Google Glass Is Dead, Long Live Google Glass

DumbSwede writes BBC reports on the demise of Google Glass as we know it: Google Glass sales halted but firm says kit is not dead. One can only assume there will be dissatisfied early adopters and developers given Google's decision. Here is to hoping Google Glass 2.0 (assuming there is one) will be better received. The Verge expands a bit on the re-org that the linked BBC article mentions, as a result of which Google Glass moves from the Google X incubator to its own division: Google's announcing today Glass is "graduating" from the Google X experimental projects incubator to become its own independent division — a division that will report into Nest's Tony Fadell. Current Glass head Ivy Ross will retain day-to-day authority, but she'll report to Fadell. Nest itself will remain separate and independent, and Tony will still be in charge there as well.

Comments

I hope this still comes to the industrial sector

[Anonymous Coward]

I was hoping to see some of these devices replace specialized fork lift pc's and inventory management systems. I know that a lot of things like the Honeywell hand helds and LXE's are tried and true but the idea of leaving an inventory listing in the corner of someones eye and allow verbal updates sounded like a game changer for replacing some of our existing systems.

Glass was doomed from the start

[mrchaotica]

Glass never had a chance, not because of the privacy issues but because it just didn't actually have the processing power or battery life to do anything useful. Considering the guy who designed it has worn wearable computers for more than a decade, I expected better.

Re:Glass was doomed from the start

[JaredOfEuropa]

I've seen few applications that wouldn't be better or more conveniently served with either a GoPro or a Smart Watch. The one application that I would have jumped on was banned by Google: facial recognition. I'm seriously bad at remembering names and faces, and having a HUD showing people's names would be some help in overcoming this social handicap.

Re:Glass was doomed from the start

[PsychoSlashDot]

The Pebble does not use E Ink, it uses Sharp's Memory LCD crap. An E Ink display uses no power unless the display is refreshed. Memory LCD uses power constantly. I would have thought you'd know that as someone who "owns" a Pebble.

Five days of battery is terrible for a watch. A smartwatch with an E Ink display could last a lot longer.

I wrote some stuff responding to your attempt to rile me up, and it amused me intensely, at your expense, then I deleted it so you can't even reply to it. So thank you.

But I'm not going to stop trying to be helpful.

As it happens, the screen on the Pebble is a form of e-ink. It isn't the same oil-cell bubble technology used in many e-readers (including the one I "own") but it's marketed as e-paper because it's got many of the benefits of traditional e-ink while simultaneously not having most of the shortcomings of straight LCD. What, specifically, does that mean? Well, for instance it's fully transflective, meaning that it's perfectly viewable in daylight conditions (atypical for most LCDs).

Also, as designed, the display pulls very little power to maintain a given display. What pulls power is altering the display - as with traditional e-ink - but this too is addressed with admirable cleverness; it's designed so it doesn't refresh the entire screen, only horizontal lines that contain altering content. So with a watchface that isn't wasteful, you may only be redrawing a fraction of the screen at a time, leaving most of the display at maintenance pull. Traditional e-ink redraws the entire display each draw, and usually does so a total of three times; once to solid black, once to solid white, and once to draw the desired content, all to deal with the memory effect that traditional e-ink has. It's not actually a given than traditional oil-cell-based e-ink would actually net longer battery life.

Finally, the Pebble's screen is capable of a much higher refresh rate than traditional e-ink, so that non-watch applications can have smooth display. Admittedly, the vast majority of the time a user only redraws a portion of the screen once per second, but the capacity is there.

As for battery life, yes, five days is excrementally poor for a watch. Strangely, for a smartwatch it's not at all poor. I - an admittedly small sample of exactly one - find it no chore to find one night a week that I don't sleep with the Pebble on, so it can charge. Every other night of the week I wear it as usual, allowing it to wake me in the morning as my traditional digital watches have for the last... oh... nearly four decades. It also bears mentioning that the method the Pebble uses to get attention is vibration, not audible sound. At first I didn't know if I would like that, but in the end I've come to prefer it. Of course, physical movement is also battery-expensive, so that's another factor to keep in mind when comparing battery life to traditional watches; they just beep.

Dismiss the product if you will. Not everything is for everyone, but the Pebble is in a completely different category from every other smartwatch on the market in pretty much every way. Not expensive, not huge, waterproof, doesn't have a silly battery-intensive colour display. It's a very capable companion product that augments an existing device instead of trying to weirdly replace it.

It was never really for sale

[Russ1642]

Until it's on a store shelf it isn't for sale. It was never advertized as a consumer product. It wasn't even promoted. To get it you had to go out of your way to even find out where you were supposed to get the damn thing.

Not surprised

[Elledan]

Best way to judge how successful a new technology is going to be is to look at how many clones stream out of China. Haven't seen a single Google Glass clone so far. Cloners may be cheap, but they're not crazy :)

Good idea...outside of the public eye

[ErichTheRed]

One of the things that I always thought about Google Glass was this -- it has a billion good uses for work, but is stupid and creepy when you start walking around in public with it. It's creepy in more than one way - there's the "everyone thinks you're a stalker" thing, the weird head gestures you need to make to control it, the talking to yourself, and also the "Google now knows exactly what my eyes are tracking in any given image" kind of creepy. I'm not a millenial, so I probably sound like an old coot, but Google already knows enough about us - phones, search, Gmail, etc.

Now, that all goes out the window when you're talking about work use. With all these cloud data centers hosting thousands of racks of servers, maintenance techs would be able to get real time info. Warehouses would be able to show human forklift drivers where stuff is. Aircraft and car mechanics would be able to get manuals without having to print/read paper job cards. Stuff like that is very useful - walking around with them in public is a different story.

Maybe Google is realizing this and tailoring future devices for certain applications.

Re:I hope this still comes to the industrial secto

[Anrego]

I honestly think we'll see the kind of jobs requiring that being automated before we see better tools for those jobs. The days of people going around warehouses gathering stuff on a list are coming to an end.

Re:the Edsels keep on coming

[JWSmythe]

They wanted bragging rights to be the early adopters. I was interested enough to say "I'll get them when the price is about $50 to $100."

There's one up for bidding on eBay, currently at $105.50. I didn't put my bid in, because that's beyond what I'm willing to pay for a toy that I'll stop using in a few days. I'll check back in a year, and see what's selling at $50.

Re:the Edsels keep on coming

[Anonymous Coward]

sigh, please use computer terminology correctly. this is slashdot.

"vapourware" is software which has been advertised and marketed, or demonstrated with a prototype, and yet never fully completed or released.

Google Glass is real, completed, and released.

Just because you don't like it doesn't mean you can use incorrect terms to describe it. Why not also call it a pizza, since it's not a pizza?

Re:I hope this still comes to the industrial secto

[Andy Dodd]

All evidence from Google over the past few months (the Glass for Work initiative, their filing of design patents for Glass that are clearly dependent on an external power source such as a belt-worn battery pack, their partnership with Intel whose chipsets are not suitable to any form of Glass that does not depend on an external battery pack - note that Intel chips are suitable only to tablets/Chrombooks due to their excessively high power consumption) is that Google is targeting industrial/business uses.

They have done nothing to address Glass' biggest flaw as a consumer device - battery life/power consumption.