Version History: Google Glass

24:09Okay, that's good. So now we've litigated that already. I love them so much. But you bring up a good point because Google was like desperate to make these things not nerdy gadgets. Like went way out of its way to try and make these like cool cultural objects. I mean, if you're going to measure how mass market a thing is, is will your grandma wear this? Your sweet little grandma Betsy. I'm envisioning it. Will your sweet little grandma Betsy go like, oh, dearie. Yes, I will wear this. That is convenient. Like, will your grandma Betsy wear this? And I guarantee you grandma Betsy ain't wearing that.

24:43My grandma never had a smartphone. It's a mass market. But I think the way you get to, was it Betsy or Bessie? I don't want to get it wrong. Betsy, okay. I think the way you get to grandma Betsy is like making it like celebrity cool first. In September of 2012, Glass shows up at the New York Fashion Week. This is like a tried and true playbook. This is like if you're Apple, if you're Beats, if you have some like piece of – If you're humane pins. I was just about to say that. If you have a gadget that you want people to like not only tolerate but like think is cool, you go to Fashion Week and you like pay a very good looking set of people to wear it.

25:20Just – David, you're killing me here. I love them. David, these look better on you than I anticipated. I have to say. Thank you. It's like upsetting me how they kind of work for you. Yeah. Which is probably both a compliment and an insult. It does work for you. I look horrible in hats, but I will take the compliment that I look good in glass. Not glasses. But also, it depends on the celebrity, which is what I was going to say. Because if you have the right celebrity marketing the thing, if they're known for fashion, if you have Zendaya wearing this, okay, maybe. If you have Zendaya wear this at the Met Gala, okay.

25:50Maybe you can convince people. If you have a nameless model just walking down wearing haute couture fashion that 90 % of people won't ever wear, that's not relatable. per se. I think that's right. I agree with that. I think that is right. But the other thing was, so Google kept at this for a long time. And we had, this is a story from the next year. This is August of 2013 that we did with one of my favorite Verge headlines of all time, which says Google Glass is in Vogue, the magazine, but not yet in Vogue. Very good headline. Very good headline. But this was a 12 page spread in Vogue magazine that was like all about Google Glass.

26:29it's it's super fascinating and again like you can see it's trying to do a thing that is both like fashion and science fiction and it's all sort of like retro futuristic it's just really interesting and i think the thing i like about this kind of stuff is you can really see what google wants this to be in the world and it's like yeah some of these pictures are like this is not trying to hide glass this is this is how do we make it iconic it's making a statement yeah this This is why maybe the New York Fashion Week thing kind of fits it, because New York Fashion Week is known for just very outlandish stuff, statement pieces.

27:06And it does kind of lend itself to that. Yes. But then again, you have to think about the average person. Sure. Who among your friends that you can think of is very confident and comfortable wearing statement pieces? Most people are not. Most people don't want to stand out in that way. I do. I love it. But like, not everyone is comfortable. Ironic coming from the land of wearing sweatshirts to work and that's it. Yeah. Especially at the time. This would maybe work in Manhattan when everybody is just trying to peacock all the time or in Williamsburg. Yeah. But not. Yeah. Not San Francisco. Not in the basement that I work in every day.

27:42Yeah. Yeah. But OK. So that will judge you. Just to just to like keep anchoring us in time here. Right. So now we're at the end. Let's get to the end of 2012. OK. Google like first talked about in April. Officially launched it in June. hadn't shipped the damn thing to anybody, but is still just sort of trickling bits out. And this is one of the things I had forgotten was we covered this thing vastly more before it launched than after. Which is, I think, in a real way, like there's the story of Google Glass, right? It's like once we got our hands on it, we all kind of understood it. It's kind of tech blogging, right?

28:15But Babak Parviz, who is, again, the person who started this whole project, gives an interview with IEE Spectrum at the end of 2012, basically like laying out the big idea. And he talks about AR, and he talks about pictorial communications, which is basically like video chat, and information access. He said there were no plans for ads, which raises the question, how is Google ever going to make money off of this? I assume the answer is ads, and he just didn't know that yet. Also, at this point, Google is working with Warby Parker. It's still, it's like trying to make this thing happen, and you can see the big idea, right?

28:50And the big idea remains the big idea. This is what I mean by I don't think, I think history will look back on Google Glass fondly that like they were right about at least what we would spend the next 13 years working on as a tech industry. Like it had all sort of directionally right theories about what AR was going to be, about what video chat was going to be, about ambient computing, which was like not a thing we were talking about yet. It was wrapping all of this stuff into one product that sucked. But so the next big turn for us comes in early-ish 2013 when Josh Sapolsky, America's preeminent scholar of Google Glass, got to try them on.

29:37This was in the relatively early days of The Verge, probably the biggest story in the history of The Verge. We were in our tiny little one-room office right off of Union Square. It was huge. This was like a monumental day in the history of The Verge. Let me just play you a clip of Josh trying these on for the first time. I can see it fine. It says, OK, Glass 325. It's complete. Oh, record a video. OK. Oh, yeah. And now I can see. So this is seeing what I'm seeing now. He's standing there with two of the people who ran this project for Google. You don't have to. You just look at it. He-O-V. OK, Glass, take a picture.

30:17See, better than Meta Ray-Bans, these can record in horizontal. I mean, that's very cool. Yeah. Instead of just vertical. This was the moment that it was like, okay, we actually start to understand this thing. We spent time sort of out in the world using it, taking pictures. One of the funny things at the very beginning of that clip that I saw over and over in my prep for this was everybody had the same experience, which is you put it on. It doesn't work. And then you adjust something a little bit. And then you can see the tiny screen up in the top right corner of your vision. And then it starts to work.

30:45But so many people were like, I put it on. And I was like, what is this broken piece of trash? The 7 ,000th time in this podcast, nothing has changed. No, I mean. Nothing has changed. And this was true before this, too. When you have those kind of, like, beam splitters or whatever they're using, you do have to be very specifically. It's like when you go to one of those telescope things in New York and you have to, like, look through it the right way. Because if you don't look through the direct center, it's all foveated and weird. And, yeah, it's not good. What I'm going to say is like, so CES 2025, it was like the year of the smart glasses.

31:22And I just thought about this particular product so much because I was there with the holiday glasses. And that's another thing where it just depends on how it's shining into your eye. And it was just like, I had so much eye pain by the end of that show because I'm trying all of these gadgets. And it's all dependent on me putting it on and looking at it in a specific way. and the eye strain plus the Nevada dry air really did a number on me at that event. Yeah, I mean, and that's where like Apple got it right with Vision Pro on the auto-adjusting lenses that move to make sure they're in focus for the most part.

31:57For the most part. Yeah, they could still... It's the right idea. It's the right idea because this is very problematic, especially if you're going to be putting it on every single day. You're going to be wanting to use it all the time. You want to check a quick notification, but it's slightly out of focus and it gives you eye pain, that's not going to be a good long-term product. And everyone's vision is different too. Yeah, yeah. So it's one of the biggest fundamental problems with this category. And obviously it's been a problem since day one. And it's still a problem day, however many days later, because it's been a long time.

32:2813 years later, yeah. All right, but let me just run you through some of the specs of this thing, which I very much enjoyed. It connected to Wi-Fi, but it could also tether to an iPhone or an Android device. Good, great for them. It didn't have a cell radio built in, but it did have GPS. The battery life, do you remember what the battery life was? That was what it ended up being. Do you remember what they said it was when it shipped? Twelve. They said it was one day. Bullshit. Which is just a whole lie. All day battery life, baby. Bullshit. Keep going. Just a lie. Keep it running. It had 16 gigs of storage, which I think at the time was fair enough.

33:00It was like an Android phone at the time. It had a five megapixel camera, 720p video. Like an Android phone at the time. the little display on the right side here was 640 by 360. Nice. And it had the same processor family as the Galaxy Nexus phone. It sounds like they took the Nexus components and stuck it in this. It's a 2012 phone on your face, essentially. Like, not the best one, but a fine one. Yeah. And when you put it on the screen, again, in the upper right corner, it would either show you nothing, or it would show you the time, or it would show you the words OK Glass. And OK Glass was the wake word.

33:32Just a prompt. And fun fact. I learned that OK Glass became the wake word, but wasn't their only choice. And I would like to see if you'd prefer any of these other ones to OK Glass. OK. Clap On. No. No. What? I don't know. Absolutely not. Device Please. Uh-uh. Oh, my Lord. Device Please is the one I most personally enjoy. Device Please. Device Please. They tested pew, pew, pew. Absolutely not. I didn't think these were real options, but it's a fun thing to test. And then the one I most enjoyed and kind of wish the alternate universe had come true was GoGo Glass. Absolutely not. GoGo Glass. Somebody watched Inspector Gadget.

34:14They did. And was like, we're going to do GoGo Glass. I am appreciative of these ridiculous— Device Please is hands down the best possible outcome. We should move back to that. No. I'm down for that. No. I'm just going to be the wet blanket here. Absolutely not. Okay, GoPro. I would prefer if everything was just device, please. GoPro, please. Device, please. If the models end up coming for us, we're going to have to be nicer to them. That's exactly right. But the user interface thing that I also discovered a lot of people had trouble with, and I remember this now in retrospect, before you talked to it, you had to touch the touchpad here on the right side.

34:53Because that was a battery thing. Like if it was always listening, the battery would have just died immediately. so you had to touch it basically to get it to start listening and then say the wake word why why wouldn't that just initiate the wake word when you touch it i think it could like you could have it you could have it set both ways okay um but they the the big reason i think for that was they really really wanted it to be a voice system right like you could scroll on the touchpad on the right side you could tap you could do stuff but like google really wanted this to be a voice product and i think correctly so like the best version of this thing is definitely for sure not me swiping on the side of my face all day yeah again nothing has changed but one of the problems with that back then is just then you're just talking to yourself in public and so like i it's it's just you know it's hard enough testing these smart glasses now going like you know with the meta glasses i was at a car show and i went what model car is this you know just talking to yourself so loud that it could actually hear you in a loud environment it just It creates these scenarios where you're just like, I am a psycho out in public.

35:59Yeah. And I look cuckoo for cuckoo buffs. I already think it's weird when people are just walking down the street talking on the phone on their AirPods because I'm like, who are you talking to? Yeah. It's confusing. Even though I know, like, intellectually that it's guaranteed that they're on the phone, it still feels. It's jarring. Because how often in our, like, cultural history has it been that someone talking to themselves is a crazy person? Yeah. Yeah. It does happen. This is actually a very good segue. So let's take a break. And then I want to come back and I want to talk about the two things that happen when Google Glass launches, which happen roughly simultaneously and are deeply fascinating.

36:36But first, let's take a break. We're right back.

36:55All right, we're back. So it's 2013. People are super excited about Google Glass. The thing launches. You can take pictures. You can take videos. You can do Google searches. You can have Google Hangouts calls. Do you guys remember Hangouts? Oh, yeah. RIP Hangouts. Well, which version of Hangouts? Because there was like seven. Well, not Hangouts Chat. Yeah. And not Google Chat. This is what I mean. This is just the right down the middle Hangouts. Yeah, the videos. Yeah. So Sergey Brin also shows up and is like reminding everybody about how this thing is going to just change the world forever. He does a TED Talk in 2013 as these things are coming out.

37:28And again, I just want to frame the extent to which these things happen absolutely the same time. Google Glass is very exciting and everybody hates it. At the same exact time this starts to happen. And I think Sergey Brin gives a TED Talk and pretty much teases what's about to happen. Also just want to note very quickly, Humane Pin, TED Talk. Google Glass, TED Talk. How did they end up? it's like almost like don't do a ted talk about your gadget reality and don't be on the cover of forbes or else you will go bankrupt and to prison also don't do fashion week yeah yeah true i'm ready for this but all right here here's sergey brin describing how this is going to change how we do everything project glass um because we ultimately question whether this is you know the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life how do you want to connect to information um you know should it be by just walking around looking down but that was the vision behind glass so i just want to point out he says the ultimate future and then puts on google glass he is like he is invested not kidding when he talks about how big a deal this thing is going to be it's going to change our lives forever it's going to change our relationship with technology right but at this time like again 2013 ish there's only a few thousand of these out there It's still the Explorer edition.

38:47It's still not a consumer product, but it's still like it is. It's still probably a year later, the buzziest thing in tech still, which is nuts. Like to maintain that without ever actually like really shipping anything is wild. It got some new apps. It got some new features. It was like developing really fast. And there was also the sense of developers wanting to be part of it. There were like, it was people thought it was going to be the next big platform. Yeah. Except at the exact same time, Glass is like immediately becoming both like kind of a joke and kind of a problem. Yeah. And I had truly forgotten how concurrent all this stuff was.

39:29Google is out here being like, this is the future. It's going to change everything. This is the next big wave of computing. Yeah. At the exact same moment, everybody's like, look at these losers. And like, let me just play you one. So this is like a useful moment is like once something hits SNL, right? That is like we've gone a certain kind of mainstream. This is from May of 2013. So again, we're like still pretty early in this. This is Fred Armisen on Saturday Night Live with Google Glass. Seth, they're amazing. You know, I used to spend so much time in my life looking down at my phone. And now, thanks to Google Glass, the phone is up here.

40:07And I could use it without being rude or distracting. And it's simple. You just toggle through the menu like this, and you have to activate it kind of just a little. Kind of like this. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's great because no one knows you're doing it. Come on. I mean, I noticed you're doing it. So he's whipping his head around. This is the irony of so many of these things is that, like, tilt to wake on the Apple Watch kind of came from this. Yeah. There are so many weird device interactions that actually do make sense in a different context. But the fact that you need to do this kind of stuff with that thing on your face is just not good.

40:46The thing that drives me nuts is that obviously Google Glass did it all first and it did pioneer it all first. But like we are here 10, 12 years later and some of the new smart glasses coming out now obviously didn't watch this episode because it didn't exist yet. But they also are making the exact same mistakes. For sure. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And like this is such a perfect version of like everybody knows what Google Glass is. Like this is not a joke you can make about a lot of gadgets, but it fully plays. And he's just sitting there like jerking his head upwards and being like, don't I look super cool?

41:20Also like his outfit, it just ties it all together. He's kind of dressed like Sergey Brin. Yeah. Yeah. He's a little bit. He's just in that 2012, 2013 era. The plaid shirts were bad, man. Tech bro. Yeah. It's a vibe. It's a vibe. It's a vibe. Yeah. So, and again, okay, so around this same time, I just, I wrote down a list of stuff that starts to happen. I'm just going to read you this list. Okay. Congress sent Larry Page a letter asking whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy of the average American. Great question. Great question. Great question. Excellent question. The EU had really similar questions.

41:52The UK Department of Transport banned Google Glass behind the wheel. And everybody is like, eh. A woman in California got a ticket for driving while wearing Google Glass. I remember that one. The officer said it was the equivalent of watching TV. I remember that. there started to be some real energy to like legislate this stuff out of being possible. Google tried to fight those laws. They started picking it pretty quickly. A guy got thrown out of a movie theater because they thought he was recording. Yep. She could have been. I will give either of you$100 if you can tell me what movie it was that they thought he was recording.

42:22The Matrix 2. Batman. Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit. Oh, okay. I did not know it was a film. I don't have$100 on me. I figured I was safe on that one. Yeah. there was a guy in a Seattle diner who was asked to remove his headset or leave that became a whole thing this diner in Seattle like briefly became famous for being like anti-Google glass they were banned in Caesar's Palace like immediately it was very funny that immediately all of the casinos were like I see what you can get out all the scams that are like wait but you can scam us back are you ready for another nothing has changed somebody built a facial recognition app called Name Tag.

43:03Of course. Which really freaked people out. So Name Tag was so bad, but so well covered that somebody made another app called Anti-Glass, which cost up to$300 a month, but promised that people wouldn't be able to identify you with Google Glass. Again, nothing has changed because that stuff is coming out again now in light of the Meta Ray-Ban stuff. We're just doing this again. $300 a month. And in May of 2013, like again, We're barely at the beginning of a beta test here. The New York Times runs this big story about all of the privacy problems with Glass. And yeah, the headline is Google Glass picks up early signal.

43:43Keep out. Like, tough beat. Google says what you would hope it would say, right? And Steve Lee, the product director, says that privacy was top of mind as we designed the product. Of course they do. And then Charlie Mendes, an engineer on the glass team, says this, which I think is just a truly alarming fact. He says, if I'm recording you, I have to stare at you as a human being. And when someone is staring at you, you have to notice. If you walk into a restroom and someone's just looking at you, I don't know about you, but I'm getting the hell out of there. I just want to point out this is a defense for why Google Glass is not a bigger problem than just a person staring at you.

44:18Bad person. It's a bad defense is what I'm going to say. It's. So all of this is happening right there. There's real understanding of like why this thing is a problem. But I would present to you the number one problem with Google Glass was the people who wore Google Glass. Uh-huh. Also known as Glass Holes. Yeah. What a perfect name for them. Truly. Truly. So I did a lot of research to try and figure out where the term Glass Holes came from. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. I believe. Etymology. I believe. I believe. This is the tweet that did it all. You found it. It's from Startup L. Jackson. It all has 45 likes.

44:53Glasshole. The know-it-all guy you've always hated, only now he's got 4G and Google Plus connected to his face. Thanks, Google. Would one of you like to read the date on this tweet? October 16th, 2012. 2012. We had glassholes before we had glass. That's crazy. Oh, wow. That's crazy. It was so abundantly clear to people what this thing was going to be. And it says the tweet was quoted by CNET, so I bet the CNET article that quoted it, then that probably spread. So CNET hit it in a big way. TechCrunch helped make it popular too. Like everybody sort of immediately, like to your point V, you hear it and you're like, yep, that's it.

45:28That's it. That's the name. Glasshole. Yeah, exactly. And so it like really immediately started to take off to the point where it was like, there was a great story in the Atlantic in April of 2013. April of 2013, explaining the etymology of the word glasshole. Like this is how far we've gone where linguists can trace the history of the term glasshole before any of us had Google Glass. Is that where you found the tweet? It is where I found the tweet. And they also believe that it was Startup Bill Jackson that did it. So it's just bad times, right? And it was very clear that this is what was going on.

46:07People were a problem. There were people getting into fights. Because at this point, if you're a person who wants to wear Google Glass, you are sort of a self-selecting true believer in this technology. And so these true believers and the people who like instinctively hate this thing that is like creepy in my face recording me, do I don't know if you're recording me? Like that just became sort of explosive. And in 2014, February of 2014, Google is forced to post a set of do's and don'ts for Google guys. Oh my gosh. And if you'll allow me to, I would just like to read a few of them to you. Please.

46:48Do's. Ask for permission. Standing alone in the corner of a room staring at people while recording them through glass is not going to win you any friends. The glass camera function is no different from a cell phone. So behave as you would with your phone and ask permission before taking photos or videos of others. This is an official Google website. Like the lengths to which you have to go before you're willing to post this on your website is just truly, truly nuts. Here's a don't. Don't. Glass out. Glass was built for short bursts of information and interactions that allow you to quickly get back to doing the other things you love.

47:23If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time, you're probably looking pretty weird to the people around you. So don't read War and Peace on Glass. Things like that are better done on bigger screens. Wow. This is actually a thing I remember. People were doing the experiments. Like, I wore Glass for 24 straight hours. Yeah. It was a thing where people were like, I'm going to go hard on this. And it just, it was a tough look for everybody. I'm going to switch things up and say everything is the same. But here's the one where like whoever wrote this really just sad times.

47:53Don't be creepy or rude, a.k.a. a glass hole. Respect others and if they have questions about glass, don't get snappy. Be polite and explain what glass does and remember, a quick demo can go a long way. Actually, that's not going to win you friends either. Nope, that's not. In places where cell phone cameras aren't allowed, the same rules will apply to glass. If you're asked to turn your phone off, turn glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about glass and will ruin it for other explorers. If you have to write this on your website, your product is failed.

48:20Don't be a jerk. Like, it's genuinely the solution to all of these privacy concerns. Thus, then and now has always been don't be a jerk, which is like, how effective is don't be a jerk as a policy? It's not very effective. You just need one jerk to ruin it for everybody. In one of my computer science classes in college, they used to call it the monkey at the keyboard problem, which is probably still what they call it. The idea is that if you can have a monkey at a keyboard that makes every possible mistake that can possibly be made, the flow of it needs to still work. And if you need to put a list of things that you shouldn't do with your product that you worry is too addictive and can be too creepy and can be, that's not going to work.

49:04The monkey is going to keep pressing buttons all the time. He's going to take a lot of photos or he shouldn't be taking photos. Yep. That is unbelievable. Yeah. And it's really this document to me is so damning because it's like, OK, we understand that we've lost the fight here. And we are going to we are going to beg you to not keep doing all of the things that you're obviously doing. Wow. Do you guys did you guys have any Google Glass encounters either as the wearer or the recipient? So I remember the first time I saw it in the wild was at CES at I believe CES 2013. and this woman was just wearing it, just sitting there.

49:36And I looked at her and I went, tool. What a jerk. She was sitting there. She was well-dressed. And she just sat there. And usually in the press room at CES, you are like a husk of a human. You're working. You're not really paying attention. She just sat there. No laptop in front of her. She was clearly waiting for people to come and ask her about what it's like to use this. And obviously, you know, at CES, people are going to fall for the bait. So I'm watching this woman. And she's just sitting there. And she's like, oh, yeah, I can do like so much with that. And I just like stared at this woman for a whole hour, just like a parade of people just being like, oh, my God, you got it.

50:14What's it like? And she's like, yeah. So like she lives in my head rent free, this glass hole, because she didn't look like what I thought a glass hole was going to look like. She was very stylish, just put together. Maybe she's a plant. I you know maybe she was a plant because I just could not believe what I was seeing in that room. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't really have any encounters with it. Everyone around me was also poor in college. But I do remember going to San Francisco on day trips because I went to Santa Cruz for college. I was close. And I did see random people on the street occasionally with them on.

50:52And at the time I was just thinking I want it so bad. I want it so bad. I want it so bad. So I can't tell you that like i you know even when the glass hole stuff was coming out i was like oh everyone's being a little bit dramatic come on but then people started getting kicked at the movie theaters and pulled over on the highway and i was like okay how useful actually is this if everyone around me is going to rebel when i'm wearing it and i think that became the thing right like i think if you're if you're google you can survive one or two of those yeah incidents right like if it's just the person who gets thrown out of the diner or it's just the person at the movie theater because they weren't mad that they were wearing glass.

51:25They thought they were recording the movie. It's like, okay, if what we need to do is just sort of explain a technological change that is happening, fine. All of these things happened at the same time and so loudly and to a gadget that people were already talking about so much that I feel like it just became a totally insurmountable hill to climb. The more it becomes part of the conversation, the more people are going to report on the moments it goes wrong as well. It's like people will say like a Waymo will get hit, right, by another car and people will say self-driving car gets in a car crash.

52:00It's like because a guy T-boned it out of the side, like out of nowhere. So, you know, it gets an insurmountable amount of coverage because everyone's talking about it. But I also think like the real turning point in this list of things and that coverage is when they get snatched off the face because then you're introducing a level of bodily danger. And then, you know, from the people who were quite evangelistic about this tech, you kind of get a belligerent attitude coming out from them, too, going like, no, I am going to wear this in places. I want people to, you know, kind of daring them to kick them out because it's my right to wear these things.

52:35So you just kind of get this combative energy around these devices. And then just for the normal person, oh, if I wear this, someone might attack me. Yeah, that's not good. Like for me, that was the turning point when I saw that. I was just like, oh, I don't want to I don't want someone taking them off my face. And I remember that was all over the news, too. For sure. Yeah. This was again, it was sort of right before the feelings around technology started to shift significantly, because when I was living in San Francisco around 2016, 2017, that's when people started going around spray painting on the ground, like get out of SF techies.

53:12Yep. It was like right before that moment. Yeah, this was like the pre-Cambridge Analytica world in a very real way. Maybe this was sort of one of the beginnings of that movement. Yeah, I think you're probably right. I agree with all of what you just said. I would like to add only one thing, which is this photo. No. Robert Scoble in the shower wearing Google Glass. I think, I mean this sincerely. There's no coming back from this. No, there isn't. This became the meme of it. Robert Scoble was like an investor and a sort of tech enthusiast. Loved everything. That was a Google Glass Explorer. We won't keep this on the screen very long.

53:52If you want people to like this product, why are you posting this photo? Do you remember the do's and don'ts from Google, one of which was say, wear it in small bursts? I bet you$50. It was in response to this man who said he would never take it off except to let strangers try it. And I think the caption of this photo was something to the extent of like, you thought I was kidding. The really, you know, if you put glass hole in the dictionary, you just put that picture next to the definition and I think people will get it. It just tells you everything you need to know. Yeah. It does. That's unfortunate.

54:24All right. So we're actually, this is the wild part. We're almost at the end of the story here. So Glass is simultaneously becoming sort of everywhere and ubiquitous. And in the middle of 2014, Google makes them available to everybody. They changed some of the leadership. Babak Parviz actually left to go to Amazon because Amazon had just made the Fire Phone. And why wouldn't you want to go work at Amazon? But at this point, like, I think the narrative fight is over and Google has lost. And they reduced the price to a thousand dollars, I believe. But that's not enough to fight the stigma. Right.

54:59So in May, they become available to everybody. And then Google I.O. happens with essentially nary a mention of Google Glass. So insane. And I think at that point, you can basically look at it and it's over. And at that point, for the next 18 months or so, it doesn't die, but it sort of loses steam. Again, this is like the people who were excited about it are no longer excited about it. And so it just kind of starts to die. And then Astro Teller, who runs the X Division, the guy on the rollerblades, he gave a quote later that he said, when we originally built Glass, the work we did on the technology front was very strong and starting the Explorer program was the right thing to do to learn about how people use the product.

55:40Yeah. Agreed. What a spin. Where we got a little off track was trying to jump all the way to the consumer applications. And then this is a line from the story where he says it. He pauses. We got more than a little off track. So January of 2015, the Google Glass website switches to just saying thanks for exploring with us. That was it. Oh my God. That's so sad. Tony Fidel, father of the iPod one of the people who helped create the iPhone dude who did stuff at Nest is put in charge and actually says that more is going to happen Glass is not dead, Glass is not over they have big plans, there were reports of a cheaper model coming soon and it never did, but Glass did live one more life, what was that life?

56:24Google Glass 2 I remember this being announced and everyone was very shocked and then also very unshocked when what they announced it to be was an enterprise, more of a training sort of AR application for people that were building components and like car, you know, when you're putting together a car in a factory or something like that. That was actually what I tried at the Moonshot factory. You built a car? No, but I did do components like sorting with the Google Glass 2 on there. And yeah. Notably. Can you can you tell me what year this happened? This was about 2017. Yes. So notably 2015, I believe, was when like Windows AR and HoloLens started coming out.

57:12And there was this blip in time where everyone like a magic leap. Everyone was so interested in the applications of AR. And I think that Google was thinking, wait, we built that already. Right. If this hype. Yeah, let's pivot. Let's pivot to enterprise. Which is what I always said. You always pivot to enterprise. Well, it solves a huge problem because if the big cultural issue is privacy and you're in Enterprise, well, you kind of eliminate all the privacy issues because you're just wearing it for one specific purpose for a temporary period of time and then you take it off. And that's just the only way that it was ever going to survive given the context of the glass hole.

57:52Yeah. But Enterprise Edition 2 also came out in 2019. Okay. So they have they they still were doing this. I don't I would like to know I would love to hear from someone in an enterprise scenario if they're using this because I've never heard of anyone actually doing it. But they you know they retrofitted it to add some extra components. They have some like eye shield stuff now so that it doesn't. like the construction worker shield protective eyewear as well as some ar applications right like one of the things i thought was most interesting was uh i forget which company it was but i think it was a shipping company they were using the glasses to scan items as they moved them around like if you have to like scan inventory in and out having that camera be on your face makes a ton of sense that's what i was doing that that's a good point i was trying to remember the demo that i got with the enterprise i think it was enterprise too and it was just like, oh, you can take this from this container, scan it, put it in that container.

58:47Isn't that so cool? And I was like, I guess. I guess. I guess. But if you have to do that, you know, 10 ,000 times a day, then it would probably be useful. A thing I learned, by the way, was that whether that should be what Glass is for or whether Glass should be like a mainstream consumer application was a debate inside of Google all the way back to the beginning of the product. And there were people who fought tooth and nail, but like this is a useful enterprise tool that we should make for people to do enterprise-y things with. And then there were people, and by people I mean Sergey Brin, who were like, this is the future of computing and completely changed the course of the product forever.

59:21He's not the only one that still thinks that. He sure isn't. So this is, that's the end of the Google Glass story. But V, I don't think it's over. It's not over. Like we're back. We're back. We're back, baby. Google, well, you know, like it takes a detour away from Google and into Meta because Meta has basically revived this in the consumer consciousness with the with the ray meta ray band the regular no no no the regular meta ray bands because not to be confused with the ray band metas not to be oh god i i really hate how they changed up the namings of this but okay so the ray band metas were the things that changed it because you know it got it back into the consumer space um you know there's vloggers out here.

1:00:07So now recording in public is a lot more accepted. We're more likely to ignore it. So like things are starting to line up. And now Google is basically like, we pioneered this stuff. Android XR, Google Glass prototypes. Like last year I tested again. I went into a tiny little room where they showed me Galaxy XR and I was like, OK, whatever. That's an Apple Vision pro dupe let's show me show me the glasses and i tried like five or six different prototypes that they had and i went oh my god you guys never stopped you jerks never stopped really tinkering around with this and you know it was it was pretty impressive there were versions that were um monocular which means it was only in one lens and there were versions that were binocular in both lenses the quality was a lot better they you know stuff ai into it now and the narrative is like what we were waiting for was Gemini.

1:01:00Okay, can I give you an alternate theory? And this is what I want to end on before we get to the version history questions. A thing I have heard from people in a position to know is that they believe Google Glass was not only a failure, but was such a spectacular cultural failure that it made everybody gun shy to try this. So we got an email from Richard and Richard got it in college. Richard could afford it you know no offense wow but Richard said that he really liked that it was it was a heads up display it had all this stuff but he says it was a taste of the future I used to ride a longboard at the time and being able to just play music through the mediocre bone conduction system see text come in at a glance and check a map as needed while also having a POV camera oh my gosh all without needing to take my eyes off what was ahead of me except for a quick look up for an instant that felt like a video game promise of the future you know it's so funny I used to ride around Santa Cruz with my electric longboard with the Snapchat spectacles.

1:01:57Of course you did. We did the same thing. Of course you did. That seems exactly correct to me. Yeah. And what Richard says is, which I thought was really interesting, is that it was basically a, like, I had to put it on on purpose and choose to use it in a way that even some of the wearables we have now are much more, like, thoughtless. You just sort of put it on kinds of decisions. Yeah. But okay, we're going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the version of straight questions, and we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

1:02:44All right, we're back. So in every episode, we have eight questions that we ask about every product. And we're going to go through them right now. Question number one is where does Google Glass fit on the time matrix? The time matrix is two things. It's right idea or wrong idea, right time or wrong time. And we have to put it in a quadrant. Was it the right idea at the wrong time? Was it the wrong idea at the wrong time? Where on the matrix does it belong? We can forget about the right time. It obviously was not the right time. Yeah, it clearly does not belong. So it's clearly on the wrong time.

1:03:18Oh, man. I think it's a philosophical debate as to whether it was the wrong or right idea. I think do you want this is still so very much an open question 13 years later. Like if you're thinking about, yes, I believe in the future of AR and smart glasses, then it was the right idea at the wrong time. If you think this is the most dystopian shit you've ever heard of, then it's 100 % the wrong idea at the wrong time. I'm going to kind of, as the wearables lady, say it was the right idea at the wrong time because just in all of my reporting, I think there are genuine use cases for this technology that are great.

1:03:55Whether it's the use cases that big tech thinks it is, because they seem to think it's this general computing, going to replace your phone 24-7 device, and I genuinely do not believe that that is the right application for these. So I'm just going to say right idea, my version of it, right idea, wrong time. That's my case. I want to say right idea, wrong timeline, because in the timeline that we were headed towards, that Google was headed towards, that they clearly wanted with ambient computing, the frequency at which they use that phrase at Google I.O. after Google I.O. just increased rapidly as Google Assistant became more into their zeitgeist and more of the thing they were focusing on.

1:04:36If that had stayed at their primary like thing that they were their primary masthead that they were moving towards, I think it would have been the right idea because the idea, again, was contextually give you the information you need without having to like go into your phone, get out of the world, keep doing things with your kids, all that kind of stuff. I don't think they've given up on that, though, because I've heard it from a lot of Google execs. I mean, it might just be the wearables division that's like really hang on that. Project Astra, which is like the big multimodal AI feature, that's exactly what you're talking about.

1:05:07They've been at this since like Google Lens a million years ago, right? This idea of like how do we keep your life and your computing aware of each other? A, I agree with you that it's the right idea. And B, I think it's still what Google wants to do. I think there's still, you know, I've had a bunch of conversations with them over the last couple of months and ambient computing still comes up there. So I think to David's point that they really do believe that it's like we touched a hot stove and now we're just a little afraid, but we still believe this is the right idea. So I still think we're in the timeline.

1:05:43I suppose it feels like with the AI bubble that they kind of veered in this other direction of like, yes, some of these AI, some of the things these AI platforms are trying to do is to automate things for you. and obviously it's all contextually based. But at the time it felt like, oh, we noticed that you walked into your house like every day at the same time. We're going to start dimming your lights when you leave. Right. That was their focus. And now it's like, talk to a robot. I agree with that. So it's a little bit different. I think it's because they discovered how hard that thing you just described is to actually do in the world.

1:06:20But it is, I agree with you and I do think it's the right idea. But I think I'm good with right idea, wrong time. Yeah, I think that's good. This is where it lives. Yeah. All right. Question number two. Was Google Glass peak anything? I have a few, but I'm curious if either of you have thoughts. It was peak Glasshole. Peak Glasshole. Good. It was peak Glasshole. I'm going to say it was peak live demos. Yeah. It was definitely, it was peak Sergey in every way. Like for good and for bad, it was peak Sergey Brin. It was peak tech cringe. But it didn't feel cringe at the time. Was it peak Google? Yeah.

1:06:54I don't think so. So I think depends on what you mean by peak Google. Yeah. It's like we mean peak Google of them going hype, hype, hype. Oh, my God. This is a thing. And it's dead. I mean, I would say that's that is in a certain way sort of peak Google. Yeah. But I think like it just kind of what you were talking about earlier in terms of like our relationship with Google and what people thought Google was as a company. Yeah. It was like save the world. You know, it was. Project Loon to me is peak Google. Ooh. Oh, Project Loon was there over developing countries. That's good. You fly blimps and you give everyone internet for free.

1:07:30I used to talk a lot about how I liked Google's basic trade where it was like, we're going to go out of our way to give everyone access to the internet because we're going to make a ton of money because they're going to use Google products. And for so many years, I was like, I'm cool with that. Yeah. And then I realized I was dumb and wrong and that's fine. Well, then Meta did that, but the only websites you could use were Meta websites. Right. Okay. So I think I agree. Were they peak smart glasses? No. No? No. Okay. All right. Question number three. If you could time travel back and build this thing yourself, I'm putting you in charge in 2011 of Google Glass.

1:08:06Could you make it more successful knowing what we know now? Yes. I think this might be the easiest yes of all time. It's so easy. Just don't make it look like that. Oh, come on. Make it look more discreet. Don't do whatever that marketing rollout was where you just - I'd say at a tally light. That's all I think. That's one. It's an LED. You could kind of fix it in one meeting. I feel that way. I don't know. I mean, there's just a lot of different things, but I think don't be a jerk would have helped them a lot. Be a little bit more proactive and think about the privacy question because they were caught very on the back foot with the privacy question.

1:08:43So then it makes it look like you didn't think about this thing. Have a use case for people. Explain how you're going to use this. explain why you would want this also notably probably why the vision pro is not doing well because there is not a use case everybody's like it's a monitor for my mac i have one i can watch a movie alone yeah yeah i i do think if if it were me i would have i would have done sergey brin stuff to marshal all of my resources towards making video chat happen and make that the like killer app of google glass i don't know if it would have worked but that would have been the one thing where i'm like yeah the weird thing is like because you like apple had to invent the whole thing with your persona because then it introduces the question of yeah you can see the other person but they can't see you i guess they could see your first person view if you wanted yeah but the other thing i would have done was i would have skipped trying to go straight to the consumer with it and what i would have done because when i uh recently went on vacation to italy i realized that the meta ray-ban display was most useful to me as a tourist so i was like oh just give these to museums have them oh talk to you about talk to you about the things that you're seeing it's a great point give them to opera houses and theaters so you can see subtitles and then not only do you get normal average people going and getting familiarized with the tech thinking it's not scary you know you you get them to go like oh this is why i would want this oh how else could I use this in my life?

1:10:14You know, Nintendo did that with the Nintendo DSi. They gave it to museums and you would go around the museum and take pictures of things and it would tell you about them. I remember they recently canceled that and it was like a big deal. Sad. But that's another episode. Question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? Google Glass? Yeah. Is there a retro nostalgia? No. This would have worked if there were shorts and reels in 2012, but we were just not there with social media yet. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, okay, that's a fun counter future. Like if Google had been like, okay, actually what we're going to do is instead of whatever weird nonsense we did with Google +, we're just going to do TikTok.

1:10:53Yeah. Yeah. And Glass was a TikTok camera on your face. I think that would work. Maybe that's how we make it work. That's our time trap. I think so. I think you're probably right. It's legitimately why the Meta Glasses are working now. 100%. Because it works with the content. Well, first of all, we have a content creator sphere that's not YouTube, right? That's like short form content is a thing. Do you know who owns YouTube, by the way? Google. I mean, you know, they could have done if they had done shorts way back then, you know, this might have had some sort of gumption because, you know, what do kids want to be these days?

1:11:29They want to be influencers. So they have this built in content creation tool pathway. So it's actually a very funny way to think about this thing. if they had just gotten rid of all of the ambitious stuff and just said it's a face camera for vertical short form video. It's a face GoPro that's not ridiculous. Which Meta, I don't think Meta anticipated that either. No, they didn't. They were shocked. They were surprised. Yeah, they're just like, we need to, you need to be able to talk about the world. And every single time someone has used the Ray-Ban Meta or whatever the hell they're called, they go, oh yeah, I can ask about that, huh?

1:12:01Like they always forget. Listen, I went to the Vatican Museum. I was testing out because, you know, they say use it in a museum do whatever and i was like okay let me test it first of all the vatican don't have wi-fi so i'm on crappy international data and going like what am i looking at and for nine out of ten times it was was just like you're looking at a marble bust one time it could tell me what marble bust i was looking at and so you know that's another one for the nothing has changed files that's my that's yeah that was my experience very much so with the humane ai pin standing in front of a giant statue of abraham lincoln it's like you're looking at a square marble man object oh my god not at all that's not what it is okay yeah what feature of this product should every current version of this kind of product have what what would you take off of google glass and ship on the meta ray-ban glasses i have an answer i like the way that they showed the notification system working in the demo videos.

1:13:01The little pop-up-y circles that just kind of appear in front of you? Yeah. That was nice. I agree. They're sort of doing that with the various versions of these. Nothing for you? Nothing for me. I think the only thing I could argue is the lightweightness of it. Like that concept of it being quite light on your face because most of my issues with current smart glasses is that they're not comfortable. They don't I can't wear them long term. I just can't. So yeah, the lightweightness. Otherwise, I'm just like, great idea. Like throw out most of this form factory. Yes. My answer is kind of related.

1:13:41It's just going to be the modularity of it. Like I think they sort of designed and built it wrong. But the idea that you can like take off the lenses when you're inside or whatever and want to just have the display but not be wearing sunglasses. Like I have a pair of the Meta Ray-Ban sunglasses. And they're sunglasses, which is useful when they're sunglasses. And I'm not going to sit at my desk at work and wear sunglasses. Or if you're in a museum. Right. I mean, they have transition lenses, but it costs more. Yeah. Right. And even that, like, I don't wear glasses because my vision is sick. I feel like I've mentioned this before.

1:14:12Like, I've really, like, choice vision. Me too. Wow. Okay. As the David's power over here. But I like the idea of, like, if you're going to give me something like this, I want one that is both useful as glasses when I want them to be glasses and then not even sort of affectation glasses, just not glasses when I don't want them to be glasses. I don't think Google did it right, but I think like directionally that idea was an interesting one. And I would like to see somebody better at design try to do it. All right, three more questions. These are the Hall of Fame criteria questions. In order to get into the Virgin History Hall of Fame, it has to satisfy all three of these criteria.

1:14:48No. Hall of Fame question number one. Did this product do something truly new?

1:14:56Kinda? Kinda. Really? I think it's an easy yes. I really do. Yeah. I mean, if you want to be pedantic. Just think about the, like, response to that first video in 2012. Yeah. That it was like, they've invented a new kind of relationship with technology. Yeah, I was going to say, like, there's no way this was the first head-mounted, wear-it-all-the-time thing. But it was so close to the invention of the smartphone and the way that the UX worked on smartphones and just transitioning that over to a headset display. Right. That it was pretty novel at the time. It was like the first version. Why are you hesitant?

1:15:36No, I'm just saying like on a technicality, to your point, it's not the first head mounted display. No, not at all. This tech has been around for 60 years. Like it's an old technology. But like in the history of it, did it do something new? I would say it's the first, like Google will say it's not consumer, but it is the first consumer of smart glass. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right. Hall of Fame question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? Both, honestly. It was remarkably. If it's both, is it neither or is it both? It's both because it was remarkably bad in the sense of like if you're going to pitch this technology, you absolutely did not land it.

1:16:16But it was remarkably good in the sense that, like, you actually made a thing that made people see what the vision was. That's the thing. It's a hard that's a hard question because the Humane AI pin is remarkably bad and then it just did not work at all. Correct. Yeah. This did what Google said it could do. Yeah. So it's not remarkably bad. It just remarkably failed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the story of it is remarkably bad in a lot of ways. But the product itself, I'm not sure, was remarkably bad. It wasn't. Like, I really, to your point about history, remembering this a little bit more kindly, it was ahead of its time in many ways.

1:16:53Like, the product itself, for the components that were available at the time, for where the culture was at the time, the engineering that went into it, it's actually remarkably good, in my opinion. They just got a lot of things wrong about what people wanted. Yeah. So, like, in that sense, they're remarkably out of touch. They also did it before because this was still during the big data era wave. And this was before the IoT wave, which happened more in 2015, 2016. So considering they had to make it that small and they were still able to even have five hours of battery life on a thing that should have probably used more power than it did.

1:17:32Better than you would expect. Something in that era on your face you would expect to last like. Two hours max. Max. Max. Because even now, like a lot of those products, like Vision Pro last two hours, you know what I mean? Yeah. With the big ass battery. I will say you're making me realize that maybe the answer to the time travel question is go back in time and just don't let Sergey Brin see it. And like seriously, like there's a case of like what if you had just let this thing exist inside of the Moonshot factory for five more years? Let them develop it. Just let it get better. Let them build it.

1:18:03Let people get more used to technology. Like if this thing had shipped after the Apple Watch and after we'd had a lot of questions, a lot of debates about what it means to have technology on your body and how we should have our relationships. Like maybe if the first version of this thing comes out in 2017, it's received completely different. Yeah, it would be. I mean, the privacy question, I think, is the biggest thing. And no one has really answered it in a way that makes sense. But I think if you took it, if Sergey Brin had not been allowed to see it and had been allowed, if we had let them cook just a little bit longer.

1:18:33I think, you know, this would have hit very differently. Yeah, I think so. Also, Google Lens came out like 2017. So that implementation in this is basically what Meta is trying to do now, except it would have been more obvious to use it for that purpose at the time. Totally. Because people were using Google Lens all the time to identify plans. Yeah, I say this about the Meta. That's exclusively what I use it for. Yes. It's awesome. I say this about the Meta glasses all the time is that they have thought of nothing original. And as we've said in this, they've thought of nothing original. All they did was nail the execution.

1:19:05Right. No, all they did was call someone who knows how to make glasses. Nail the execution is what I'm saying. Which is why Google is now working with someone who knows how to make glasses for their Astra. Yeah. Yeah. And so all they did was nail the execution. And all Google didn't do was nail the execution. Yeah. Just that. Just that. All right. I think if the question is remarkably good or remarkably bad, I think glass fails. I think it exists somewhere between. It's so difficult. I do feel like it should be in the Hall of Fame. I do. It is so important. It's so iconic. All right, well, let's see if it passes number three, which is, did Google Glass have a lasting image?

1:19:42Yes. Yes, absolutely. In the history of smart glasses, there's going to be a whole chapter dedicated to Google Glass. Everything that has come after in this space, you can trace back to this. The genesis of it, the ideas of what we should be doing with smart glasses, the mistakes that we are currently making, The issues that we're currently not solving, it all goes back to Google Glass. But are you sure that the whole nothing has changed thing means maybe Google Glass wasn't that important? Maybe we learned nothing from Google Glass. No, it was important because it is like the touchstone. Like anytime I have to explain things to people, it is the touchstone I go back to because it is the thing that everyone remembers.

1:20:18Like when we have this conversation, the fact that glass hole was coined from it and that's going to be used in perpetuity. That's a thing that we use forever. You know, the lessons that people have learned in design from it, like we saw that patent with the little smart ring. Those are things that people are still exploring. Just the idea of the projection that being in one side, the use cases, the is it enterprise, is it not? These are all things that started with this device. And so like if we were to have a history textbook, there would be a whole section and chapter dedicated to this one thing and the lessons that we've learned from it.

1:20:58So I think that's a huge impact. When I think about the iconicity of consumer technology, the humane AI pen is going to be a blip that nobody cares about. You know what I mean? But this is a thing that feels like a cultural touchdown. Like it also failed. It also had similar problems. But it is a thing that people will continue to talk about. Nobody's going to talk positively about the humane AI pen. I think it's five years away from being essentially lost to the ether of technology. Google Glass will not. All right. Yeah. Google Glass, welcome to the Version History Hall of Fame. It's an honor to have you here.

1:21:33I did not think it was going to get in, but I think it's the right call. I feel good about it. I think it should. All right. It's time for us to get out of here. David, put these back on. You clearly look the best of the three of us wearing these. You do. So put those back on. Thank you to both of you for being here. This was delightful and good fun, and I look forward to doing this with many more failed wearable, eyeable products. If you want to support this and everything that we're up to, subscribe to The Verge. If you subscribe to The Verge, you can also listen to this podcast ad-free. It's very simple.

1:21:59People really like it. We'd love for you to do it. We will be back next time with more weird gadgets that may or may not be the Hall of Fame and may or may not look as good on David Amell's face. We'll see you next time.

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