Do you remember all the buzz when Google first unveiled Glass? When it was introduced 4 years ago, the tireless minority of technological dreamers among us were overcome with excitement— to them, wearable tech was way overdue. To the rest of us, the idea was met with a bit more hesitance but hey, even the iPhone felt unnecessary and a bit risqué at the time.
However, concerns were immediately raised regarding privacy, tech etiquette, and ethics, and early users were pretty quickly ostracized in the public eye. As “Glasshole” became the term du jour to describe Glass-users, Google playfully adopted the nickname to describe behaviour to avoid in their Glass “do’s and don’ts” guidelines, but that did little to combat the mass skepticism.
Along with ideological worries, many pointed to specific, practical drawbacks of Glass. An optometrist at Google confirmed that use had caused eye pains, and several US States worried about driving safety passed laws banning “wearable computers with head mounted displays” on the road.
Google announced the end of production of Explorer Edition on January 15, 2015, and it’s been essentially silent on the topic ever since. Rumours circulating in mid-2015 suggested a revival – a new “Enterprise Edition” designed for the workplace more than the general consumer – but it seems unlikely that that will be happening any time soon. In fact, it now seems like Google may be doing their best to “forget” the project, almost all mentions of the product on official pages have been stripped away.
Ultimately, the failure of the Glass project is widely attributed to a crucial mistake: it was targeted at mass consumers in a time way before the general public was ready to embrace this type of technology. To quote Astro Teller, head of Glass’s home department, Google X, “misleading marketing pitching the [Explorer Edition of Glass] as a consumer product was one of the biggest mistakes”.
So was Google simply too early? Did it launch a futuristic product when it should’ve spent a decade working out kinks and waiting for society to become a bit more comfortable with tech’s role in our lives? Maybe. But it’s this type of risk-taking that a company needs to hit it big, and it’s overly pessimistic to say that the death of Google Glass represents the death of wearable technology. Instead, it seems to have moved away from the head and towards the wrist for the foreseeable future. Intriguing possibilities remain, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a revival of this product a few years down the road. Even if Google’s abandoned wearable tech, perhaps we’ll be seeing through Apple Glasses come 2020.