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TechStuff Classic: The Google Glass Story

Published Nov 10, 2023, 8:18 PM

Was Google Glass an idea ahead of its time? What are its origins and where is it today?

Welcome to tech Stuff, a production from iHeartRadio. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer at iHeart Podcasts and how the tech are you. So it is Friday, It's time for a classic episode. The episode you're about to hear, originally published on May twelfth, twenty seventeen, is called the Google Glass Story. Hope you enjoy. I'm going to talk about a subject that I've touched on in past episodes. In fact, we did a full episode about this subject. I'm talking about Google Glass. And while we did do an older episode about this, I felt like we could really use a chance to revisit this and kind of talk about in the more modern style of this show. You might remember the old version of tech Stuff was more conversational, and this one's less, so it's more narrative. Well, Google Glass was a big augmented reality project or an AR project, out of Google's R and D labs, the Google X Labs, that's the super secret research and development branch of Google. And it probably was a little bit ahead of its time. In fact, it really was ahead of its time, and it was purposefully ahead of its time. That was part of the problem, but I'm getting ahead of myself. It might have suffered from some poor design and implementation, or at least some choices that perhaps puzzled people. I wouldn't go so far as to call them poor myself. I actually really liked Google Glass. Maybe it was just too darned expensive. It's pretty costly, but whatever the reason, and we'll explore all of them. It's no longer a consumer product that you can buy from Google. So today we're going to talk about Project Glass, how it got started, the technology behind it, and the failed experiment to turn it into a consumer product, and where is it now. The reason I decided to cover this is because the week I'm recording this episode, The Telegraph ran an article about some of the biggest flops in technology, and some of the usual suspects were in there, like the Nintendo Virtual Boy was one of the major flops listed. There are also some heartbreaking intrease in there. The Sega Dreamcast, for example. I know that's another video game component there, a console. In this case, it was legitimately a really good video game console. It just didn't do very well in the market. But I still have one and it was really really good. Then there was Google Glass. That was also one of the ones that the Telegraph listed another heartbreaker. So what's the story behind it? Well, I can't talk about Google Glass without first talking about augmented reality, can I? You know me? You know I can't. I am physically incapable of doing that. I'm sure many of you are familiar with the concept of augmented reality or AR, but just in case, I'm going to give you a quick refresher. So Thomas Cottle gets the credit for coining the phrase augmented reality in nineteen ninety. He was specifically talking about a system that would allow you to see where wires needed to be laid out in say, the fuselage of an airplane. So if you've ever been able to walk into an airplane where it's been stripped down so you can see the guts of it. I was recently at an airplane museum where I got to do this. I walk through what had been a former seven forty seven and now included a section where everything got stripped away so you could see essentially the bones the skeleton of the seven forty seven, and part of that included conduits through which wires would run well. When you're building one of these airplanes, you need to know where those wire conduits have to be so that you can make sure they fit into the overall design. Coddle worked on systems that would give a digital overlay as engineers would look at this airplane design so that they could lay the cables the proper way, make sure that they were aligned so that they weren't going to end up messing up the design some other way. And really, augmented reality is just the integration of digital information into the real world around us. And you can do this in lots of different ways, but typically we talk about augmented reality in terms of overlaying some sort of visual digital information, like a digital display through which you can see a view of the real world, and thus you can have some augmented information on top of that view of reality. So a good example of this might be a fighter pilot who has a helmet that includes a digital heads up display or HUD on the visor of the helmet itself, so you might be able to visualize things like Allied aircraft and you'd be able to see it and it would be identified within your visor, so that you get information about that. That's a simple example, simple in the sense that you can easily imagine it. It's actually quite complicated when you build the technology. A few high end cars have similar features that give digitally enhanced information that is projected or otherwise displayed on the windshield itself, which gives the driver the ability to see certain special views. You might be able to see, like an infrared view of what is outside the car, or a projection of things like the outside temperature, that sort of stuff. But it tends to be in those luxury cars. You don't see it in a lot of the lower production cars, even the nicer ones. It's pretty rare. You also have, I'm guessing an augmented reality device on you. More likely than not most of you, I'm sure have smartphones. So if you have a smartphone, you have a device that is probably capable of running augmented reality apps. There are tons of different apps in the AR space for all of the major smartphone platforms, iOS and Android being the two big ones, but there are ones for other ones as well, and typically the way these work is that you hold your phone up, your phone's backfacing camera pulls in a view of the world around you. So it's like you're getting a live view. It's like your phone is a monitor for you to look at a live camera feed of the world around you. But then the app allows other digital information to be overlaid on top of that view. So it might be something as simple as directions of where to go. Say you've programmed your phone saying I want to get to this one particular coffee shop and it's about six blocks away, and you hold your phone up and it tells you, all right, you need to go three blocks straight ahead. Then you're going to take a rite. That's a pretty simple again concept for augmented reality, but it could do other stuff too, Like you might be able to hold it up to a sign that's written in a language you can't read, and it might be able to read it and translate it for you. We're seeing a lot of translate apps that incorporate this kind of augmented reality, and it's pretty awesome, at least in my opinion, is pretty awesome. But there are tons of different ways to implement augmented reality and just as many different use cases for AR, and it ranges from just entertainment to productivity to industrial use and beyond medicine, lots of different potential uses for AR now. Google Glass started as a head mounted computer device that would incorporate augmented reality features into a display that you could look through and still see the world beyond. And while the project was first teased in a video in twenty twelve, the origins for this project go back much further than that. And first, before there was even a Google, there was a guy named Thad Starner. I've actually had the good fortune to meet mister Starner because he works at Georgia Tech. He's a professor there, and I visited Georgia Tech. I visited the wearable computing labs, and I've chatted with him. He's an interesting dude, and Georgia Tech's just down the street from how stuff works, so it's not hard for us to get over there. Well. He also served as a technical lead for Google Glass. In fact, I believe he served as technical lead longer than anyone else in that position for that particular project. And it was Starner's work in wearable technology and augmented reality that you could say got the ball rolling. So you remember I mentioned a guy named Coddle got the credit for coining the phrase augmented reality. Well, Starner says that he really coined that phrase independently of Coddle. Also in nineteen ninety through a fellowship proposal, he wrote, and he thinks that that might be the first appearance of augmented reality. He wanted to use the phrase artificial reality when he was originally talking about this concept. However, someone else was already using that term. That someone was Timothy Leary, and if you don't know who Timothy Leary is, you should look that up. Leary was specifically talking about the kind of reality you experience when you have partaken in mind altering substances. So it wasn't exactly the context that Starner wanted to imply when he was talking about his technology, so he didn't adopt artificial reality, and he went with augmented reality instead. In nineteen ninety three, which was years before Google ever even existed, Starner created a wearable display. So it was a display that attached to his glasses, and really he worked with other people to design this. He didn't build it by himself with his own two hands, but he worked with designers to create a computer system that incorporated a display that could clip onto his glasses, and it was pretty big and bulky, and it was not transparent. It was like having a small computer monitor mounted on your glasses. And he started to wear this all the time wherever he went. It was kind of an experiment in finding out how you might use wearable computers, what elements are important, which ones are not important, how do you incorporate it into your daily life. So he would wear this all the time, and it very often would prompt people to ask questions about this weird thing that he had on hims on his face mainly. Eventually there was a build of this that started going by a name called the Lizzy. It was a wearable computer, complete with input devices and with that head Melton display that again was kind of unsightly originally anyway, This display was able to show a resolution of seven hundred and twenty by two hundred and eighty pixels, so tiny resolution compared to what you would find today, the very low resolution compared to today's screens. It was also monochromatic, so only one color. And connected to that was a one handed keyboard called a twiddler, which I wish were a joke, but it is not. So it was a little one handed twiddler keyboard. It kind of reminds me of the keypads on old cell phones where if you wanted to send a text message and you had to hit the letter E, you had to press the def key twice in a row in order for you to select E before you moved on to your next letter. According to Starner, he could hit type up to one hundred and thirty words per minute using this one handed keyboard method, which is crazy fast. It's crazy fast even if you're using two hands on a regular keyboard. So I was really impressed to hear about that very large and heavy batteries would give the computer more than ten hours of juice before you need to recharge. But I mean, these batteries weighed several pounds at least, so they weren't little, unobtrusive things attached to the computer. It was like wearing a hefty backpack, so it wasn't exactly comfortable to wear all the time. And the computer was really serving as a platform, a development platform. It was the basis for programmers to design wearable computing applications. So it's not like it magically gave Starner some sort of crazy computing ability. It was rather an early wearable device to help explore the applications and implementations of wearables without having to worry about creating a specific product. So this was really exploratory, and when you think about it, it was meant to say, we think there's something here, but we don't exactly know what it is yet. We don't know what the final form is going to be, So I don't have an idea for something that's going to be in a package on a store shelf that other people can go out and buy. Rather, I think computing has the capability of transforming our daily lives in yet another way. Now keep in mind, this isn't the early nineteen nineties. This is before smartphones, so smartphones would go on to show us that, yes, indeed, having a computer device that you can carry around with you changes things. There's no question of that. The Internet itself is a reflection of how much that has changed. Internet advertising has changed dramatically because of mobile devices and the popularity of them. So wearable computers definitely had the potential to make an enormous impact, but we had to figure out what sort of implementation made sense and what kind of applications would you use it? For because just to have something, just to have it that doesn't remain compelling for very long. That would be part of the problem of Google Glass later spoiler alone. Now. One of those applications that Starner created early on was a program that would keep track of everything he said, whether or not it was straight voice to text. I am not entirely certain. I'm sure by some point it really was. But he would also be able to type things in using the twiddler, which I remind you it's not a joke. So it was kind of like a perpetual notes system. He could keep track of things he was thinking about and talking about, and then he could run a search back against that see if he could find anything interesting later on, and he said that about ninety five percent of the time what he got back was garbage, wasn't particularly interesting, insightful, or helpful. But about five percent of the time it was totally the opposite. It was something really worth knowing and remembering. So he thought of it as something like a memory booster. It wasn't replacing his memory, but augmenting it. Now, according to popular accounts, Starner attended a conference in the late nineties and he met two postgraduate students from Stanford, so this would be about nineteen ninety eight. Those two postgraduate students were named Saragaie Brenn and Larry Page, and if you're familiar with those two, you know those are the co founders or Google. In fact, they would found the company Google just a few short months after this conference. Now, Brin and Page thought that Starner's wearable computers were fascinating, and he gave them a full demonstration of what the computer was capable of doing. However, at the time, they were already focusing on a way to improve search engines on the web, so they couldn't really dedicate any attention to wearable computers. They were too busy perfecting their search engine approach. And this was important because back in the day before things like Google, the algorithm that got so sophisticated that it was able to ignore a lot of the tricks people were using to try and direct traffic to their sites. Web search engines were just okay. Most of them were looking for instances of keywords appearing on a page, which meant that people would try and fool search engines by inserting as many different key search terms as possible at the bottom of a page, even if the page had nothing to do with that particular concept. And why would they do this Because web advertising is based off of how many views you get on a page. Page views are king at least most web advertising is not all of it, but a lot of it is. So if you were able to direct a lot of traffic to your web page, that was another page view, it didn't matter if what that people founded that by the time they got there, if it wasn't what they were looking for, and if they bounced, you got the page view. You don't care where they go afterward. Well, Google one of its big missions was to create a better search engine that would ignore all of the gamification of SEO and to try and look for the links that are the best representation of whatever it is you're searching for. So that's what their real focus was on. However, this meeting between Starner and Brennan Page may have been the first seed for Google Glass, and it happened in nineteen ninety eight, before Google was an official company. Now flash forward a decade, it's two thousand and eight. Google by this time is a huge company, incredibly successful, and it had just launched its own smartphone operating system called Android. Starner immediately thought that Android had promise as more than just an operating system for a smartphone. It could be ported over to all sorts of different devices and used for lots of different stuff, particularly things that were small and nimble, stuff that wasn't like your traditional laptop or desktop computer that includes wearables. So he tried to get in touch with Brennan Page. However, the phone number he had from ten years previous was no longer going to either of them. Big surprise, right, and he kind of let lie for another couple of years. In twenty ten, he would write an email to Saragai Brenn and he said, you should probably come out to my lab at Georgia Tech and take a look at the wearables and see where we've gone in the last ten years. I think he'd be really interested. And Brennan said, you know, we're thinking about wearables. We think it's about time. And rather than us go there, how about we fly you and your team out here so you can give us a full day of demonstrations. And Starner said yes, and next thing he knew, he became a technical lead for Project glass Over at Google's X division. By Shortly thereafter, after Starner joined the team, Starner Brennan Page were able to bring over another leader in wearable tech, someone that Starner had worked with in the past, Greg Priest Dorman, who had pioneered work with biofeedback systems in the seventies and into the eighties and then moved into wearable computing. He's another huge name in wearables, so he also joined the Google Glass development team. On August eighteenth, twenty eleven, four Google employees filed a patent for what was called a wearable device with input and output structures. It's the title of a patent, and like most patent titles, it's a little dry and it seems pretty nondescript. The illustrations accompanying the patent include one that closely resembles what the final form of Google Glass turned out to be. Some of the other illustrations looked more like a more or less normal pair of glasses. Some of them looked a little strange or odd. The patent described the general components for the invention, which you know patents are supposed to do. In order for you to get a patent on something, you have to actually explain how the thing works the parts that are that it's made out of. Otherwise you can't You're not supposed to get a patent on it. So what did this cover? Well, I suppose I can quote directly from the patent itself under the claims section. The first and most important of the claims reads thus late an electronic device comprising a frame configured to be worn on the head of a user. The frame including a bridge configured to be supported on the nose of the user, a brow portion coupled to and extending away from the bridge to a first end remote therefrom and configured to be positioned over a first side of a brow of the user, and a first arm having a first end coupled to the first end of the brow portion and extending to a free end, the first arm being configured to be positioned over a first temple of the user, with the free end disposed near a first ear of the user, wherein the bridge is adjustable for selective positioning of the brow portion relative to an eye of the user. A generally transparent display means for a fixing the display to the frame such that the display is movable with respect to the frame through rotation about a first axis that extends parallel to the first brow portion, and an input device a fixed to the frame and configured for receiving from the user. And input associated with a function wherein information related to the function is presentable on the display. What the what? Well, I'm going to explain what that means, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. All right, So what did that patent speak actually mean? Because it got so weird and dry, and that's typical for patents, by the way. That's it's a very formulaic approach because patent system is a bureaucracy and you have to conform to the methodology of the bureaucracy in order to get your idea through Otherwise, if it doesn't conform, you're not likely to get a patent award. So what it actually means is the invention would fit on your face like a pair of glasses that one arm or stem if you prefer, of these glasses would curve around the brow above one eye to rest against the side of your head, so over one eye, and in early Google glass it was always the right eye. There'd be a little protrusion. That's where at the end of that protrusion. That's where the screen would be, the clear transparent screen. I guess I can say clear and transparent like I can say ATM machine. Then the other part of it would wrap around back behind your ear, with a part of it resting just behind your ear. More on that than just a second, but that would be the main part of Google Glass. The other section would just be a dumb frame that exists really just to provide stability. So you would have a part that would rest on the bridge of your nose that would help support the stem I was talking about. And on the other side your second ear, because you remember the patent said first ear and first etc. Et cetera. First brow. The other one would be the second one. This is not important to the invention because nothing of any technical import is going on on that side. It's literally just a frame to hold the rest of the technology in place. So over your right ear you have the stem of the Google Glass, and in that section you've got a control area. You've got your battery, you've got your speaker, you've got your projector for the screen, you've got inside, you've got the processor, you've got the receiver for Bluetooth et cetera. On the other side, over your left ear, it's just a regular little stem that fits over your ear, kind of like a regular pair of glasses. There's nothing, no technical elements inside that side of it. It's just dumb plastic. So the part that's right behind your ear, that's where the speaker was, that's where the audio would come from. Obviously, if you're watching a video or you're taking a call, you would need to be able to hear things through the glasses. It's cool because this particular speaker wasn't just playing audio blasting it out into the real world. It was using bone conduction to transmit audio so that you could hear it. Now, if you stood close to someone who was wearing google glass and they were playing audio, you would hear stuff. Because when you get down to it, sound is vibration. The sound that you are hearing right now is transmitted through molecules vibrating at the frequency that I'm talking at, and the amplification as well. The amplitude, So when you get down to the fact that sound is just vibration, bone conduction makes sense. It is what it sounds like. Sound is transmitting through bone. Your bone conducts sound bones, I should say, although in this particular case we're talking about the skull, otherwise known in medical circles as the headbone, So the headbone would transmit the sound from the speaker. So what's happening is that? Well, I guess it helps if we talk about just the regular sense of hearing first, right, These vibrating air molecules enter your ear canal. They cause your ear drum or your tympanic membrane if you prefer to vibrate. Now, that vibration gets transmitted to a tiny set of bones in your inner ear, which acts as kind of like an amplifier, and they ultimately terminate on an organ called the cochlea, which is sort of in a spiral shell shape. It's got some fluid in it, and it's got some finger like nerve endings in it that are in this fluid. And when the coclia is vibrated, then this fluid moves around and that stimulates the nerve endings inside of it, which then sends signals to the brain which then interpret that to be sound. It's pretty cool when you really develop thought about it. Well, the neat thing about bone conduction is you can bypass the ear drum entirely. You can send vibrations through bone, which then will reach the inner ear on their own bypassing that pathway that all other sound tends to take and vibrating the cochlea directly. So there are a lot of sports earbuds or headbands or whatever that have these kind of bone conduction speakers. Some people call them bone phones. I do not, but some people do. And the Google Lass had one of these types of speakers to again transmit sound without it blasting out into the general world. Pretty interesting stuff. And this meant that you could watch things like videos, or listen to a voicemail or make a call using Google Glass, and you could hear through Google Glass. You didn't have to hold a phone up to your other ear. Now, the invention also incorporated a screen that was transparent, so, in other words, you had to be able to see through the screen and be able to view the outside world through it. It couldn't have an opaque backing, so you couldn't silver the back of the screen, which presents some challenges. So how do you project images so that you can see a display and read the digital information? Because again that's what augmented reality is all about, right, it's overlaying that digital information on top of a view of the actual world around you. So if you can see through the screen, how do you display images on that said screen? Well, Claim nine on that same patent gives some information on that matter. It says the electronic device of Claim one wherein the generally transparent display is a prism of a transparent material configured to make an image projected into a side of the prism visible at a surface of the prism that is at a non zero angle to the side of the prism. Now what that means is that on casual glance, the prism looks like an elongated cube of clear plastic, and it looks like that's all it is. But if you were to take a look at it from the top, like the top of a pair of Google glass, and you were looking down, you would see that there's a fine line bisecting from one corner of this prism down into about the middle of the prism, a this weird little diagonal. This is an angle layer inside the prism, and the way it works is it allows light to pass through straight from ahead of you. So if you're wearing the pair of Google Glass and you're looking at something, light can pass straight through the prism, no problem. But if light were to come from a right angle to the right, as in a place where a little projector in the Google Glass could project out images, it would then redirect that light ninety degrees so that it goes into your eyes. In other words, you can still see the world in front of you because that light can pass through unimpeded. Light coming from the right side, which is where the little digital projector is, that gets reflected into your eyes, so then you can see the digital information overlaid on top of the world around you. So think of its kind of like a mirror, but the mirror only works if light is coming at it from a very specific angle. It's, you know, in a way, like one of those two way mirrors where you can see through one way but not in the other. It's kind of similar to that. So I thought that was super neat. It was actually the most fascinating part of Google Glass when I was first learning about it way back in twenty twelve, when I was trying to learn how it worked so I could write an article about it, and in fact I did write at least a version of how Google Glass works. I haven't looked on the website to see if that's still my version, because we update these articles on occasion and sometimes that changes the authorship as well. But yeah, way back in the day, I wrote an article about how Google Glass works, and part of it was just learning about this prism and I thought it was fascinating. In addition, the design of this prism meant that it was slightly above your normal line of sight. So this is that part of the patent that talked about it being offset from your eye. It's it's mounted a bit above where your natural line of sight would be, so you would always have it in your field of view, but it wouldn't necessarily be in focus unless you were to glance upward so that your right eye would be looking at the prism directly. This was a specific design implemented by Google in order to avoid things like people getting distracted by digital images when they should be paying to the world around them, and to make Google Glass something that you reference rather than something that replaces your view of the world around you. Very important if you're doing something like I don't know, walking or driving or riding a bicycle, anything where you're moving through a space. You want to be able to make sure that you're not having your attention divided so that you end up doing something stupid, like walking into an open manhole or into a telephone pole. I have done that before, for Realsi's but that was because I was looking at a phone. I've been that guy. I don't look at my phone when I'm crossing streets, but I look at it when I'm walking down sidewalks, and I have paid that price on multiple occasions. You think I've learned by now, and I guess I have. I've learned how to replicate that experience almost perfectly. The patent also included an important component in Google Glasses control system, which was a capacitive touch bar along that one stem, the active stem of Google Glass. And I've talked about capacitive touch before, but let's quickly go over that so that we understand what I'm talking about. So with a capacitive touch surface, you have the makings of a circuit, right. All that remains is you have to have something to close the circuit. You have to have something conductive make contact with a capacitive surface so that a complete circuit can form and when a complete circuit does form, there's a voltage drop at the location of the touch. So if I have a giant touch screen in front of me, and it's a capacitive touch screen, and I reach down with one finger and make contact with that screen, I complete a circuit, and there's a voltage drop at the point where I touched it. Software on the device is able to interpret that as being an actual command of some sort, and it might be selecting a program. It might mean turning volume up or down. It might mean swiping right because that dude you're looking at on tender is pretty hot and you kind of want to know what's his deal man, so you want to swipe right on that. Lots of different applications. There are also resistive touch screens that work on a slightly different principle. Those are the ones that you have to actually use pressure when you're making contact because it's not enough to touch it. You actually have to press so that you're slightly deforming the layers in order to create a circuit within the display itself. But that's a totally different type of touch screen. Now, in the case of Google Glass, the capacity panel is a means to cycle through the various features that are on the glasses. It's also a way to execute other basic commands, so Google would go a step further than this. You wouldn't have just touch commands. That was just one way you could interact with Google Glass. They also incorporated some motion controls and voice commands. So, for example, if you wanted to turn your screen on and you wanted to wake up Google Glass from its power saving mode, you could choose an option where by tilting your head backward at a fairly good rate, it would wake up Google. It's kind of like saying sup to someone. We'll be back with more about the Google Glass story in just a moment. If you want to take a photo, you could start with the phrase okay Google, which probably sounds familiar to you if you have an Android device or a Google Home and if I just activated it, I am sorry. You could then follow up with take a picture, so you could give a voice command to your Google Glass to take photos. I can speak from experience that people thought that this was the coolest thing ever when Google Glass was brand new and only a few pairs were out in the wild. In September of twenty twelve, after I had a pair of Google Glass, and yes I did have a pair of them. Technically, the company purchased them. I was just the representative who got to be the one to use them. When I had them, I took them to dragon Con, which is a big science fiction and fantasy convention here in Atlanta, and I would ask people, may I take your picture? Because there are a lot of people in costume, a lot of great cosplay at dragon Con, and most of the time people say yes absolutely. That's why I got dressed up. And then I would say okay, Google, take a picture, and they would look at me confused because they had never seen Google Glass do that before. And then the little light would flash on the Google Glass because that would indicate that a photo had been taken. Google wanted to have a physical indicator to let people know when a camera was active. And then immediately they would freak out about the fact that I was wearing the future on my faith, and I would invariably have to take another photo because the first one would mostly be if you've ever seen a dog, look confused. That's what almost all of the first photos look like from that Dragon Con. Because I was talking to a pair of glasses and they thought I was talking to them and they were wondering, why am I saying this. These days, everyone would totally understand what was going on. At the time, it was pretty new. Now, to avoid making the headset too heavy or too hot, the designers decided that Google Glass would have to be a peripheral piece of technology, so in other words, they didn't want it to be loaded down with processors and with various connectivity chips like cellular connectivity, Wi Fi, all of that kind of stuff. So you would co pair it to another device, like a smartphone, for example, and the smartphone would act as your link between the glasses and the outside world. For the most part. You could also do Wi Fi, I think, but obviously WiFi is not pervasive, so if you're anywhere where there's not Wi Fi, you would need to have almost like a modem, and your smartphone would act as your modem with a Bluetooth connection allowing for the communication between your glasses and the phone. Now, that simplified the components that needed to go into the glasses themselves, and that allowed the designers to make it a little bit lighter and not worry about so much heat generation. It also meant that there was less of a drain on the battery, which was perhaps the biggest challenge for the team was designing a battery that would be light enough and yet powerful enough to do what they wanted it to do. They needed it to not make the glasses uncomfortable to wear or really unwearable for any length of time, but they also wanted to make sure they had enough juice to get a decent amount of use out of it before you had to recharge it. They also got around this by having Google Glass go into sleep mode pretty quickly, so that anytime you were not actively using it, it could conserve power, and that way you could get maybe another hour out of it. It drained pretty fast back when I got one. Earlier wearable computers would require those massive batteries I talked about before, ones that weighed four or five pounds. Now, you don't want something like that on your glasses. It would just be excruciating. So this was a huge challenge. It remains a huge challenge in wearables to this day is figuring out the balance between the features you want to include and how much can a battery provide before you're going to have to start recharging it. Every few minutes. While the paperwork was being drawn up with the patents, Starner and others were in Google's labs building this actual hardware and testing it constantly. Whenever they were in the lab, they were wearing these devices. Whenever they were doing their regular jobs, they were wearing these They were testing them, they were trying them out, they were adding new features, taking old ones out when they didn't work, building apps just for their own use, to kind of really test the limits of what this technology could do. And then at the end of the day they would put them up and go home because they weren't ready for the world to see Google Glass yet. They didn't want to go out and start using it outside where people might wonder what the heck is going on, and then next thing you know, everyone's talking about it. So in twenty eleven, Google employees submitted the patent for the headmounted display. The Patent Office would eventually grant that patent on February twenty first, twenty thirteen, which actually is not that long at all. That's pretty fast in many cases for between a patent application and when it's actually granted. A couple of years is nothing. But then go we'll let the cat out of the bag. In between those two dates, in April twenty twelve, Google released a concept video, and this was a video that was shown from a first person view, so you were in the shoes of a guy wearing some sort of device that had something to do with Google. And the reason why I'm vague is because the video was pretty vague. It was just giving you an idea of what this experience might one day be like. Clearly, it was a head mounted display of some sort with a heads up display element to it, and it allowed this guy to send messages, to make phone calls, to take images, to share live video with someone else. So, in other words, the camera on this device could feed video directly to somebody somewhere else in the world, and you could even alert the person of what was going on in the world around them. So at one point, he's on his way to an appointment and he wants to take the subway, and as he gets close to the subway, a little alert points up and it says there are delays at the subway station, and he's like, aw shucks, and so he decides to walk instead. So some of this stuff would get worked into Google Glass. Some of it wouldn't be directly worked into Google Glass, but they could fudge it through other means. But it was an interesting video and it got a lot of people talking. It generated a lot of buzz. Now, you might think, like with the subway example, was that a case of machine vision understanding that the subway the guy is walking to is a particular one in a particular system, and that that one is one that's being affected by delays. That was not worked into Google Glass because the camera cannot be perpetually on. If it were, the battery would drain very very quickly. Instead, what you could do is you could incorporate GPS from a smartphone as well as a person's calendar if they've added an appointment to their calendar, and if the phone makes a quote unquote guess that you are on your way to set appointment, and it notices you're getting closer to a subway station because of your GPS coordinates, it could then send you an alert saying, oh, we've got this message saying that that particular subway station is experiencing delays. Now, from your perspective, it's almost like Google Glass looked at the subway and then said, hey, buddy, let's walk. You're never going to get there if you try and get on the train. But in reality, it could be stuff that's happening on the background. The nice thing is it doesn't really matter how it happens. What matters is the experience. Does the experience make sense? Is it compelling? Because if it is, it doesn't matter if it was because of machine vision or if it was because of a combination of GPS and calendar apps and other information. The result is the same either way. Other than the fact that in the way I just described, it's not draining your Google Glass battery super fast by having the camera on all the time. The video got a lot of attention. People were excited about it. People wanted to know more, but Google did not show off Google Glass at that particular moment. They did show it off not too long after that, and they did admit they were working on an augmented reality project and they wanted to get feedback from people about how they would use it and what they thought about this concept. A couple of months later, they held the Google Io Developer Conference. I've been to one of these. They're very very nerdy. It is interesting. It gets incredibly technical very fast, because it's meant for people who are developing apps for Google platforms. The event took place in San Francisco's Moscone Center, and high above the center was a blimp with several skydivers in wingsuits and parachutes, and each person in that group was wearing a pair of Google Glass. And in the middle of a totally different presentation, Sarah gay Brenn runs up on stage and he says, I'm sorry to interrupt, but we've got a time sensitive event going on right now, and he switches to video showing the blimp above the Moscone Center. Then they switch to a camera inside the blimp itself and you see the team there, and you see that each member of the team is wearing a pair of Google Glass. They start a Google hangout using their Google Glass, and then you can see the screens from each of their perspectives. So now you're getting a first person view of these people who are inside the blimp. And eventually, once the blimp is in the right location, they make a jump. They jump out of the blimp, they fall, they launch their shoots, they land on the roof of the Moscone Center. They hand over a package to a person riding a mountain bike and he's also got Google glass on. He rides over to the edge of the building, switches over into repelling gear, repels down the side, gets inside the Moscone Center, gets on a different mountain bike, rides over into the conference room, down the aisle, straight over to the stage, and brings Sergei brin a package that has inside of it a fresh pair of Google glass. It was a heck of a demo. I watched it live, not in the Moscone Center. I was watching it remotely. I was not at that particular Io event, and my jaw was on the floor to see this display of wearable technology in such a cool application. You know, this Google hangout that's showing me what it's like to skydive from a first person perspective. And then this journey from the sea, the roof of the building down into the center itself. It was an effective demonstration. Now, in August twenty twelve, Google would receive a pattern. Now this was not the same one for the head mounted display pattern that one wouldn't be granted until twenty thirteen, but this was a patent for a process and the title of the pattern was unlocking a screen using eye tracking information. So this would require having some sort of camera facing back toward a person's eye, and it would look at motions of the eye and interpret that as various commands, including unlocking a device. So you may have had a smartphone at some point that allowed you to create a pattern by tracing something on a screen. An old Android one I used to use had a grid of dots, and you would connect dots in a particular pattern, set that as your pattern of choice, and every time you wanted to unlock the phone from that point forward, you had to retrace that pattern. Well, you could do the same thing with eye tracking if you had a virtual display of dots and you stared at one dot until the camera had picked up and acknowledged yes, you're looking at the correct one, and then you just move your eye from dot to dot, and this is like moving your finger from dot to dot, and you could unlock a screen in that way. That's just one particular approach that you could use to unlock a screen using eye tracking. This particular type of feature would not be included with Google Glass, but it shows the kind of stuff they were thinking about while they were putting all this together. Yet Another pattern revealed what Google hoped to do with Project Glass, and it used gestures. So these would be hand gestures, actual hand gestures you would make in front of your face lack a crazy person in order to send commands to your Google Glass. So let's say you see something on the street and you like it. It could happen. Maybe you see a poster for a band that you like and it's they're coming up with a show nearby. Make a little heart shape with your hand. Awe, so cute, you Millennials, And then this would end up being picked up by the camera and interpreted as liking the thing you are looking at. Maybe it posts to a social media page saying, Jonathan likes the fact that they might be giants is going to be in Atlanta the Variety Playhouse playing a show, And yes, I would like that. I love they might be giants and the Variety Playhouse is a delightful venue. I don't know that I would go so far as to make the little heart shape of my hands, though I do have my limits. But this shows another way of how Google was thinking about interactions with its technology and ways that you could control it beyond just using a capacitive touchscreen or even voice commands. That also would not find its way into Google Glass, but it might find its way into some future Google product. Now, next we'll explore a bit with Google Glass, and we will pay handsomely for it. But before I jump into that, let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. In April twenty thirteen, Google would open up an extremely limited program called Glass Explorers. So I guess actually it was dragon Con twenty thirteen, not dragon Con twenty twelve, which totally makes sense. I can't tell those years apart dragon Con to dragon Con, they all bleed together. But this program, the Glass Explorer's program, was a pilot testing program. It was really a beta test for the technology itself, and you had to apply to be in it. You actually had to fill out an online form to explain how you would use Google Glass and why you think you would be a good candidate for the Glass Explorer program. Not only that, but you had to pay for it. You couldn't just get a pair. They cost one thousand, five hundred dollars fifteen hundred dollars for a pair of Google Glass. Now, the application process was pretty simple, but it meant that Google could very quickly go through this huge number of applications and decide which ones sound like good choices and which ones don't. Now, in my case, our company bought the pair of Google Glass. I applied for them, but it was a company purchase, so I don't actually own those Google glass anymore, but I was able to buy some. Now I'm going to tell you a funny little story that happened to me. And this is all because Jonathan doesn't pay enough attention when he fills out online forms. So in the United States, there were a couple of different places you could pick up a pair of these glasses once you ordered them, and you had to physically go to these locations. Google did not want to send anything to anyone because they didn't want to deal with the case of someone intercepting a shipment and stealing it or selling it or breaking it apart or whatever. They wanted to keep a tight rain on who actually got their hands on these Google glass So as part of that, you had to go to one of these physical locations to pick up your pair. They did not have one in Atlanta, which is where I live. They had them in Los Angeles, in San Francisco, and New York. Out of those, New York is the easiest for me. To get to. New York is a couple of hours flight from Atlanta. If I want to go to San Francisco or Los Angeles, you're talking four or five hours each way. So I decided I would pick up my Google Glass in New York, and I filled out the form and I indicated the day and location where I wanted to pick it up. But then I realized something I had double booked myself. Something else was happening the day that I had chosen, and Google Glass would allow you to change your delivery date one time only. That's it, so if you messed up, you could change it once and that's all you could do. So I go back on there and I'm like, well, I can't take this day that I thought I was gonna do. I'm going to do this other day. So I chose a different day. I did not realize, however, that by choosing a different day, my choice of destination got reset to the default, which was Los Angeles. So instead of rescheduling to fly to New York, I rescheduled to fly to La So I actually had to fly to Los Angeles go to Venice, California, which is where Google has an office, and pick up my pair of Google Glass. Bright side of it is the day after I got my Google Glass, I got to really try it out at the happiest place on Earth because I went to Disneyland and I brought my Google Glass with me. So funny, stupid story about Jonathan not paying attention. Moral of the story is pay attention on your online forms, especially if you have to resubmit anyway. Back in those days, I still wore eyeglasses. I've had laser eye surgery since then, but back when I got the Google Glass, I still wore eyeglasses, and Google Glass at that point had not been outfitted to work with existing pairs of glasses. You could either wear Google Glass or you could wear a pair of glasses, but you couldn't really do both unless you worked for Google like Sergey Brinn, and you could have someone make a custom pair for you. So instead I would have to wear contact lenses. This was one of those early complaints about the Google Glass program. A lot of people wanted to be able to attach the Google Glass part to an existing pair of glasses, and there was just no way you could do that In May twenty fourteen, Google opened up the Explorer program and allowed more folks to join, and there were talks of special Google Glass stores, including floating barges, off the coast of places like San Francisco and New York. And these were meant to be interactive tech spaces and perhaps even a high end life luxury showroom for Google Glass. But by June twenty fourteen, so May twenty fourteen, this is all in the news, and in fact, the barges have been kind of coming together over the last couple of years, but in June twenty fourteen, the plans for the barges were I guess scuttled is a good word if we're talking about barges. The plans were scuttled. The barges weren't scuttled immediately, but the plans were. They never saw service, they never came online, they never became stores. They did raise a lot of interest as people watched them take form on a daily basis, but they disappeared with about as much of a whimper as could be. They were never really explained, and so they kind of started to become something and then went away before anyone could really figure out what exactly they were going to turn into. In January twenty fifteen, Google pulled the plug on the Explorer program because ultimately it had been a failure, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. So let's rewind a little bit. It's twenty twelve and Project Glass has a divided team. You got two main camps of engineers who are disagreeing about a fundamental aspect of Google Glass. One team thinks this should be a persistent wearable device, meaning you put it on and you wear it all day long. It's like a fashion accessory, it belongs as part of your outfit. The other team disagrees and says, no, this should be something that you're using for specific use cases. So a situation comes up when you would need Google Glass. That's when you put it on, and then when that's over, you take it off again. The two can't agree with which direction they should go in. Saragey Brinn, who's excited about the technology but impatient to wait and get all of this susted out, has an idea. Instead of relying on a relatively small group of engineers and developers, why not create a beta testing program invite a wider group of people to use it in the real world and take that information as a way of developing it further. So, in other words, you open this up, you get a lot more information from a lot more people using it in a lot of different situations, and you see where it works and where it doesn't work, and you make changes. If it works in one case, maybe you pursue that a little more. If it doesn't work in another, maybe you change gears or you try to figure out a way to make it work in that situation. But the point was opening it up to more people meant more information, and more information meant that they could make better decisions. And this was not a bad idea. It could teach Google how people would use the technology and where they should concentrate on building out features. It was really just a larger part of the overall Google Glass experiment, only there was a small problem. The unveiling of Google Glass made it a prestige item. The way they showed it off and the way they rolled it out meant that it became an object of exclusivity. You had to apply to be in the club for one thing, so people were either in it or they weren't. You had to pay fifteen hundred dollars for it, which meant that you needed to have a pretty good amount of discretionary income if you were going to buy something like this. Wearing Google Glass didn't just say I'm interested in technology. It also said I have the money to blow on something that hasn't even become a product yet. And it also said I'm in a club and you aren't. And on top of that, people began to express concerns about privacy issues. I mean, how could someone feel like they could maintain any sort of sense of privacy if they're going out in public and other people have cameras mounted on their faces all the time. I mean, that's what Google glass was. In part. It was an external camera pointing outward the world from the perspective of the person wearing it. Now, Google Glass had included a light to indicate whether the camera was on or not, so that way people could see if perhaps video was being recorded or streamed live over the internet, or if a photo was being taken, and if the light was off, then presumably it wasn't. Now I would encounter strangers who would see me wearing these glasses, and they thought it was the most amazing thing. Ever, and the day I received my parent Los Angeles, it was like I was being treated as a celebrity. People were stopping me to ask about the Google Glass. They wanted to learn more. They were fascinated by the technology. They wanted me to take pictures of them using it. But then I got home and I got around my friends. My friends were different because I hung out with my friends all the time. They knew me. But now I've got a camera on my face pointed at them. And more than once I had friends ask me if I might take off the Google Glass while I had a conversation with them, because they didn't feel comfortable with the thought of a camera looking at them, even if the camera was demonstrably off, if they knew for a fact I wasn't using Google Glass, it was still uncomfortable. And this was a problem that was widespread. It wasn't just anecdotal in my case. So people who were in this program began to be called a new name. The official name was Glass Explorer, but the new name was Glasshole. That hurt. The technology was not ready for a full consumer product. It was never intended to be that. It was meant to be a test bed for this technology. And if you got involved in the program, and if you were honest with yourself about what you were doing and what the product was for, or what the Google Glass was for, you should have been fine with that. You knew from the get go that this was a testing phase of a technology, not something that was ready for prime time. But people began to get frustrated with glasses limited utility. They'd say, like, after a couple of months, they just stopped wearing them because really, I mean, you've got a camera in your pocket already, why do you need another one. They weren't putting Google Glass through more and more uses, which meant that the program was becoming decreasingly important. Over at Google. They were getting less data, which is what they needed in the first place to make Google Glass a successful consumer product. So there wasn't just enough there there to keep people's interest, and the wrong sort of folks had jumped into the program. And by wrong sort of folks, I mean people who thought it was a prestigious thing to be in this club, who spent the money as a way of having something that other people did not have, not as a way of expanding the technology, but as a way of expanding their own status among others, and so interest and support began to wane, both inside and outside the company. But Glass did not disappear. Lots of those features became incorporated into other stuff like Android and Google Home. The phrase okay Google is still used to activate Google's Assistant, which can be on the phone, it could be on Google Home, it can be on other devices. And I apologize if once again I woke it up for those of you who have Android devices nearby, and that can do a lot of different stuff depending upon what Google Assistant is running on. For example, at home, I can use it to listen to different types of music or control my lights on my phone. I can do all sorts of different types of features. And you might even encounter Google hardware Glass hardware in certain industries because, believe it or not, Google Glass does still exist. Google still produces them and still licenses it out, but only to other companies. It's a business to business product now, it's not a consumer product. This is a program I'm called Google at our Glass at work, I should say Glass at work. So rather than this consumer product, this is a device that gives real world assistant to people working in various industries, and it all depends upon the augmented reality apps that the glasses are running. But it could be something like what I was talking about before with mechanics, giving real time, overlaid information on how to do a repair or how to take apart an engine or how to build one. It could be for medical use, it could be even just for corporate use. There are a lot of reasons that Google Glass could come in handy. So it is still around. It's just not a prestige product for glass holes. Now it's doing real work. The sad thing is, I bet Google glasses progress would be much further along if there had not been such a hoopla about it when it was first launched. If it had been launched more like we're trying to develop this technology and less like a rock star, then maybe people wouldn't have gotten so wrapped up in it, And maybe that means that Google would have been able to get more helpful information from people who are really using the technology the way it was intended, and maybe we would see Google Glass much further in development and maybe would even be a consumer product. I'm sure it was discouraging to the Google Glass team to see how things went awry, but it does still exist and AR is still a thing. There are related products that are also pushing augmented reality into a new era. There's Microsoft's hollow lens that's a great example. There's Magic Leap, about which we know very little bits and pieces of information leak out over time, but we're always learning a little bit more. But I'm always going to have a soft spot in my heart for Google Glass. It's something that I think if it had just had a little bit of a lower key rollout, we'd be looking at a very different world with wearables right now, or at least a more advanced one. Hope you enjoyed that classic episode about Google Glass. Obviously you could argue this is another case of Google shelving a product after having some issues getting it to actually, you know, gain traction. Whether Google will ever make a huge jump back in the mixed reality remains to be seen. Honestly, it kind of remains to be seen if anyone can really get that technology to a point where it has mainstream adoption. It's such an expensive and difficult technology to master that it may be a while before we see that. Apple certainly is going to give it a shot, so I have to keep our eyes on that. Hope you're all well and I'll talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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