From Star to Punchline in Three Years: The Short Life of Google Glass

In its fourth year, Google Glass has reached the end of the road as a consumer product.

In 2012, Google Glass was the darling of fashion and tech, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin wore it down a New York Fashion Week runway. In 2013, soon after the developer edition began shipping, the fever broke: Seattle, parts of the UK and other public places began banning it as an invasion of privacy. In 2014, Google Glass became a byword for snooping and a target of parody; a wearer was attacked in San Francisco, and jokes about the device spread faster than praise... Over three years, Google Glass rode a roller coaster straight down.

Now, in its fourth year, how many people are still waiting to see Google Glass on store shelves? You may be waiting forever. Last weekend Google announced it would stop selling the US$1,500 "Explorer" edition of Google Glass, and shut down the entire Explorer program aimed at consumers.

Unless you are a partner in Glass for Work (a Google program that puts smart glasses to professional use), you can no longer buy Google Glass. With the Explorer program over, the Glass team has also "graduated" from Google X, the company's secretive research lab. It will now report to Tony Fadell, head of the smart-home division, and keep developing future versions.

This is not a death sentence for Google Glass, but Google has admitted that Glass failed as a consumer product. Look back at its life as a "consumer product" and you see that the same premise made it and broke it.

The original idea: a consumer AR product that distracts less

At TechCrunch Disrupt NY this year, Astro Teller, head of Google X, said the original idea behind Google Glass was to reduce the distraction technology causes, the opposite of today's ever-present smartphones. Phones and other smart devices, he argued, make people more distracted, forcing them to switch back and forth between the "real world" and the "digital world."

"Ideally, people shouldn't have to wrestle with the UI. The only moments people should notice the UI are when it finishes a task and disappears, or when they take the glasses off."

Google built Glass around this idea of "not distracting people": a frameless eyeglass frame with a small display above the left eye. Voice commands turned the device on and off and took photos, and the display could use augmented reality (AR) to lay virtual information over the real world... At the time, few fully functional consumer AR devices were on the market, and Google saw an opening.

For a company of Google's size, the logic was sound. In late 2011 and early 2012, as smart hardware took off, Google needed to chase the biggest slice of the market, and it had the means to do so.

It was exactly this pairing, "consumer product + AR," that made Google Glass an internet sensation the moment it was announced. In April 2012, a Google concept video called "One Day" made big promises: Google Glass would give you real-time directions, send texts, take photos and let you share your view with your girlfriend, and life with it on your face would be full of happiness:

Plenty of people who watched that video probably wanted to shout at Google, "Shut up and take my money." By painting an AR dream of a "post-smartphone era," Google made people fall in love with Google Glass, or at least with the idea of it.

Early star power

A concept and a video were not enough. The other reason Google Glass stayed so hot from 2012 through the first half of 2013 was celebrity.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin was Glass's chief promoter. In April 2012, a few days before the project was announced, he wore the glasses to a charity dinner and was "caught on camera," as a teaser. In September 2012, the designer Diane von Furstenberg sent her models down the runway in Google Glass, and Brin joined her for the closing walk.

In March 2013, he gave a TED talk on what inspired Google Glass, and a month later he was photographed riding the subway in it... Even Larry Page, Google's normally low-key other co-founder, wore Google Glass to a wedding in 2013.

Celebrities loved Glass early on, too. Britain's Prince Charles liked to pose for photos in it, and Kunal Nayyar, who plays Raj on The Big Bang Theory, wore it to the 2013 Emmy Awards.

Even the Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann put a pair on for a photo after a Republican Party meeting. Other figures from entertainment and media, including the actors Kevin Smith and Neil Patrick Harris and Tim O'Reilly, chief executive of O'Reilly Media, eagerly tweeted their way into the online contest for the first batch of Glass purchase slots. It was quite a party.

Tech moguls, fashion stars and socialites all loved Google Glass, and the public never tired of tracking which celebrity wore it where. Trend-chasers believed Google Glass was the coolest wave since the smartphone, and that anyone who didn't jump on early would be left behind.

Once it shipped: what is it for?

Surprisingly, the moment Google Glass hardware shipped was also the moment the bad reviews poured in.

In April 2013, the first developer units shipped, priced at US$1,500. As more people put Glass on, some wearing it for long stretches, a few began to ask: what exactly does Google Glass do?

By Astro Teller's account, Google Glass was supposed to deliver a superb AR experience that didn't distract. In fact, even the hardware disappointed. After the product shipped, Business Insider ran a piece titled "Nobody Really Likes Google Glass," listing its hardware flaws:

• The battery lasts only 3-4 hours;
• It easily makes you dizzy and unable to focus on what is around you;
• The screen is hard to see in bright light;
• You cannot adjust brightness, WiFi or Bluetooth while wearing the glasses;
• Voice recognition is full of bugs;
• You need a phone with you to use Google Glass, because the glasses have no cellular data connection;
• It is hard to take off;
• It is hard to reply to messages.

So much for the hardware. What about the software? Despite the fanfare at launch, the small screen and limited use cases kept the number of apps from growing. In fact, most content apps could not display their content in full and offered only notifications or bare headlines:

• Google's own services: the voice assistant Google Now, Google Maps, the social network Google+ and Gmail.
• News and media: The New York Times, CNN, the fashion magazine Elle.
• Social: Path, Foursquare.
• Lifestyle: the note-taking app Evernote, the workout coaching app Strava, the recipe app AllTheCooks, the instant-translation app Word Lens, the e-book app Kindle.
• Merchant services: OpenTable for restaurant reservations, the travel app TripIt.

It looks as though every base is covered. But do you really want to read the latest headlines from Elle, CNN and The New York Times on Google Glass? Or read Kindle books on a screen that small? Even Google's most loyal fans could not hold back. The journalist Jeff Jarvis, who wrote a book about Google and uses the full range of Google products, from the Nexus 5 to the Chromebook Pixel, kept saying on social media that he wanted to return his Google Glass:

"Google Glass is weird, useless and expensive, and the frame design is terrible. An expensive nightmare."

On the American Q&A site Quora, you can even find the question "What is Google Glass useful for?" The top-voted answer discusses its value not as a consumer product but in professional work.

The doubts pile up

Even as the hype around Google Glass kept building, a different voice emerged, and it became the dominant theme of 2013: Google Glass threatened people's privacy, and wearing it was itself a safety risk because it distracted the wearer.

In February 2013, Joshua Topolsky of The Verge, who got Google Glass early to test it, walked into a Starbucks wearing it, with several photographers in tow. Starbucks staff immediately stopped the photographers from shooting, but Topolsky wrote proudly: "So what? I was still filming with my Google Glass the whole time."

The Guardian ran a long piece on the issue, arguing that Google Glass invades privacy: the ability to record anywhere, anytime was worrying enough on its own. How was it different from a pinhole camera worn on the body?

As these safety and privacy worries festered, Google Glass went from a device everyone craved to a symbol of hostility.

In April 2014, Kyle Russell, a 20-year-old journalist, wore Google Glass into a San Francisco restaurant. After other diners shouted "Glass!", someone yanked the glasses off his face and knocked him to the ground with a punch.

Drivers wearing Google Glass were another worry. In July 2013, Britain moved to bar drivers from wearing it, saying the device would make it easy to text or check messages at the wheel and dangerously distracted. In October 2013, a woman in Los Angeles was fined for driving while wearing Google Glass.

As privacy and safety concerns mounted, many American restaurants refused to serve customers wearing Google Glass. In November 2013, a restaurant called Lost Lake posted a notice on Facebook asking diners not to wear Google Glass or any other device that films people without permission. Seattle's 5 Point Cafe had long since posted a sign at its door banning Google Glass inside.

More and more people, it seems, treated Google Glass as a joke. Its odd look on the face and the suspicion that it invaded privacy left it on the losing side of public opinion. The online outlet Mashable once made a short film called GlassHole, mocking the annoying habits of Google Glass wearers:

If you haven't laughed enough yet, here are 10 Google Glass parody videos for your enjoyment.

Who still loves Google Glass?

At TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2014, the well-known investor Fred Wilson asked the several hundred people in the room how many had used Glass. Most raised their hands. He then asked how many still used it every day. Almost no one did. The audience was mostly tech founders, tech journalists and tech investors, the very crowd that had been most excited about Google Glass in the first place.

At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that just wrapped up in 2015, we also saw very few people walking around in Google Glass. The media, and even the eager evangelists who follow tech, appear to have given up on it.

As a consumer product, leave aside whether Google Glass was technically ready. Under legal scrutiny, and in a society increasingly concerned about privacy, an everyday wearable AR device with a full camera and recording functions, like Google Glass, still struggles to become a truly popular consumer product.

Still, even though Google Glass failed as a consumer product, it did put wearables and AR in the spotlight. Yesterday at the Geek Park Innovation Conference, Ray Kurzweil, a director of engineering at Google and a well-known futurist, said he believes the form of smart glasses will change, but that Google Glass is headed in the right direction:

"Not having to take out a device is the right direction, because our eyes are our device."

Indeed, the merging of technology and people will go on. It will not stop here.