Google Glass, once heralded as the future, is now set to exist only in the past. As we'd heard was likely a couple months ago, the project is officially being put on hiatus, Google announced in a blog post.
Since the clumsy, distracting headset thing didn't look good or work well, its viability as a commercial product was always in question. Recently, Glass was put on the back burner, with dozens of app developers like Twitter pulling out. And now commercial sales of the product are kaput, with a moratorium on sales to begin the 19th. Google Glass in the "Explorer" edition has been selling for two years now for about $1,500. Perhaps that price, which was too high, will only increase as Glass become a futurism artifact.
Google put on some rose-colored glasses for their blog post, calling this a "transition" and writing that there would be more wearables or Glass style products. "We’re continuing to build for the future, and you’ll start to see future versions of Glass when they’re ready."
A lot got written about Glass in its short lifetime (hell, Gary Shteyngart even covered it for the New Yorker, remember that?). And maybe more will be said on this as the world learns of its demise. But I won't say too much, except that Glass was an interesting thing to watch. It arrived at a moment of unbridled futurism but immediately managed to make people bristle. It was banned in bars and at events. It became a touchstone for tech, introducing the general public to the idea of wearables. And most impressive, it was a thing even though it was at least part vaporware!
"It’s hard to believe that Glass started as little more than a scuba mask attached to a laptop," read the Google blog post. But is it THAT hard to believe?
