Google is finally sunsetting their Google Glass product. They had discontinued support for Google Glass a while back, but they’re finally going to stop supporting Google Glass Enterprise Edition. The Google Glass Enterprise Edition was mostly being used by companies.
According to a blog post at Google, “Glass Enterprise Edition has helped workers in a variety of industries—from logistics, to manufacturing, to field services—do their jobs more efficiently by providing hands-free access to the information and tools they need to complete their work.”
In a statement on the Google Glass Enterprise site, Google states, “Thank you for over a decade of innovation and partnership. As of March 15, 2023, we will no longer sell Glass Enterprise Edition. We will continue supporting Glass Enterprise Edition until September 15, 2023.” I suspect that less and less companies are currently using Google Glass, and most have probably moved on from using Google Glass and are using something else at this point.
Google Glass Consumer Edition
Google started selling a prototype of Google Glass to qualified “Glass Explorers” in the US on April 15, 2013, for a limited period for $1,500, before it became available to the public on May 15, 2014. I personally remember a lot of industry friends getting ahold of Google Glass as an Explorer, and paying the $1500 to get the first version of Google Glass.
The first version of Google Glass had an 5 megapixel still/720p video camera. I think the product may have failed ultimately because of the privacy issues that were a concern for many people.
According to Wikipedia, on January 15, 2015, Google announced that it would stop producing the Google Glass prototype, to be continued in 2017 tentatively. In July 2017, Google announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition. In May 2019, Google announced the Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2. Now, today, they have announced that they’re going to stop supporting Enterprise Edition 2 in September 2023.
What’s interesting to me is that even though Google Glass (consumer edition) never really took off, there are actually some other related products that are on the market today, such as the Facebook/Ray Ban Smart Glasses.