Remember Google Glass? It was the name coined for spectacles developed by Google’s (now Alphabet’s) X division (the company’s intellectual sandpit in which engineers develop way-out ideas). Looking at first sight like a cheap pair of non-prescription reading glasses, Glass functioned as a kind of miniature head-up display (a transparent screen that allows users to read data without having to change their viewpoint). Over part of the right-hand lens was a small rectangular block of glass which functioned as a miniature computer monitor. Inside the right-hand support (the part that goes over your ear) Google had packed memory, a processor, a camera, speaker and microphone, Bluetooth and wifi antennas, an accelerometer, gyroscope, compass and a battery. So when you put on your spectacles you were, in fact, donning a tiny wearable computer.
Glass was first announced in 2012 and made available (for $1,500) to select early adopters (dubbed “Glass explorers”) in 2013. It went on sale to the general public in May 2014. In technical terms, it was an amazing piece of miniaturisation. Driven by voice commands, it had quite impressive functionality. You could tell it to take a photograph, for example, or record a video of what you were looking at. Similarly, you could call up a Google search about something you were looking at and have the results displayed in surprisingly readable form on the tiny screen – which appeared to be suspended some distance ahead of you in space. In that sense, Glass looked like the realisation of a dream that early tech visionaries like Douglas Engelbart had – of technology that could usefully augment human capabilities with computing power.
There were just two problems with Glass. The first is that it made you look like a dork. Although Google teamed up with the company that made Ray-Bans, among other things, if you were wearing Glass then you became the contemporary version of those 1950s engineers who always had several pens and a propelling pencil in their top jacket pockets. The second problem was the killer one: Glass made everyone around you feel uneasy. They thought the technology was creepy, intrusive and privacy-destroying. Bouncers wouldn’t let wearers – whom they called “Glassholes” – into clubs. The maître d’ would discover that the table you thought you had booked was suddenly unavailable. And so on.
In the end, Google bit the bullet and withdrew the product in January 2015. Privacy advocates and fashionistas alike cheered. Technology had been put in its place. But if, like this columnist, you believe that technology has the potential to improve human lives, then your feelings were mixed. Clearly Glass was not going to work as a consumer product. But it still could be a powerful aid to human effort in some areas.
And it turns out that that’s what Google thought too. In fact X’s engineers had been working on Glass 2.0 – an “Enterprise Edition” (EE) aimed at industrial applications – for at least a year before the consumer product was pulled. Last week we found out, courtesy of the veteran tech commentator, Steven Levy, what they have produced, and what Glass EE is being used for. He went to a factory in Minnesota that makes tractors, of all things, where he found workers wearing the EE glasses as naturally as they normally wear safety spectacles. (In fact, the redesign offers the possibility of detaching the electronics and fitting them to safety glasses.)
Designer Diane Von Furstenberg (right) and actor Sarah Jessica Parker try out the first version of Google Glass at a New York fashion show in September 2012. Photograph: Peter Foley/Camera Press
One of the companies that had been experimenting with the original version of Glass was Boeing, the aircraft manufacturer. When Google executives visited the company in 2014 they were astonished, Levy says, “by a side-by-side comparison of workers doing intricate wire-framing work with Glass’s help. It was like the difference between putting together Ikea furniture with those cryptic instructions somewhere across the room and doing it with real-time guidance from someone who’d constructed a million Billys and Poängs.”
I see two morals in this story. The first is that if Doug Engelbart were alive today, he’d be grinning from ear to ear. This is augmentation in practice. It’s what technology is for: supplementing rather than replacing human intelligence. The second is that the way Glass EE has arisen from the ashes of the original project is par for the tech course. I’ve lost track of the number of successful products that emerged as side-projects from original failures. Flickr, for example, evolved from a tool developed for an online game. Instagram came from an attempt to develop a rival to Foursquare, the mobile check-in app. And Twitter was a side-project that came from a failed podcasting project called Odeo.
So if at first you don’t succeed, see what you can make of what you’ve already done. The only problem for Google now is that once regular dorks see how slick Glass EE has become, they will want it too. Spoiler alert: it won’t come cheap.