Google shuts down Google Glass Enterprise, ends early AR project

Google The company announced on its website on Wednesday that it has stopped selling its Glass Enterprise smart glasses. The company said that in September Google will also stop supporting its software.

The move marks the end of the line for one of the first — and still most recognizable — smart glasses product lines from the big tech company.

Glass Enterprise was the successor to Google Glass, a lightweight eyeglass product that displayed small pieces of information on a transparent screen in the user’s field of view.

Glass was first sold to developers and early adopters in 2013 for $1,500 and quickly captured the imagination of tech enthusiasts. But the Glass project never caught on as a mainstream product at Google, despite support from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The built-in camera led to a fight over privacy, and the product became the butt of jokes on late-night television.

By 2017, Google was positioning the product as a tool for enterprises, such as streaming healthcare appointments or training workers on a factory floor.

Google recently released a new $999 version of the hardware in 2019.

Google’s retreat comes as rivals, including meta And AppleAugmented reality and virtual reality are investing in technology that could end up in devices that are the much more sophisticated Google Glass.

Meta has released Ray-Ban smartglasses with cameras but no display and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken publicly about a Google Glass-like final look for the product line.

Apple is reportedly preparing a virtual reality headset that can use video from external cameras like a transparent lens to display the outside world.

Microsoft has its own augmented reality glasses for businesses, HoloLens, but the company reportedly laid off parts of the team working on it earlier this year and Alex Kipman, the device’s creator, is leaving the company in 2022 .

However, the discontinuation of Glass doesn’t mean Google has given up on augmented reality or SmartGlass. Last summer, Google previewed a separate pair of smartglasses that could translate and transcribe speech in real time, and said it would continue to publicly test augmented reality glasses prototypes.