Twelve years ago, there was a piece published in the Guardian titled “Google Glass Advice: How to avoid being a glasshole.”
Q: What was a glasshole?
A: It was/is the derogatory name for the early wearers of Google’s first wearable tech – Google Glass.
Q: What was Google Glass?
A: Smart glasses, kind of. They had no lenses, you wore them like glasses, and they had a little rectangular plastic prism on one side. Inside that little prism sat a Heads-Up Display (HUD). They did not spread widely, and they were super expensive. In the UK, they cost over £1,000.
Q: Why didn’t they work?
A: Quite a few reasons. They were technologically before their time, had limited use (in my opinion) and didn’t work as a mass market product. Cost was a factor. The biggest factor was probably that you would be called a glasshole.
In researching this part of the project, I went down a rabbit hole on Google Glass. Here are some of the interesting things I found:
· Despite being a mass market failure, Glass continued in some certain specialised roles in industries until 2023.
· Google Glass is still available on eBay, and there are a small but dedicated group of collectors and developers.
· There are online communities where people still use and discuss Google Glass
· Most models of Google Glass are now dead; their batteries were difficult to replace and have degraded by now.
· Glass was released in the UK, then discontinued seven months after – mainly due to privacy concerns.
With my limited resources, I set about getting my hands on some Glass. I wanted a pair when they came out, but I was a student. So £1,000 smart glasses were not really on the table. Even now, they are not on the table. But luckily, they had now slipped into my price range. The price range specifically, was free.
After a lot of searching, bidding on eBay, and commenting on posts, I eventually found a very kind business owner who was disposing of a job lot and agreed to send me a few pairs if I paid postage. He couldn’t guarantee they worked of course.
When they arrived, I spent some time looking at them, studying them like they were some artefact dug up from the ground. I’d never seen them in real life before, as I suspect most people haven’t. They seemed both old and new at the same time. The battery space is big, square and plastic. They are bulky and uncomfortable. The camera seems huge in comparison to the Ray-Bans. The most interesting part however, is the plastic prism like display in which the HUD sits. This is by far the weirdest, most futuristic aspect of the glasses. Aesthetically, it feels very much like something you’d see in a retrofuturist artwork. Maybe this appeal is why listings for a functionally dead technology still attract attention on eBay, commanding hundreds of dollars for what is essentially a few grams of plastic at this point. The telltale language of collectibles, like ‘rare edition’ is appearing on some of these listings.
Of the three pairs I have, two of them turn on. One of them can get to the HUD screen and scroll a little bit before cutting out. They are truly at the ‘end of life’ stage.
There is something poignant and anthropomorphic about their seemingly intense effort to power up, like they are trying to summon their final dregs of energy to run, before failing and spluttering out into darkness.
I could leave this post as a reflection on Glass being yet another failed tech product. Too expensive, too ahead of its time, too invasive, the public didn’t like them, the end.
But I won’t, because billions being poured into new, quite similar products.
Why is this, if the smart glasses experiment already failed? Could it be that their time has finally come? I remember people saying smartwatches were a useless fad. Yet since 2019, Apple alone has outsold the entire Swiss watch industry. Smartwatches are everywhere. I even saw a fitness tracker on sale in Aldi for £7.99.
Even though I have only ever seen one person wearing Meta Ray-Ban’s in the wild so far, their glasses apparently sold seven million pairs last year.
If we are heading for ubiquituous. AI-enabled wearables, then just like with USB-C charging, we will need an international and social consensus on what these glasses should be able to do, and what safeguards we need to demand from tech companies, because the objections that started the ‘glasshole’ situation have not evaporated.
In the ‘Don’t be a glasshole’ article, the guidance was to take the glasses off in social situations, don’t be a ‘tech zombie’ and stare into the screen, and to treat the camera like a phone camera and ask permission before filming. This is eerily similar to the ‘how to use Ray-Ban Meta glasses responsibly’ page on Meta’s website, which says basically the same thing.
The only change is that now, the technology is better, it has an LLM built in, and the cameras are less obvious and built into regular looking (ish) frames. The social response appears to be similar – people don’t like them and consider them an invasion of privacy.
Yet the presence of AI also brings another aspect into the fold – namely, what happens with data that goes into the AI model? What happens if facial recognition becomes embedded? At the same time, wearables are becoming more subtle, more effective, and less visible. You could easily shame a Google Glass wearer, and there was no ambiguity about whether they were wearing them or not. The glass cube, the lack of lenses, it was visibly ‘off’ from afar.
My own experience wearing these glasses is that very few people have noticed. Even when I ask a room “how many of you noticed the glasses” few hands raised. Now you’re not a glasshole, just a person in chunky glasses. The only signal now is a recording LED, and there are products dedicated to disguising that, and technicians who will disable it.
It seems that the lesson learned from Glass was one about aesthetics and function, not privacy and intrusion.
A new technological leap (GenAI) and improvements in hardware have meant that companies were willing to roll the dice again – have they chosen correctly?
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