later. Lets not piss on early adopters and test platforms too much. Glass was never going to be a consumer product.

>$1500

Then don't buy into the program. Its not a consumer product its a test/dev platform. It blows my mind people think they were paying for some hot new product. No, you were paying to be part of a dev program.

Also "google quality" is pleasant enough. I paid next to nothing, compared to other smartphones, for my N4 and N5. Those are fine phones.

You're also still paying for them with your data.

I'm not convinced it broke any more than the newton or the palm pilot broke. It's just too early. palm pilots, newtons, and other PDAs were around for 13+ years and were considered "for geeks only". It wasn't until iPhone that PDAs finally became popular with the masses.

Personal HUDs or Google Glass etc will go through the same steps. Something, maybe not totally similar but something with a camera, a HUD, augmented reality, and hands free controls will happen someday and will become as mainstream as smartphones are today. It might be 5, 10, or 15 years down the road.

We got a few at my old workplace, and the tone of this article really annoyed me because you had to be wilfully ignorant to think that Glass was a finished, polished product. The whole point of 'Explorers' was explicitly stated as being for finding the kinks in the system outside the lab. The people who claimed it 'worst product ever' were moronic linkbaiters.

One of the problems it did have that I thought was a problem for adoption was that it didn't handle being lent out very well. If you calibrated it for yourself, it was pretty responsive, but hand it over to someone else, and it was out of whack in didn't really respond. I lost count of the number of times I'd show someone something cool, hand it over to them to try, and have it not work on them because the calibration wasn't suitable. Understandably, this left them with the opinion "this is shit".

It was a marvellous bit of well-made kit, had a couple of problems, and as you say, was in the first generation of it's kind.

>> "The whole point of 'Explorers' was explicitly stated as being for finding the kinks in the system outside the lab."

Originally. Then they started to sell it on the play store for $1500 with a full marketing page and no explanation that it was a beta product.

Indeed. It was one thing to release a prototype to people interested in experimenting and playing around. It was another to push it through a retail channel alongside designer frames.

Certainly the time they released it to the UK market Google would have known that they were selling an evolutionary dead end as if it were a product.

I would assume this was more an act of internal political cowardness at recognizing reality rather than grubbing for money.

> It was a marvellous bit of well-made kit

Marvelous other than the 1500 dollar price tag for an unfinished product, the lack of software, the abysmal battery life, and the obvious privacy concerns of this device being constructed by one of the most invasive companies on the planet?

I agree with the fact that it's the first, but calling it marvelous is a bit of a stretch.

Adjusted for inflation Glass was the price of an Apple One or the launch price of a Commodore 64 (which, if you preordered, came with a free cassette drive for storage: a $70 value.) It was priced correctly for for true early adoptors who wanted a prototype. Not as a consumer product. Google's stated target price for commercial release was "about the price of a smartphone."

It seems to me your adjusted for inflation price is talking about currency inflation and not the deflation in tech prices. $1500 is quite a bit of money for such tech in my opinion. This is especially so in light of Google's legendary poor customer service.

I thought the Palm was a great little PDA. I had a Palm Tx tethered to a (yellow cased-forgot brand) GPS. The setup relly worked well for me. I remember being at a Goodguy's closing sale at 9 p.m., and debating on buying 300 units of Halo 2 for $5 each. Drove to library, got a signal, found a price and happily went back and bought the games. At the time, I couldn't figure out why more people didn't carry around a wifi PDA? I wasen't a tech guy back at that time. I guess it's all in the marketing? It's funny--at that time--I felt for the first time I had a tool I could use to hedge the competition. Jump to a few years later, everyone is on the same playing field.

Yeah, the Palm Pilot was a reasonably successful device for its time. At a prior employer, in addition to lots of the engineers having one, not a few sales reps and marketing types (including myself) did as well. The syncing was admittedly a bit of a pain (my model was pre-WiFi) but I wouldn't put Palm Pilots in the same class as Newton or Google Glass. By today's standard it looks pretty limited but it was relatively widespread consumer tech at one point--though nothing like Smartphones of course.

You know, looking at everything through a HUD will give you diminished reality, not augmented :(

I see this more as how phones are currently. You must divert your attention away from life to fiddle around with a device. That is diminished reality. Something like a mature Google Glass that integrates seamlessly with reality, having commands that can flow with day to day tasks--that is augmented reality.

Personally I think it was the camera that killed it. That, and the fact that google put out an unfinished product without providing plethora of resources and apps for it, to get people excited, hoping the community would finish it for them... That, and the fact that people started calling Google Glass users "glassholes".

What killed it was that it didn't solve any problems that weren't already solved by other devices (notably Smartphones) and introduced other problems (the 'glasshole' one you mentioned is but one example) that the other devices did not have.

That and of course Robert Scoble wearing it in the shower.

> That, and the fact that people started calling Google Glass users "glassholes".

That was one weird thing I did not expect to happen after the release, but I can't stop thinking that a people calling Glass wearers "glassholes" are themselves actual assholes.

They positioned it as an up-market, exclusive, fashion device. If you drive a BMW, you've automatically classified as an asshole. Not at all surprising that people wearing glass were labelled that way.

I thought it had more to do with the fact that there was no way to know if you were being recorded.

Basically, think about the most embarrassing or terrible thing you've ever done. Now, imagine that that were a video on Youtube or Facebook and you were automatically tagged in it. Users were dubbed Glassholes because they chose to walk around with this kind of power in bars and public bathrooms.

Isn't there a light that goes on when it was recording?

I thought they added that later in response to people freaking out about being recorded.

I do felt they sold it to the wrong crowd - to the rich dudes instead of geeks. But still, the kind of reactions you described is a really shitty feature of society.

Oh, and the reactions of Google Glass fans was very off putting, too.

The G word was like the N word for them. It wasn't possible to discuss this aspect of the product even if you reassured the fans that you don't like the word.

One of the biggest potential uses of something like Google Glass I see is automatically pulling up information about things you're looking at and there's no way to do that without a camera. Now, as far as I know the Glass didn't have enough horsepower to do that usefully but theoretical future versions might. It's just too bad their advertising focused on people making recordings of what they were seeing.

This is exactly right, any AR device needs a camera input, the problem is in the video recording aspect - it creeps too many people out.

Is it gone? My English is not the best but I would interpret the google plus status they are reffering to not as closing down but as "Hey we move to our own offices, beta is over, no new beta devices. We tell you when the final release will be available for purchase."

https://plus.google.com/+GoogleGlass/posts/9uiwXY42tvc

"beta is over, no new devices" means no devices will available and the next sentence "we'll tell you" seems to imply never or a very in-the-future date.

TLDR; It's an euphemism for closing up shop

Okay, yeah, maybe it's like that.

This article made is seem like the demise of glass was due to Brin's love life...

I read that more as personal attachments and enthusiasms led Brin to over invest and over promote the project in a way that was harmful. Perhaps the author also saw this as further evidence demonstrating fecklessness.

I'm waiting for the movie.

What I never understood about the whole explorer thing was, why didn't they send out a version 2 after six or seven months?

because you could not use it without taking your eyes off what you were already doing? To be honest, it was too intrusive for both user and those not using it.

I will be more than happy the day my phone/watch/etc can talk to me in conversational format and know when it should. Should being, would it interrupt my doing something more important or not.

- battery life

- people don't want to talk to their device in public or make gestures around their head. it looks/sounds stupid

I don't understand why everybody is pretending that the Google Glass that "explorers" and developers have is a consumer product, and that it failed in the market.

Google Glass has yet to hit the consumer market. All of the criticisms of it as a fashion statement or a consumer device are pretty much moot. It's like people pretended to understand that they were alpha/beta testers and then conveniently forgot.

Yes, this explorer phase of the beta is over. Why do we need to make up some deeper reasons? Maybe a lot of issues were discovered, but that's precisely the point! Arguably, Google now has more insight into the real-world use of optical wearables than anyone else. When the market (that they incubated) develops more, they can be ready with a capable, fashionable product.

Does this page look like a beta:

https://play.google.com/store/devices/details/Glass_Explorer...

"Who are Glass Explorers?

From chefs to cyclists, Glass Explorers are the first to make, move, and marvel through Glass. They're bold and inspiring and they're helping shape the future of Glass."

It certainly doesn't even use the word 'beta' even once. And when there are frames made by DVF available I'd say that, yes, you can critique it as a fashion statement, too.

I see the word "prototype" used all over this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Glass

And if you refer to the terms of service, it's pretty plain that it's not a consumer product.

And if you refer to the terms of service

is never a valid argument in the twenty-first century. When was the last time the average consumer read the terms of service before you bought a product?

http://www.google.com/glass/termsofuse/

Are you trying to suggest that people ever read the Terms of Use?

This is exactly what I'm talking about. People ignoring/dismissing information and jumping to wrong conclusions (with some effort, I might add) based on the omission.

I'm going to put my neck out and say "watch this space".

Google don't have this front and center any more with this glass product but I think they'll definitely be looking at different form factors in the future.

Waiting for Google Wave integration in Google Glass?

I think i'd be waiting a while for that one. I think Google Glass will be scraped as its form factor is just creepy but I believe it will be miniaturised, perhaps into contact lenses.

The future sure will be interesting.

Maybe Microsoft's API Windows Holographic will be the dominant API then and Google produces compatible contact lenses. Or maybe not.

I'm wondering when Apple will decide which technology has a chance to get copied and cleaned up for its own customers? (I have Apple products. But I'm aware that the ideas aren't coming from Apple.)

I look at Google Glass as this decades 'Segway'. Hyped beyond all proportions, it failed as a mass market product, but found enough of a niche that you still see them to this day.

That will be the future of 'Glass.

That seems doubtful as they have stopped selling them.

But it can't be bought anymore... if it does fill a niche, which I'm not sure it does, people in that niche will be buying GoPros and cellphones and strapping them to their heads.

I dont think Google Glass 'broke'. Just because new thing is not as successful as iphone, does not mean its failure.

Suffice to say that, it was at least a very expensive experiment. And everybody I know hated it - it had a very antisocial vibe on the wearer.

What I like about phones is that you can put them in your pocket. If you're having a face to face conversation with someone, you can put the phone away, and give them your full attention. But if my phone was part of my glasses, it'd always be on. How annoying!

The project was interesting, but the technology nowadays is just not quite there yet. I've heard people talk about HoloLens, which might have been a point to consider as Google was basically the only people in this game, although the thing was falling anyway.

Once they can get it to fit in a contact or use BCI with a phone...

tldr

Marketing and sales came in and fucked it over, as usual. Nothing new.

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