Google finally finds a true purpose with its new augmented reality glasses… sort of like Apple and its watch

When Google debuted the Glass in 2013 (yeah, nearly a DECADE ago), it had a signature Google flaw – it lacked purpose. Now, with their newly unveiled demo at I/O 2022, Google seems to have finally found a purpose for their AR glasses. Hint, it ties in with the general theme of Google I/O 2022 – to help people.

I remember when Apple was still working on the Watch. There was this consensus that the company was looking to make a watch that was ‘wearable fashion’. Apple even recruited iconic designer Marc Newson and the ex-CEO of Yves Saint Laurent to help design the Watch. A few years later, the Watch isn’t perceived as a fashion-forward wearable – not even by Apple. Instead, somewhere down the road, Apple realized the TRUE purpose of the Watch, to be a health wearable. That moment of clarity seems to have come to Google too, although 9 years later – as they finally realized that strapping an Android device to your eye isn’t an AR headset. Instead, Google’s new augmented reality prototype hopes to allow people to make sense of the world.

Designer: Google

Google XR Glasses Concept by Gokul Beeda

After announcing a whole new catalog of products, including the Pixel 6A, Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, Poxel Buds Pro, Pixel Tablet, and Pixel Watch, Google gave us a taste of an AR Glasses prototype they’ve been working on (labeled Proto 29) that combines natural language processing and transcription to provide subtitles to the real world. Wear the glasses and, in theory, you can understand any language. The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013.

It seems like Google’s making a habit of lifting the veil on their ‘under-wraps’ projects and showing them to the world as a flex of their tech capabilities. Last year, Google gave us a taste of Starline, a holographic chat portal that made virtual conversations feel like people in the same room, talking to one another. Starline’s purpose was to blur the boundaries in a virtual conversation, and in a lot of ways, Google’s new glasses do that for a physical conversation, transcending languages and even disabilities, given that the glasses go a great deal in helping the deaf and people with reduced hearing to understand the world around them.

All that’s nice, but what’s really remarkable is the new Google Glass (or the Proto 29) design. Unlike the 2013 glass, which was as bad as having the word NERD tattooed on your face, these new glasses look remarkably stylish, and there’s absolutely no hint of tech visible even when you take a closer look. Unlike Facebook and RayBan’s Stories, or Snap’s Spectacles, there’s no camera lens in sight, and aside from the Google branding on the temple stem, you really won’t be able to tell that these are advanced AR glasses.

Then again, that’s probably intentional on Google’s part. Knowing that this product won’t release at least for another 2-3 years, it’s possible that Google created a special demo unit that hid all the electronics. All I’m trying to get at is that there’s a lot to know and learn about these spectacles and their design, and I’m willing to bet good money on the fact that the final product may look nothing like the prototype. That being said, let’s not take away from the fact that what Google demonstrated is BEYOND incredible, blurring the line between innovation and magic… and finally demonstrating a pair of AR glasses WITH PURPOSE!

The post Google finally finds a true purpose with its new augmented reality glasses… sort of like Apple and its watch first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Google Glass 2022 concept makes up for all the mistakes Google made with its original AR glasses

Can you believe it’s been nearly 10 years since Google debuted the Glasses, its stab at AR and the Metaverse long before it even occurred to Mark Zuckerberg? Sure, Google’s original glasses were kinda geeky, had limited functionality, and looked absurd enough that they were doomed to fail… but a lot has happened since then. Facebook and Snap have BOTH made tech-infused spectacles, Xiaomi at least announced its Augmented Reality glasses, and the rumor mill is abuzz with news about Apple allegedly working on (and being close to announcing) their AR Glasses. Given that the time is opportune for Google to renew its efforts in this space, this concept revisits the weirdly clunky Google Glass from 2013… but in an infinitely classier avatar.

Designer: Gokul Beeda

Dubbed the Google XR Glasses concept, this little number styles itself on a pair of neo-retro acetate frames, with a chunky design that manages to cleverly conceal all the tech within its form factor. 10 years later, this revised concept seems to get the fact that wearable tech needs to imitate wearable fashion. Bluetooth headsets look like a strange artifact from the 2010 Wall Street era, but the AirPods with their classy design do not. In that very vein, the Google XR Glasses look like your average pair of acetate frames – the design looks incredibly slim and cohesive, but there’s a clear separation between the aesthetic part of the glasses, and the tech part. The aesthetic part, in this case, lies in the front of the glasses and their molded acetate design. The tech, however, sits entirely in the temple stems, not conflicting with the overall visual appeal of the glasses.

While the 2013 Google Glasses looked a lot like a nerdy visual distraction, the 2022 Google XR Glasses concept looks just as classy as your average hipster frames.

What this 2022 Google XR Glasses concept gets right, more so than the aesthetic, is the marriage of tech. Back in 2013, when Google debuted their first edition of the Glass, it wasn’t really even meant for public sale. It was a proof-of-concept of what the Glass could achieve, but it had a ridiculously tiny HUD crystal, an inconsequential camera, and an even more inconsequential app ecosystem. After a rather tepid response from the audience (because Google couldn’t make a compelling sales pitch to users for why they need the device apart from “Look, it’s so shiny and futuristic!”), Google killed the Glass, adding it to the infamous, ever-growing graveyard of Google products that the company axed because they ‘got bored’. (Fun Fact: Ever since its inception, Google’s killed more than 260 of its products/services)

So what did I mean when I said ‘marriage of tech’ in my earlier (slightly disparaging) paragraph? Well, for starters, Google has, in the past decade, really beefed up its hardware and software chops. Its Pixel Tensor chip’s received a fair bit of praise, the ARCore forms the bedrock of all of Android’s AR endeavors, and finally, Google’s Soli chip (which was briefly introduced in Pixel 4) proves to be the biggest ‘secret sauce’ when it comes to gesture-based tech… and all these find themselves in the 2022 Google XR Glasses concept.

The tech in the glasses is pretty much confined to the temple stems. On the front of the stems sit cameras on each side (providing the parallax required to capture depth), along with Soli sensors that can detect and react to gestures (like swiping, tapping, spinning, pinching, etc.), while the digital elements are projected directly onto the Google XR Glasses’ lenses via a projector built into the inside of the temple stem. How the tech would work in reality seems a little up in the air at the moment (this is a concept, after all), although the fact that those aren’t specialty lenses means that people can, at least in theory, have prescription powered lenses built into their Google XR Glasses.

This honestly seems like the perfect storm for Google to re-enter a market they almost accidentally created. The Google Glasses pre-dated any AR headset, and were launched just a year after Oculus debuted their first-gen Rift headset in 2012. In a lot of ways, Google helped create the first spark of the Metaverse, but now seems to blissfully operate outside it while Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple fight out their battle for dominance in this field (although Microsoft hasn’t really announced any plans to build subsequent Hololens devices). In this opportune moment, do you think Google should jump into the battlefield and flex its hardware and software capabilities? Or should the company just sit back and ride this one out as they did with Waymo, Project Ara, the Nexus tablet, the Pixelbook, the Chromecast, or the relatively unmemorable Google Clips camera??

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Facebook just filed a patent for a baseball cap with a built-in AR headset and it looks terribly cringe

This is an opinion piece. All views expressed in this article belong to me, the editor.

I don’t believe in punching down. As the editor of a pretty well-to-do design magazine, it makes little sense to call out individual designers and students over their work. I do, however, believe in being able to hold larger companies and billion-dollar OEMs to a different standard. There is power in being able to critique designs and help the world understand what’s measurably good and what isn’t… which is why I think it’s alright to sometimes critically look at Apple’s Cheesegrater Mac, the Tesla Cybertruck, or in this case, Facebook’s AR Baseball Cap which is frankly ugly enough to make Google Glass look cutting-edge.

Outlined in a patent filed back in 2019, and spotted just this week by Founders Legal, it looks like Facebook’s working on a more accessible AR headset that can be worn everyday, anywhere. The AR headset exists as a snapback-style cap (although there’s a fedora version too) with a flip-to-open display built into its visor. Facebook describes the design for its forward-thinking headgear as an alternative to traditional AR headsets and goggles that can often appear thick and clunky. In doing so, instead of opting for a more sci-fi design, Facebook believes that integrating the headgear into something like a cap or hat that people wear around every day, is a much better solution. I don’t know about you, but I can’t help cringing at the very thought of a sci-fi fedora. In fact, Facebook even indicates that this foldable display system can easily integrate into different cap styles, including potentially even (and this was actually referenced in the patent file) cowboy hats.

Gizmodo writes: It might look extremely silly, but in its patent filing Facebook says there are some notable advantages of a design like this. It makes it easier to position potentially hot electronics farther away from someone’s face, thereby increasing overall comfort and wearability. The length of the visor also makes it easy for Facebook to position AR components like cameras, sensors, etc. It sounds practical in theory, but looks far from aesthetic if you ask me for my completely subjective opinion. The idea of having to wear a cap so that I can access AR functions seems odd. Not to mention the fact that casualwear and cutting-edge tech don’t necessarily go hand in hand. It’s an incredibly delicate tightrope when you’re walking between tech and fashion – Apple’s excelled in this domain, Google’s had a few hits and misses. I don’t think Facebook’s got this one in the bag.

With news about Apple working on AR glasses, it would almost seem like the sensible move to adopt that direction too. More than 70% of all adults wear glasses as opposed to probably the 20-ish percent who wear baseball caps and fedoras on a daily basis. That’s discounting the fact that an even smaller number of people actually wear caps indoors. Besides, I really don’t know if there’s any data on how many people want cyberpunkish fedoras with built-in AR displays. Those numbers are yet to be collected.

Images Credits: Andrew Bosworth (Facebook Technologies, LLC.)

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Google’s Next-Gen Glass Runs on Android, Is Faster than Ever

The third generation of Google Glass has arrived with Glass Enterprise Edition 2. This version largely sticks to the familiar formula that you know on the outside, but we can expect it to be different inside, and more powerful in both hardware and software. Since it’s “built on Android” it will be easier for developers to write apps for it, and you can also enroll it in Android’s enterprise device management to help IT maintain control. There are also some very welcomed changes on the inside though.

The new version runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR1 processor. That means much faster performance and power savings for longer battery life. Which is very helpful when you need to wear Glass for hours on the job. There is also improved camera quality for video streaming and such. It also has a USB-C port for faster charging which is a good addition.

Keep in mind that this version is for work use, and not really for the rest of us. You won’t see them on the street, but you may see them in warehouses, shipping centers and other work environments. It may also attract more corporate customers who want augmented reality eyewear without buying something as cumbersome as Microsoft’s HoloLens 2. Companies interested in the Glass Enterprise Edition 2 can inquire here.

[via Engadget]

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