Google Glass sales halted

Google Glass took a good idea for some contexts and mass marketed it to a completely different context where it&#x27;s primary feature was mostly useless. HUDs and AR make a ton of sense when you need to augment human knowledge, intelligence, and sensory in real time with voice as the primary user interaction. Flying fighter jets, driving race cars, fighting on a battlefield, working in complex and unsafe industrial operations, etc.<p>AR doesn&#x27;t significantly augment your experience of riding the bus to work, ordering dinner at a restaurant, taking a walk around the block, or even most forms of labor (manual or otherwise). So not only did Google Glass not have much of a benefit, but it had the drawback of annoying countless people who had to be around the glasshole who never stopped yapping at their glasses.

Google Glass was ahead of its time, for a while. They re-engineered the guts of a cellphone to fit into an eyeglass frame. The visual &#x27;cube&#x27; that forms the display was a novelty and kept the project within the bounds of whats possible to be manufactured today.<p>Then Google came across a <i>fiber optic eye-ball projector</i> that made the Glass visual interface look like an 8-Track of the Doobie Brothers. They immediately realized this and dumped a <i>half billion dollars</i> on the project, Magic Leap.<p><a href="http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new-alternate-rea-1660441103" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new...</a><p>Some day, Google will spring a productized version of this on the public and it&#x27;ll be like nothing before, including Oculus. Its the best shot we&#x27;ve got at &#x27;true&#x27; augmented reality.

So some speculation (since we on the outside can never be sure, and when I worked at Google it was always interesting to see the difference between what was reported vs the reality inside the company.)<p>I&#x27;ve always felt that consumer products were going to be really hard for Google to pull off. It reminded me of Intel trying to make an LED wristwatch in the early 80&#x27;s. Too much consumer &#x27;hands on&#x27;, too much industrial design. Neither of which Google are strengths.<p>I expect glass is dead, all the money they might have invested in making it real they spent on Magic Leap, and now its up to the Leap guys to be the &#x27;visual interface to Google.&#x27; The small android experience will fold into the IoT part of Google (Nest) and that will be that.

&quot;calls end to&quot; apparently equals &quot;moved to another division for continued development on different timeline&quot;. Linkbaitish title.

It seems to me that Glass wouldn&#x27;t have suffered half the backlash it got if the original release had excluded the camera. Even if everybody was just grumbling about how useless the product was without a camera, people still would have bought it, and it probably wouldn&#x27;t have gotten half the bans or negative press it ended up getting.

If Google wanted to sell it to the world, they should have first made it without the camera. Later on when people are comfortable with the form factor: add the camera.<p>This is how we have ended up with mobile phones with cameras that nobody seems to mind about. Phones only got cameras halfway through their life. By then, it was too late to stop.

Aside from the mismanagement of the software&#x2F;hardware associated directly with Google Glass the true problem it had was the contradiction between the benefits of the user and those around the user. The single greatest thing about Glass, and it really was brilliant, was the ability to take pictures that almost perfectly captured your field of vision. This is, however, the precise feature those around you might take objection to. Take that feature away and Glass really has no use at all.<p>The irony of this is it&#x27;s not hard to conceal cameras on people in order to record their surroundings if you&#x27;re so inclined, and the reception to Glass just demonstrated how opposed people are to this when it&#x27;s a visible intrusion, regardless of the actual threat presented.

I&#x27;m not sure what it means for the future of Glass, but doesn&#x27;t the title and most of the content of the article undermine that it&#x27;s being moved to an actual product division?

I see it as something like Google Wave, a bit before the market is ready for it with a terrible form factor. However the technology and intent is correct.<p>These things will be back, but they won&#x27;t be Google Glass, they&#x27;ll be the &quot;GoPro of Google Glass&quot;. Probably single function at first, cool looking, wearable&#x2F;usable, with modders and hobbyists starting to build out functionality piecemeal until they have something really cool.<p>And back to that form factor, I&#x27;m just a regular guy, and I wouldn&#x27;t be caught dead in these things. When the visual impression of your product is Robert Scoble wearing them in the shower, you know you&#x27;re doomed.

And by &quot;Glass programme&quot; they mean the Explorers program, not the entirity of Glass itself, which is being moved from Google X to something less R&amp;D-y, in the hands of the Nest CEO.<p>Probably about time - Glass needs to sink or swim already.

If I didn&#x27;t read this line I would feel that it would be a dead product:<p>&gt; She and the Glass team will report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest<p>It sounds like they&#x27;re just transitioning the responsibility to an Apple vet who has good taste.

I think we place too much emphasis on visuals simply because they&#x27;re more readily at-hand for the individual user, even when doing so forces <i>those around that individual</i> far outside their comfort zone. It creates a barrier, putting both sides on the defensive, at odds with each other.<p>Meanwhile, we drastically underestimate the potential utility of non-visual sensory augmentation. For instance, a hidden device providing vibrotactile information could provide far subtler, lower-level cues about the world around us, <i>even to the point of widening the human experience to nearly limitless novel senses</i> [0].<p>That&#x27;s the direction I&#x27;d love to see us move wearables and technology in general: pervasive, yet unobtrusive.<p>[0]:<a href="http://www.mase.io/tech/wearables/2014/10/23/wearables/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.mase.io&#x2F;tech&#x2F;wearables&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;23&#x2F;wearables&#x2F;</a>

The glass team sent this email to Explorers:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8895743" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=8895743</a><p>tldr; all XE development stopped as of Monday

It&#x27;s the camera.<p>Google made a <i>massive</i> mistake by bundling the Glass with the camera. Camera is <i>the</i> reason for the backlash and the seriously tainted brand (&quot;glassholes&quot; and such). Of course they couldn&#x27;t launch it as is. Though I wonder if they learned the lesson or if they will just hold a pause and relaunch it with no hardware changes.

So, is this good news or bad news for current Glass owners?<p>If it was me I think I&#x27;d be upset to see that my expensive piece of kit had effectively (if not officially) been end-of-lifed. (if not for Google themselves but almost certainly for any 3rd-party developers.)<p>But, I suspect some people would like the new exclusivity and perhaps the rare collectibility?

I was hoping this would be useful at some point for my daughter, who has low vision.<p>So I am hoping that augmented vision catches on, in more than just niche categories, so that the hardware can evolve more quickly.<p>It probably needs to be carefully separated from the recording capability, to work around the &quot;creepy&quot; factor.

This is a speculation but I think Google is dropping Glass because they are convinced that Magic Leap will be the winner. We have to wait to see what comes out from Magic Leap.

&quot;Instead it will focus on &#x27;future versions of Glass&#x27; with work carried out by a different division to before.&quot;<p>Is that division made up of people from Magic Leap by any chance? <a href="http://gizmodo.com/how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new-alternate-rea-1660441103" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;gizmodo.com&#x2F;how-magic-leap-is-secretly-creating-a-new...</a><p>The next step is to project 3D images directly into the eyeballs!

not a big surprise, they&#x27;ve all but completely disappeared from sight around S. Another Segway, but I doubt Google were ever serious about Glass, it was a demonstration of Google as committed to being a futuristic hi tech company.<p>The problem with the product is that people like the compartmentalization of the smartphone, you take it out of your pocket to take a photo, nothing surreptitious. And to be honest, the smartphone just does a lot more. This is going to be the challenge that the Apple Watch will also face, it competes with the smartphone for your attention and has to add enough additional value to justify the product segment.<p>Meanwhile, it&#x27;s no big deal, products come and go and some end up with much smaller target customer base, although I suspect Glass is (as Segway was) being considered for a few specific markets but over the coming year or two will just vanish only to be revisited in a decade but with holographic projection (a la R2D2) and streetview-like surround-camera and built in plethora of biometric sensors that all feed into the big post-Singularity GoolgleBrain to provide it&#x27;s eyes, ears and voice...

I bought one for dev purposes, and I was never really convinced about the design (even being a prototype). It looks nice, but it is unbalanced on a side, they could have put an extra battery on the other side, the official blog was just talking about Instagram-like uses (who is that had that horrible idea?) and the screen was not great.

augmented reality&#x27;s first home run will be in the mundane industrial sector where it can be used for training, inventory management, logistics, and any number of other things.<p>i take this as a cautionary tale of product-market fit. as mark andreessen says, where a market exists and a competent but not visionary startup finds itself, the market will often &quot;pull the product out of the startup.&quot;<p>that obviously didn&#x27;t happen here. i think it is because glass was both narrative AND product. narrative meaning that glass was supposed to be a transformational product, meant to elevate google from a search company to a product company.<p>they weren&#x27;t going to let the product find its market (my thesis: industrial). instead, pushed it to the market they wanted it pushed to (consumer), because it fit a narrative they _wanted_ to be true.

Google&#x27;s Lisa. Maybe I can recoup the cost 20 years down the road as a collectors item.

What&#x27;s a narcissistic douchebag to do for attention, now?<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/RobertScoble/posts/10151579664444655" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.facebook.com&#x2F;RobertScoble&#x2F;posts&#x2F;1015157966444465...</a>

From the glass-community forums they are not shutting down and will still support existing warranties etc..... My understanding is that there are some exciting things in store for the platform.

i would absolutely love to use my glass at my desk when working. would do wonders to clear away all the apps i&#x27;m running for notifications and constantly checking my phone to see if i got a text or missed call from a client while i was in a meeting or drafting an email.. the major prob is the product is heavily focused on google services. if they came out swinging with a mac notifications app and ios app - i would use it all day. but they didnt, it sits in my drawer as something i use for show and tell.

Wondering if Google had always expected this and Glass was a long-term strategic move or if this was unexpected and should be considered a blunder.

Weren&#x27;t they building some insane barge in San Francisco and New York to be a consumer showcase for Glass? Guess that&#x27;s sunk now.

Sometimes, technology is simply ahead of its time. Honestly, I don&#x27;t see a fit for Google Glass in society right now. That will likely change in three or five years, but right now, I feel there needs to be some kind of evolution to where Google Glass is considered &quot;normal.&quot; It has already started with wearables - smart watches, fitness bands, etc. But it needs to expand in a more logical way before Glass can be included in that list.

Glass should not have been pushed at the cellphone consumer-good fashion-accessory market until they had something swanky that actually looked tasteful on a set of glasses.<p>At the current price-point? Enterprise would be the only market that would pay $1000 in decent quantities for such a niche device. If they could get it down to $200? It could be great for the GoPro set.

Based on what Google&#x27;s implying with this Glass news, seems it wasn&#x27;t happy with the product and wants to change course. Now that it&#x27;s an actual product division and they&#x27;re killing the current iteration, I&#x27;d expect we don&#x27;t hear <i>anything</i> for a long while until there&#x27;s something new.

Sales halted of something I could never buy even if I had the money.

Wow! Who could have anticipated this? Shocking.

Disclaimer: I never tried glass. But the actual product screens I saw never seemed to come close to the slick marketing demo they showed with the parachuting guys.

The sad thing is, many of the problems which sank this incarnation of Glass would have been fixed by the community if only they&#x27;d released the source code.

Why don&#x27;t they just pivot . GoPro is not a mainstream product but they are very successful

Google should rename Google Glass to &quot;Googly Eyes&quot;.

yay! no more glassholes. seriosly though, they should have given them away to every popular actor and musician out there and pay them to use at events and concerts.

Thank the lord.

Glass doesn&#x27;t add any value to your life

let us rejoice ;)

&quot;An update on Google Glass...&quot;

So what will Scoble do when his pair breaks? How will he live?

I don&#x27;t know what to say about Google glass, but the women at 3:57 of the BBC video is IDDG, intellectually drop dead gorgeous. Capturing her smile with $1500 glasses would be worth it.

One of the largest supermarkets in the UK have just released their own Google Glass app.<p><a href="http://www.pcpro.co.uk/wearables/1000284/google-glass-app-launched-by-tesco" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pcpro.co.uk&#x2F;wearables&#x2F;1000284&#x2F;google-glass-app-la...</a><p>Nice timing.

I remember when it first came out and developers in my area would kind of gloat over it and being one of the chosen &quot;glass explorers&quot;. they would wear it to meetups and brag about the apps they were developing for it.<p>I&#x27;m kind of glad that it flopped in its current form and that those days are over.

Not really unexpected, the writing was on the wall.<p>It&#x27;s a shame though, Glass hate is coming from the old school, technophobe camp. While it _is_ a clunky, underdesigned, underpowered piece of tech, we should aim for sleeker, more powerful, more useful head-mounted computers… instead for no HMC at all.