The Vergecast - Version History: Google Glass

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

Google didn't invent the concept of smart glasses, but it was one of the first companies to actually put them on people's faces. It was a revolution, and also a problem: Google made face computers extremely uncool, and its early user base was so off-putting they became collectively known as “Glassholes.” The Verge’s Victoria Song and Waveform’s David Imel break down why Glass failed — despite being shockingly right about the future of technology. If you like the show, ⁠⁠follow the Version History feed⁠⁠ to make sure you get every new episode as soon as it drops. ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[e-mail]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Hey, it's your friend David Pierce here. I just wanted to let you know that this week and next week we're dropping the first two episodes

from season two of our new show version history. We had the whole first season on this feed, so hopefully you've heard the show already. And you've also already heard these episodes if you follow the dedicated version history feed. If you like the show, go follow that feed to hear all the new episodes as soon as they arrive. But just in case we really liked this episode,

and we just wanted to share. Let's get into it. Our relationship with technology could use a reset. We all spend all of our time just staring down at screens. But what if instead we could stare kind of up into the right at screens? That's what Google thinks might be the answer, and it's built a product called Glass that puts a screen on your face that might just change everything. From the verge of Vox Media, this is version history,

a show about the best and worst and strangest and most important products in tech history. I'm David Pierce, and on this episode, it's time to talk about the biggest thing in the history of smart glasses. Welcome back. It's time for Google Glass. V Song is here. Hi, V. Hello. David Amel, also here with us. Hello, hello. I have brought you both here because we have all been alive and in this world through Google Glass.

Yes. You both have covered wearables in lots of different ways. sort of from Google Glass all the way up through now. And I think like that, there's a lot of that story I want to talk about. Just to spoil my own intentions here at the very beginning, I think history looks very kindly on Google Glass. And I think there's some really fun things we should talk about. Google Glass is right about more things than we realized is my overall thesis for what we're about to talk about. Except Tally indicator lights. Except all of the many things it was wrong about. Of which there are thousands. Which is why we're here to do this now. But I am curious.

You both are wearables people in general. Were you both Google Glass people at the time? I was too poor personally to have one, and I was not working at a publication that would be gifted one at that time. But I was in the space. I did see people wearing it. I eventually did a documentary on Google Glass and other smart glasses. So I did get to go to the Google X Moonshot factory and try on every single prototype at one point. Okay.

Yeah. So you experienced Google Glass jealousy in the very brief window in which people experienced Google Glass jealousy. I did. And then, you know, Google Glass stuff happened. And then, you know, I got to study it from like a historical perspective. And, you know, now I feel no jealousy. One thing we're going to talk about is how quickly that arc happened. Yeah.

I felt no jealousy after a while. Or very quickly I felt no jealousy. And I was like, ah, all right. Cool. Okay. David. My jealousy arc was fast-moving because I remember distinctly sitting in my college dorm watching the announcement thing. It was the coolest thing ever getting all hyped for ambient computing being like, am I going to spend $1,500 that I do not have on an Explorer edition of one of these? And I remember being on the checkout page. Oh, wow. And my finger was hovering over that checkout button on my Samsung Chromebook for so long. And I didn't. And then when that arc eventually finished, over the course of a very short period of time, I then started to feel better,

especially since people were getting, like, harassed for wearing them and, you know, pulled over on the highway. So let's just, the meat of this story is actually weirder than I remembered. So let's just get into it. So the story starts, I think, in kind of 2010, with this guy named Babak Parviz, who was a professor at the University of Washington and also worked in Google's X lab.

And a thing I learned relatively recently about Google is there was a long run where Google would just hire professors doing interesting science work and just pay them a ton of money to come do some of that work at Google. They were like, keep your normal job. But here's a lot of money. Come just like hang out on the weekends and like make things for Google. Wild times at Google. And this like led to lots of really interesting things.

And one of the things that Bobaq Parviz was working on was all kinds of bio-nano technology. He was one of the people really early building contact lenses with embedded electronics. This was like his big idea academically and professionally was like, I want to do this stuff on context. So he starts working on this stuff and at this point like context were impossible. Contacts are still impossible, but like starting to push towards this idea of like, how do I do things sort of with and around your eyes? Because they had this insight that I think everyone has had for decades and everybody is still having now that like wouldn't it be great if instead of looking down at screens all the time we could look at each other, right? and we could have the sort of upsides of the digital world and the information that we want and all this stuff without being like this staring down at our phones all of the time. This is the pitch for the Apple Watch several years later.

This is the pitch for all of the wearables ever since. This is the pitch for all of the stuff that V wears on your body all of the time. I feel like you are told this story about connection six times a month. I have been told this story six times a month for the past 10 years, basically. So, you know, somebody do the math on that. That's a lot of times. I did like, so Steve Lee, who will come up a few times in this, he was a product director at Google.

He told Josh Topolsky, the Verges, former editor-in-chief, why are we even working on glass? We all know that people love to be connected. Families message each other all the time. Sports fanatics are checking live scores for their favorite teams. If you're a frequent traveler, you have to stay up-to-date on flight status or if your gate changes. Technology allows us to connect in that way. A big problem right now are the distractions that technology causes.

If you're a parent, let's say your child's performance, watching them do a soccer game or musical, often friends will be holding a camera to capture that moment. Guess what? It's gone. You just missed that amazing game. Nothing has changed. Nothing. Nothing. That's still the same. It's crazy. I think it was right about a few of those things. But also some of the other things that we've seen more recently is like, I used to be a big believer that the ambient technology of just having some notifications come in so that you can keep living your life and not fall into your phone was a great idea. And now the idea of notifications coming in on my eyes is the word. worst idea in my opinion. It's because like there's no control over the notification flow. Like there's

the idea is that it does it for you. It surfaces things that make sense in the moment. And the reality is is that you have to do so much curation for that for it to make sense. Like my hands are just buzzing at any given point in time. Today is a rare exception where I'm, I'm, you know, going free on one arm. But usually it's just like you got to have phantom vibrations all over your body. I do all the time. It's concerning. Yeah. This is the world Google wanted us all to look at. So this was also like, I should set the stage for what the X lab was at the time.

This was like, and still is in a lot of ways. This is where Google just like plays. This is like if you're a company that has the best business in the history of the internet in search engines, you just throw a bunch of money at like some things. They called the moonshots, right? Like you said, this was this was the moonshot factory. I miss this era so much. I know. This was like Google at its weirdest and most fun. It was a very cool place to visit. I will say, like you go and everyone's just like, he-he. Astro Teller, the guy who ran it famously, like, ran around on rollerblades everywhere. It was like...

It was my first introduction to actually a Google campus was the Moonshot factory. And I was like, whoa. Like, every stereotype of that Silicon Valley comes out of that building. Yeah. It's crazy. Yeah. But anyway, so this is like, there was no, I don't think, pretense that, like, this might be a product anytime soon. It was just like a thing that they were working on.

This seemed like a cool idea. Like, this is a sort of Googly way of thinking about the, world. Like, it all makes sense. So they start building prototypes. Let me show you a bunch of of the prototypes. V, are these? Do these look familiar? Are these the kind of ones that you saw? Those are the ones I actually wore on my face. Can you describe sort of what they are and what they felt like? So, like, if you look at them, they are basically a pair of frames with very large components on them that seem like they're just like crazy glued on, like circuit boards. They are legit. There's like, you know, there's the frame.

And then there's like circuit boards on the sides where the temple arms are. So when you put them on, you kind of are just like, this is something a student built at a science fair. It does not feel like an actual product. In one of them, you can just see blue tape just kind of hanging down. And I remember when I wore one, there was like a circuit board that was just dangling in front of my eye. And I was like just playing around with it. Like, is this good? Is this good?

And, you know, there's six there, but I think I tried closer to 10 just because there were so many. And they told me at the time that one had the battery in a backpack that you had to wear, too, in like the really early times. So, you know, it's very mad scientist looking. Just like, I don't know if you've ever seen Steve Mann. He's considered the father of wearables. And he has something called the eye tap. So it kind of looks like the Explorer Edition, but it's actually melded into his body. Oh, yeah. It gives you that kind of biohacker feel when you look at them. Yeah. They're very cool. And this is like what things always look like in this phase, right? But so this is like not long before this becomes a real product. They're just messing around, right?

Playing with this kind of stuff. And this is also like late 2010, early 2011 is kind of right as it starts to come out that Apple is starting to think about wearables. This is like the first glimmers of what would become the Apple Watch start to come out. Word starts to get out that Google has actually hired people from Nokia and Apple and other companies. Android is taking off. They want to build Android into more things. They're like, okay, how do we do Android wearables? So there's just this like confluence of stuff happening. And then you get the sense that basically like some Google executive, I think almost certainly Sergey Britten, the co-founder of Google walked into the X lab building one day, saw this on somebody's face and goes, yes. And that, like it's as simple as that at this time at Google. If Sergei's into it, he is going to do whatever he wants with it and potentially ruin everyone's lives forever, which is where we are headed. So again, there's like a bunch of people inside of Google working on this kind of idea. There was another Googler who had worked on a thing called memory glasses, which was a memory aid with context awareness that could like use glasses to sort of see what's going on.

We're just back. Nothing has changed. It's crazy. Yeah. And so it starts to become obvious that Google is working on some kind of. kind of glasses. There was this report out there in about 2011 that Google was working on thick-rimmed, sort of normal-looking glasses, which turned out to be just flatly not the case. There was also, do you guys remember something called the Oakley Thump? Oh, man, wait. Can I show you? I'm going to show you a picture from a CNET review. This is a picture of big, shunky, oakly glasses with two dangly headphones. Did this have an Intel Curie chip inside of it? It did not. Okay. That was maybe a later Oakley product. It might have been. Oakley has been at this, like, a sneakily long time.

Yeah. Part of my stinted until I was like a marketing manager for Curie and we launched some Oakley smart glasses. Oh, yeah. I was like not sure. They don't look like that. But yeah. 6.7 in the C-Net Review. Great job.

They were somewhere between $4 and $500. So this is like the smartest smart glasses kind of anybody had seen at the time. And this becomes the thing people start to think of as like, okay, this is probably. what Google is building. But nobody knows anything until April of 2012 when I'm going to say a sentence that is extremely 2012. Google announces on Google Plus that it is working on a product called Google Glass. And they dropped a video just like out.

This is one of the weirdest product launches. There was no fanfare, no nothing. Google just drops this video being like, here is what we think the future is going to look like. The title of the YouTube video is One Day. Let me just play a little bit of it for you. I remember. Day in the Life video, all through glass.

P-O-V. Waking up. I remember this video. Yeah, me too. This video, like, blew up the internet. Making coffee. And you're seeing every, through it all, little like notification bubbles and pieces of information as you go around your day.

Computer. This was the idea. What I wanted. Yeah. A chat window pops up says, want to meet up today. Meet me in front of Strand Books. Oh, my God. At two.

Eating his bagel because he's in New York. Strand books. That's another. So it goes on like this. He gets directions. It gives him lots of information. This is like, this is the day and the life story. Is it an unlisted video?

It is now. How many views does it have? It has 22 million views. Holy crap. I remember the day this came out. Do you guys remember the day? I do. I remember the day.

You know, I replay this video in my nightmares. constantly just because it's so iconic to this segment. Just this is this is a piece of tech history in a way that is giving me PTSD right now. Dave, where were you on the day? I was in my dorm. I spent a lot of time.

These kind of videos were the reason I was so freaking hyped just about Google. I owe every single year because like you said, the X projects, they just had all these professors. Like when they had Google photos and they started doing, you know, recognition of people's faces and your pets and all that kind of stuff, that all came from like the early before transformer type stuff. And then they had Project Loon. They had Sully. All of that like came out of Project X from a random professor who was working on a weird project.

So every year at I.O and like before I owed, they would, they would drop this kind of stuff. And I just, I wanted to work at Google so bad. Like that was my number one goal at the time. Interesting. And that pivoted hard later. but we can do it do that later. Yeah, I distinctly remember, like, how momentous this felt. And I think in retrospect, we now have 13 intervening years of Google faking demos for its videos.

And so, like, of course this was not the thing. But it said, you know, one day, right? And I think this as, like, a vision for what the future of technology might be. Like, it's hard to remember now because we've seen stuff like this and we've seen stuff like this. We've seen all the ways that it fails. This was like still in the days where not everyone you knew had a smartphone. And this is going to be the next thing. And it's going to be mapped into the world.

Like the thing where he responds to the text via voice was like a huge piece of news. There's a story in the New York Times. There's some stuff out there. Everybody covers it. Everybody freaks out. It's big news. And then a couple of days later, our boy, Sergey Brin, just starts rolling into rooms wearing Google Cloud. So this is a picture of him with Robert Scoble, who will come up again in a few minutes, wearing a prototype.

And so this becomes like Sergey Brin walks into rooms and just gets mobbed because this thing was like a huge deal. It was big news. It's like we always talk about things that sort of cross into the local news spectrum. Like it did a small town somewhere in Connecticut run a segment about this. Like Google Lass fully crossed that guy. Everybody was talking about it. And Sergey Brin just like rolls out and everybody's like, Sergei, is that cuckle glass?

And he's like, yeah, it's cool. No worries. It doesn't appear that they were functioning and he was kind of sketchy about whether they were working or not. But he took a, like, he took pictures with Robert Scoble. He was out doing stuff. I mean, they had five hour battery life. So they're probably just dead. It's very possible.

But so they like, the point is they're sort of just leaking out into the public, right? Like, I don't know how much of this we're supposed to know and how much of this is just. Sergei Bryn being the co-founder of Google and doing whatever he wants. But it's like starting to come out. And then a couple of weeks later, we get another piece of information when Sebastian Thrun, who was one of the big moonshot people in the X-Lab, goes on Charlie Rose's show. Again, like to understand how mainstream this was, he went on with Charlie Rose and took a picture of him. We start getting more patent filings and stuff. there is this cool one that I found from a while back about the control mechanism Google was imagining.

It thought you might be able to control it with bracelets or rings or even your fingernails, which I thought was very cool. But yeah, this one patent photo that I found is literally just straight up a smart ring that controls Google Glass. And like, again, not to keep saying nothing has changed. But nothing has changed. This is like there are actual smart glasses out right now with this. exact control paradigm. So it's, it's just insane. I love this little drawing, though. It is a good. Patent drawings are just an endless mine of delightful things. Would either of you like to guess who, to the best of my knowledge, the first non-googler to try Google Glass in public was? It's going to be like some celebrity.

I feel like it's a celebrity, but I don't know. I don't remember who was famous at 2012. What's that celebrity that had the Twitter, the first to a million followers guy, and he was the Nikon ambassador? Dead wrong. It was Gavin Newsom. Oh. Okay. Our man, Gavin has changed. Currently, the governor of California, then just a handsome guy on television.

Wait, what was he doing at that point? He was hosting a TV show. What? Sergey Ren went on his show, the Gavin Newsom show. I believe he was the lieutenant governor also. Oh, that's weird. But he's a handsome guy, so they give him a TV show. Okay.

What? And Sergey Brin actually let Gavin Newsom put the glasses on. Incredible photo. And took a photo with him. And then I think there's a line in the story that we wrote at the time that says, Bryn tells Newsom how he just took a photo without his interviewer even noticing. Newsom wanted proof. So Brin just let him try the glasses on and see it for himself. Like again, it's not like the hints weren't there.

I'm just screaming internally. And it was 2012. So like any sort of surveillance stuff was not normalized at all. all. Right. Yeah. Right. So, okay. Without him even noticing. So this brings us to June of 2012, Google I.O. With what I would call, I sincerely think I mean this the greatest live demo of all time. Yeah, I agree. Like, I really earnestly believe this. Do you want to set this up? Do you remember? Yes. Okay. So Sergei is giving the keynote inside of the Moscone Center in San Francisco. And he brings out glass. He starts talking about it. And he goes, we're going to do a really cool live demo right now. It shoots up to a

blimp that's flying over San Francisco. And there's all these skydivers in the blimp. And they're being, they're live streaming from their Google Glass. And I talked to Hugo Barra about this a little bit last night. He was like head of platforms at Google at the time. He said they had to invent a bunch of like novel networking technology to make this work. This is like first iPhone almost didn't make phone calls level. Yes.

Okay. Yes. Because Sergey was like he needed this to be. the demo. He basically just got all the resources in Google for the like three months prior to this demo were funneled into this demo working. But here, let me just

play you a little bit of this demo because even all these years later, I think this is still the coolest live demo it is incredible. So basically they have these they're technically wingsuit divers. They're not quite skydivers but they are flying down towards the Moscone Center.

And as far as we know, all of the footage they're capturing is actually live out of glass. Hugo didn't tell you there was some fake thing. No, he said nothing was fake. And then Sergey was very, very heavy set on the fact that nothing was pre-recorded or fake. That's wild. Yeah. Yeah. So they go down, they skydive, they skydive, and then they drop down onto the roof.

And there are BMX bikers who then receive the Google Glass. This part I had forgotten. No, you got to watch this part because these BMX peckers are crazy. They go so fast. and they like, they do like a back flip off the roof. It's so cool. It's being live streams. They're going off of a ramp off of one part of the roof,

doing a flip onto the higher part of the roof, where they then will hand the Google Glass to some repellers. Oh my God. Of people that repel too quickly down the building. Sergei gets nervous because it seems that they are falling. He goes, oh, are they okay? Are they okay? So now they were repelling down the building and you'll hear that Sergey kind of freaking out.

I appreciate that he's saying don't try this at home. But. All right. Are they going? Wait, wait, wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. They're like running down the hill. Oh, man. So then they, the repellers then hand off to some more mountain bikers for some reason.

They just keep handing off the glass. We're almost there. Before. And this, like, Sergey Brin is not a good enough factor to fake being that nervous. He's like, I am about to kill someone during a live demo at Google I. So they hand it off to some other BMX bikers who then fly through the Moscone Center and there are just attendees standing there. And he almost, they almost run over a bunch of attendees who are confused about what the heck is happening. Oh, that poor man.

And he rides directly through the crowd, almost hitting multiple people. It's going so fast. Look at the speed of this. It's nuts. Isn't this nuts? And watching it in 2012 resolution. Incredibly problematic in so many ways. So good. And this is also the first time we learned what Glass actually was.

We saw the thing. They demoed it. They showed a little bit how it was going to work. And most importantly, they announced what it was going to cost. It was called the Google Glass Explorer Edition. They were very careful to say this was not yet a consumer product. The plan was to have a consumer product by 2014. Again, this is June of 2012.

They're like, in 2014, we're going to have like a mainstream available thing. but this one is the Explorer Edition and it's $1,500. Yeah. But this is the first moment we know this is like a real thing that we can touch and hold and use. And that is these.

This is the Google Glass Explorer Edition in, I don't know, like a silver brown color. Like a dark beige. Toot. And it basically, I had forgotten how like light and simple it is. It's basically it's just a little band with two pieces for your nose.

And then a thing on the right that has like the little sort of transparent glass projector thing. Yeah. And then a camera and the body of it. Like this is a surprisingly elegant piece of hardware. I think Google Glass is a good name because they are not glasses. That's the thing. It's glass. It's the one glass.

It's the right eye. It is misleading. And. Okay. But here's the question. Is this a good looking gadget? Absolutely. Absolutely not.

No. Okay, that's good. So now we litigated that already. I love them. So, but you bring up a good point because Google was like desperate to make these things not nerdy gadgets. Like went way out of its way to try and make these like cool cultural objects. I mean, if you're going to measure how mass market a thing is, is will your grandma wear this? Your sweet little grandma Betsy.

I'm envisioning it. Will your sweet little grandma Betsy go like, oh, dearie? yes, I will wear this. That is convenient. Like, will your grandma Betsy wear this? And I guarantee you, Grandma Betsy ain't worn it. My grandma never has a smartphone. Someass market. But I think the way you get to, was it Betsy or Bessie? I don't want to get it wrong. Betsy. Betsy. Okay. I think the way you get to Grandma Bessie is like making it like celebrity cool first. In September of 2012, Glass shows up at the New York Fashion Week. This is like a tried and true playbook.

This is like if your Apple, if you're Apple, it is. If you're beats, if you have some like... Your humane pins. I'm just about to say that. If you have a gadget that you want people to like not only tolerate but like think is cool, you go to fashion week and you like pay a very good looking set of people to wear it. Just, David, you're killing me here. I love them.

David, these look better on you than I anticipate it. I have to say. It's like upsetting me how they kind of work for you. Yeah. Which is probably both the compliment and an insult now that I say. It does work for you. But I will take the compliment that I look good. in glass.

Not glasses. Also, it depends on the celebrity, which is what I was going to say. Because if you have the right celebrity marketing the thing, if they're known for fashion, if you have Zendaya wearing this, okay, maybe. If you have Zendaya wear this at the Met Gala, okay, maybe you can convince people. If you have a nameless model just walking down wearing a hoketure fashion that 90% of people won't ever wear. Yeah.

That's not relatable per se. I think that's right. I agree with that. I think that is right. I do. But the other thing was, so Google kept at this for a lot of. long time. And we had, this is a story from the next year. This is August of 2013 that we did with one of my favorite verge headlines of all time, which says Google Glass is in Vogue, the magazine,

but not yet in Vogue. Very good headline. Very good headline. But this was a 12-page spread in Vogue magazine that was like all about Google Glass. It's super fascinating. And again, like you can see it's trying to do a thing that is both like fashion and science fiction and it's all sort of like retro futuristic. It's just really interesting. And I think the thing I like about this kind of stuff is you can really see what Google wants this to be in the world. And it's like some of these pictures are like, this is not trying to hide glass. This is, this is how do we make it iconic? It's making a statement. Yeah. This is why maybe the New York Fashion Week thing kind of fits it, Because New York Fashion Week is known for just very outlandish stuff.

Statement pieces. And it does kind of lend itself to that. Yes. But then again, you have to think about the average person. Sure. Who among your friends that you can think of is very confident and comfortable wearing statement pieces. Most people are not. Most people don't want to stand out in that way.

I do. I love it. But like, not everyone is comfortable. Ironic coming from the land of wearing sweatshirts to work. And that's it. Yeah. Especially at the time. This would maybe work in Manhattan when everybody is just trying to peacock all the time or in Williamsburg.

Yeah. But not, yeah, not San Francisco. Not in the basement that I work in every day. Right. Yeah. But okay. So just to like keep anchoring us in time here, right? So now we're at the end.

Let's get to the end of 2012. Okay. Google, like, first talked about it in April, officially launched it in June, hadn't shipped the damn thing to anybody, but is still just sort of trickling bits out. And this is one of the things I had forgotten was we covered this thing vastly more before it launched than after. Yeah. Which is, I think, in a real way, like, there's the story of Google Glass, right? It's like, once we got our hands on it, we all kind of understood it. It's kind of tech blogging, right?

But Boba Parviz, who is, again, the person who, like, started this whole project, gives an interview with IEE Spectrum at the end of 2012, basically, like, laying out the big idea. And he talks about AR, and he talks about pictorial community. which is basically like video chat and information access. He said there were no plans for ads, which raises the question, how is Google ever going to make money off of this? I assume the answer is ads and he just didn't know that yet. Also at this point, Google is working with Warby Parker. It's still, it's like trying to make this thing happen and you can see the big idea, right?

And the big idea remains the big idea. This is what I mean by. I don't think, I think history will look back on Google Glass fondly that like they were right about at least what we would spend the next 13 years working on as a tech industry like it had it had all sort of directionally right theories about

what AR was going to be about what video chat was going to be about about ambient computing which was like not a thing we were talking about yet it was it was wrapping all of this stuff into one product that sucked but so the next big turn for us

comes in early-ish 2013 when Josh Topolsky, America's preeminent scholar of Google Glass, got to try them on. This was in the

relatively early days of the Verge probably the biggest story in the history of the Verge. We were in our tiny little one room office

right off of Union Square. This was all, it was huge. This was like a monumental day in the history of the verge. Let me just play you a clip of Josh trying

these on for the first time. I can see it fine. It says, okay, Glass. 325. It's completely... Oh, record a video. Okay. Oh, yeah. And now I can see.

So this is seeing what I'm seeing, though. He's standing there with two of the people who ran this project for Google. You don't have to. You just... See, Lee and Nes-O-Vee. Okay, Glass. See, better than Metterrey vans, these can record in horizontal. I mean, that's very cool.

Instead of just vertical. This was the moment that it was like, okay, we actually start to understand this thing. We spent, like, time sort of out in the world using it, taking pictures. One of the funny things at the very beginning of that, clip that I saw over and over in my prep for this was everybody had the same experience, which is you put it on. It doesn't work. And then you like adjust something a little bit.

And then you can see the tiny screen up in the top right corner of your vision. And then it starts to work. But it like so many people were like, I put it on and I was like, what is this broken piece of trash? For the 7,000th time in this podcast, nothing has changed. No, I mean. Nothing has changed. And this was true before this too. When you have those kind of like beam splitters or whatever they're used.

using. You do have to be very specifically. It's like when you go to one of those, one of those telescope things in New York and you have to like look through it the right way, because if you don't look through the direct center, it's all foviated and weird. And yeah, it's not good. I mean, what I'm going to say is like, so CES 2025, it was like the year of the smart glasses. And I just thought about this particular product so much because I was there with the holiday glasses. And that's another thing where it just depends on how it's shining. into your eye and it was just like

I had so much eye pain by the end of that show because I'm trying all of these gadgets and it's all dependent on me putting it on and looking at it in a specific way and the eye strain plus the Nevada dry air really did a number on me

at that event. Yeah I mean and that's where Apple got it right with Vision Pro on the auto adjusting lenses that move to make sure they're in focus for the most part. Yeah they could still it's the right idea. It's the right idea Yeah, because this is very problematic, especially if you're going to be putting it on every single day, you're going to be wanting to use it all the time. If you want to check a quick notification, but it's slightly out of focus and it gives you eye pain, like, that's not going to be a good long-term product.

Everyone's vision is different, too. So it's one of the biggest fundamental problems with this category, and, like, obviously it's been a problem since day one. And it's still a problem day, however many days later, because it's been a long time. years later? Yeah. Yeah. All right, but let me just run you through some of the specs of this thing, which I very much enjoyed. It connected to Wi-Fi, but it could also tether to an iPhone or an Android device.

Good. Great for them. It didn't have a cell radio built in, but it did have GPS. The battery life, do you remember what the battery was? That was what it ended up being. Do you remember what they said it was when it shipped? 12? They said it was one day, which is just a whole lie.

All-day battery life, baby. All-ship. Keep going. Just a lie. Keep it running. It had 16 gigs of storage. which I think at the time was like an Android phone at the time. It had a 5 megapixel camera, 720PB video.

Like an Android phone at the time. The little display on the right side here was 640 by 360. Nice. And it had the same processor family as the Galaxy Nexus phone. It sounds like they took the Nexus components and stuck it in this. It's a 2012 phone on your face, essentially. Like not the best one, but a fine one. Yeah.

And when you put it on the screen, again, in the upper right corner, it would either show you nothing or it would show you nothing. or it would show you the time or it would show you the words okay glass. And okay glass was the wake word. Just a prompt. And fun fact.

I learned that okay glass became the wake word but wasn't their only choice. And I would like to see if you'd prefer any of these other ones to Okay. Okay. Clap on.

No. No. What? I don't know. Absolutely not. Device please. Uh-uh. Oh, my Lord.

Device please is the one I most. Personally enjoy. Device please? Device please. They tested pew, pew, pew, pew. Absolutely not. I don't think these were real options, but it's a funny going to test. And then the one I most enjoyed and kind of wish the alternate universe had come true was go-go-glass.

Absolutely not. Somebody watched Inspector Gadget. They did. And was like, we're going to do go-go-glass. I am appreciative of these ridiculous. Device-please is hands down the best possible out. We should move back to that. No.

I'm down for that. No. I'm just going to be the wet blanket here. Absolutely freaking not. Okay, GoPro. I would prefer if everything was just device, please. GoPro, please. Oh, that's...

Device please. If the models end up coming for us, we're going to have to be nicer to them. It's exactly right. But the other, the user interface thing that I also discovered a lot of people had trouble with. And I remember this now in retrospect, before you talked to it, you had to touch the touchpad here on the right side. Because that was a battery thing. Like, if it was always, like, if it was always, like, listening, the battery would have just died immediately.

So you had to touch it basically to get it to start listening and then say the wake word. Why? Why would not just initiate the wake word when you touch it? I think it could. You could have it set both ways. But the big reason I think for that was they really, really wanted it to be a voice system. Right? Like you could scroll on the touchpad on the right side.

You could tap. You could do stuff. But like Google really wanted this to be a voice product. And I think correctly so. Like the best version of this thing is definitely voice control. or not me swiping on the side of my face all day. Again, nothing has changed. But one of the problems with that back then is just,

then you're just talking to yourself in public. And so, like, it's just, you know, it's hard enough testing these smart glasses now going like, you know, with the meta glasses. I was at a car show and I went, what model car is this? You know, just talking to yourself so loud that it could actually hear you in a loud environment.

It just creates these, scenarios where you were just like, I am a psycho out in public. Yeah. And I look cuckoo for cuckoo buffs. I already think it's weird when people are just walking down the street talking on the phone on their AirPods because I'm like, who are you talking to? Yeah. It's confusing. Even though I know like intellectually that it's guaranteed that they're on the phone, it still feels.

It's jarring. Because how often in our like cultural history has it been that someone talking to themselves is a crazy person? Yeah. Yeah. It does happen. This is actually a very good segue. So let's take a break. Okay.

And then I want to come back and I want to talk about the two things that happen when Google Glass launches, which happen roughly simultaneously and are deeply fascinating. But first, let's take a break. We're right. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought.

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com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. So, it's 2013. People are super excited about Google Glass. The thing launches. You can take pictures. You can take videos. You can do Google searches.

You can have Google Hangouts calls. Do you guys remember Hangouts? Oh, yeah. RIP Hangouts. Well, which version of Hangouts? Because there was like seven. Well, not Hangouts chat. Yeah.

And not Google chat. This is what I mean. This is just the right down the middle hangouts. Yeah, the videos. So Sergey Brin also shows up and is like reminding everybody about how this thing is going to just change the world forever. He does a TED talk in 2013 as these things are coming out. And again, I just want to frame the extent to which these things happen absolutely the same time. Google Glass is very excited.

exciting and everybody hates it at the at the same exact time this starts to happen and i think sergey brin gives a ted talk and pretty much teases what's about to happen also just want to note very quickly humane pin ted talk google glass ted talk how did they end up yeah it's almost like don't do a ted talk about your gadget reality and don't be on the cover of Forbes or else you go to bankrupt into prison also don't do fashion week yeah yeah okay i'm ready for this but all right here here's Sergey Brin describing how this is going to change how we do everything. Project Glass, because we ultimately question whether this is, you know, the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how do you want to connect to information, you know, should it be by just walking around, looking down. But that was the vision behind Glass.

So I just want to point out, he says the ultimate future and then puts on Google Glass. He is like he is invested. Not kidding when he talks about how big a deal this thing is going to be. It's going to change our lives forever. It's going to change our relationship with technology. But at this time, like again, 2013-ish, there's only a few thousand of these out there. It's still the Explorer Edition. It's still not a consumer product.

But it's still, like, it's still probably a year later the busiest thing in tech still, which is nuts. Like to maintain that without ever actually like really shipping anything is wild. They got some new apps. It got some new features. It was like developing really fast. And there was also the sense of developers wanting to be part of it. Like it was people thought it was going to be the next big platform. Except at the exact same time, Glass is like immediately becoming both like kind of a joke and kind of a problem.

Yeah. And I had truly forgotten how concurrent all this stuff was. The Google is out here being like, this is the future. It's going to change everything. It's, this is the next big wave of computing. Yeah. At the exact same moment, everybody's like, look at these losers. And like, let me just play you on.

So this is, this is like a useful moment is like once something hits SNL, right? That is like, you've gone a certain kind of mainstream. This is from May of 2013. So again, we're like still pretty early in this. This is Fred Armisen on Saturday Night Live with Google Glass. Seth, they're amazing. You know, I used to spend so much time in my life looking down at my phone,

and now, thanks to Google Glass, the phone is up here, and I could use it without being rude or distracting. And it's simple, you just toggle through the menu like this, and you have to activate it kind of just a little... Kind of like this. Yeah, that's pretty cool. It's great because no one knows you're doing it. Come on.

I mean, I noticed you're doing it. So he's whipping his head around. This is the irony of so many of these things, that like tilt to wake on the Apple Watch kind of came from this. Yeah. There are so many weird device interactions that actually do make sense in a different context. But the fact that you need to do this kind of stuff with that thing on your face is just not good. The thing that drives me nuts is that obviously Google Glass did it all first and it did pioneer it all first.

But like we are here 10, 12 years later. And some of the new smart glasses coming out now obviously didn't watch this episode because it didn't exist. because it didn't exist yet, but they also are making the exact same mistakes. For sure. Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And like, this is such a perfect version of like, everybody knows what Google Glass is. Like, this is not a joke you can make about a lot of gadgets, but it fully plays.

And he's just sitting there like jerking his head upwards and being like, Dahl and I look super cool. His outfit. It just ties it all together. He's kind of dressed like Sergey Brin. Yeah. Yeah. He was a little bit. Yeah.

He's just in that 2012, 2013 era. The plaid shirts were. Bad man. Bro. Yeah. It's a vibe. It's a vibe. It's a vibe.

Yeah. So, and again, okay, so around this same time, I just, I wrote down a list of stuff that starts to happen. I'm just going to read you this list. Okay. Congress sent Larry Page a letter asking whether this new technology could infringe on the privacy, average American. Great question. Great question. Excellent question.

The EU had really similar questions. The UK Department of Transport banned Google Glass behind the wheel. Yeah. And everybody is like, uh, a woman in California got a ticket for driving while wearing. in Google last. The officer said it was the equivalent of watching TV. I remember that.

There started to be some real energy to legislate this stuff out of being possible. Google tried to fight those laws. They started picking it pretty quickly. A guy got thrown out of a movie theater because they thought he was recording. Yep.

She could have been. I will give either of you $100 if you can tell me what movie it was that they thought he was recording. The Matrix 2. Batman. Jack Ryan Shadow Recruit. Oh, okay.

I did not know it was a film. I don't know. have $100 on me. I figured I was safe on that one. Yeah. There was a guy in a Seattle diner who was asked to remove his headset or leave. That became a whole thing. This diner in Seattle, like, briefly became famous for being, like, anti-Google Glass. They were banned in Caesar's Palace, like, immediately. It was very funny that immediately, all of the casinos were like, I see what you can get out. All the scams that are like, wait, but you can scam us back?

Yeah. Yeah. V, are you ready for another, nothing has changed? Okay. Somebody built a facial recognition app called Name Tag. Of course. Which really freaked people out. So Name Tag was so bad but so well covered that somebody made another app called Antiglass, which cost up to $300 a month, but promised that people wouldn't be able to identify you with Google Glass. Again, nothing has changed because that stuff is coming out again now in light of the Meta Rayban stuff.

We're just doing this again. 300 a month. And in May of 2013. Like, again, we're barely at the beginning of a beta test here. The New York Times runs this big story about all of the privacy problems with glass. And, yeah, the headline is Google Glass picks up early signal. Keep out. Like, tough beat.

Google says what you would hope it would say, right? And Steve Lee, the product director, says that privacy was top of mind as we design the product. Of course they do. And then Charlie Mendis, an engineer on the glass team, says this, which I think is just a truly alarming fact. He says, if I'm recording you, I have to stare at you as a human being. And when someone is staring at you, you have to notice. No.

If you walk into a restroom and someone's just looking at you, I don't know about you, but I'm getting the hell out of there. I just want to point out, this is a defense for why Google Glass is not a bigger problem than just a person staring. Bad person. It's a bad defense is what I'm going to say. It's, oh. So all of this is happening right there is there's real understanding of like why this thing is a problem. But I would present to you the number. Number one problem with Google Glass was the people who wore Google Glass, also known as glassholes.

Yeah. What a perfect name for them. Truly. Truly. So I did a lot of research to try and figure out where the term glassholes came from. Oh, yeah. That's interesting. I believe. I believe, I believe, I believe this is the tweet that did it all. Whoa. He found it. It's from Startup L. Jackson. It all has 45 likes. Glasshole. The know-it-all guy you've always hated only now he's got 4G and Google Plus connected to his face. Thanks, Google. Would one of you like to read the date on this tweet?

October 16th, 2012. Yeah. We had glass holes before we had glass. That's crazy. Oh, wow. That's crazy. It was so abundantly clear to people. And it says the tweet was quoted by CNET, so I bet the CNET article that quoted it, then that probably spread.

So CNET hit it in a big way. TechCrunch helped make it popular too. Like everybody sort of immediately, like, to your point V, you hear it. And you're like, yep, that's it. That's it. That's the name. Glasshole. Yeah, exactly.

And so it like really immediately started to take off to the point where it was like there was a great story in the Atlantic in April of 2013. April of 2013 explaining the etymology of the word glasshole. Like this is how far we've gone where linguists can trace the history of the term glasshole before any of us at Google. Is that where you found the tweet? It is where I found the tweet. And they also believe that it was startup Bill Jackson that did it. So it's just bad times, right? And it was like, it was very clear that this is what was going on.

People were a problem. There were people getting into fights. Because at this point, like, if you're a person who wants to wear Google Glass, you are sort of a self-selecting true believer in this technology. Yeah. And so these sort of these true believers and the people who like instinctively hate this thing that is like creepy in my face recording me, do I don't know if you're recording me? that just became sort of explosive.

And in 2014, February of 2014, Google is forced to post a set of do's and don'ts for Google. And if you'll allow me to, I would just like to read a few of them to you. Please. Please. Dues. Ask for permission. Standing alone in the corner of a room, staring at people while recording them through glass, is not going to win you any friends. The glass camera function is no doubt.

different from a cell phone. So behave as you would with your phone and ask permission before taking photos or videos of others. This is an official Google website. Like the lengths to which you have to go before you're willing to post this on your website is just truly, truly nuts. Yeah. Here's a don't. Don't. Glass was built for short bursts of information and interactions that allow you to quickly get back to doing the other things you love. If you find yourself staring off into the prism for long periods of time, you're probably looking pretty much. weird to the people around you. So don't read War and Peace on glass. Things like that are better

done on Baker screens. Wow. This is actually a thing I remember. People were doing the experiments. Like I wore glass for 24 straight hours. Yeah. It was a thing where people were like, I'm going to go hard on this. And it just, it was a tough look for everybody. I'm going to switch things up and say everything is the same. But here's the one where like whoever wrote this really just, just sad times. Don't be creepy or rude, aka a glass hole.

respect others and if they have questions about glass don't get snappy. Be polite and explain what glass does and remember a quick demo can go a long way. Actually, that's not going to win you friends either. In places where cell phone cameras aren't allowed, the same rules will apply to glass. If you're asked to turn your phone off, turn glass off as well. Breaking the rules or being rude will not get businesses excited about glass and will ruin it for other explorers. If you have to write this on your website, your product is failed. Don't be a jerk.

Like it's genuinely the solution to all of these privacy concerns thus then and now has always been don't be a jerk, which is like how effective is don't be a jerk as a policy? It's not very effective. You just need one jerk to ruin it for everybody. In one of my computer science classes in college, they used to call it the monkey at the keyboard problem, which is probably still what they call it. The idea is that if you can have a monkey at a keyboard that makes every possible mistake that can possibly be made, the flow of it needs to still work. And if you need to put a list of things that you shouldn't do with your product that you worry is too addictive and can be too creepy and can be, that's not going to work. The monkey is going to keep pressing buttons all the time. He's going to take a lot of photos or he shouldn't be taking. photos. Yep. That is unbelievable. Yeah. And it's, it's really, this, this document to me is so damning because it's like, okay, we understand that we've lost the fight here. And we are going to, we are going to beg you to not keep doing all of the things that you're obviously doing. Wow. Do you guys, did you guys have any Google Glass encounters, either as the wearer or the recipient? So I remember the first time I saw it in the wild was at CES, at, I believe, CES 2013. And this woman was just wearing it just sitting there. And I looked at her and I went,

tool what a jerk she was sitting there she was well dressed and she just sat there and usually in the press room at cES you are like a husk of a human you're working you're not really paying attention she just sat there no laptop in front of her she was clearly waiting for people to come and ask her about what it's like to use this and obviously you know it's CES people are going to fall for the bait so I'm watching this woman and she's just sitting there she's like oh yeah I can do like So much for that. And so I just, like, stared at this woman for a whole hour, just, like a parade of people just being like, oh, my God, you got it. What's it like? What's it like? And she's like, she lives in my head rent-free, this glass hole. Because she didn't look like what I thought a glass hole was going to look like. She was very stylish, just put together. Maybe she's a plant.

You know, maybe she was a plant because I just could not believe what I was seeing in. in that room. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't really have any encounters with it. Everyone around me was also poor in college. But I do remember going to San Francisco on day trips because I went to Santa Cruz for college. I was close.

And I did see random people on the street occasionally with them on. And at the time, I was just thinking, I want it so bad. I want it so bad. So I can't tell you that like I, you know, even when the glass hole stuff was coming out, I was like, oh, everyone's being a little bit dramatic. Come on. But then people started getting kicked at a movie theaters and pulled them. over on the highway.

And I was like, okay, how useful actually is this if everyone around me is going to rebel when I'm wearing it? And I think that became the thing, right? Like, I think if you're, if you're Google, you can survive one or two of those incidents, right?

Like, if it's just the person who gets thrown out of the diner, or it's just the person at the movie theater, because they weren't mad that they were wearing glass. They thought they were recording the movie. And right, it's like, okay, if what we need to do is just sort of explain a technological change that is happening,

fine. All of these things happened. at the same time and so loudly and to a gadget that people were already talking about so much that it just, I feel like it just became a totally insurmountable hill to climb. The more it becomes part of the conversation, the more people are going to report on the moments it goes wrong as well. It's like people will say,

like a waymo will get hit, right, by another car and people will say, self-driving car gets in a car crash. It's like because a guy teaboned it out of the side, like out of nowhere. So, you know, it gets an insurmountable amount of coverage because everyone's talking about it. But I also think like the real turning point in this list of things and that coverage is one they get snatched off the face because then you're introducing a level of bodily danger.

And then, you know, from the people who were quite evangelistic about this tech, you kind of get a belligerent attitude coming out from them too. I'm like, no, I am going to wear this in places. I want people to, you know, kind of daring them to kick them out. because it's my right to wear these things. So you just kind of get this combative energy around these devices. And then just for the normal person, oh, if I wear this, someone might attack me. Yeah, that's not good. Like, for me, that was the turning point when I saw that.

I was just like, oh, I don't want to, I don't want someone taking them off my face. And I remember that was all over the news too. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. This was, again, it was sort of right before the feelings around technology started to shift significantly. because when I was living in San Francisco around 2016, 2017, that's when people started going around spray painting on the ground,

like get out of SF techies. Yep. It was like right before that moment. Yeah. Yeah. This was like the pre-Camberge Analytica world in a very real way. Maybe this was sort of one of the beginnings of that movement. I think you're probably right.

I agree with all of what you just said. I would like to add only one thing, which is this photo. No. Robert Scobel in the shower wearing Google Glass. I think I mean this sincerely There's no coming back from this No there's that

This became the like The meme of it Robert Scobble was like an investor And a sort of tech enthusiast Loved everything That was a Google Last Explorer We won't keep this on the screen very long

If you want people to like this product Why are you posting this phone? Do you remember the do's and don'ts from Google One of the which was say Wear it in Small Bursts I bet you $50 He was in response to this man who said he would never take it off except to let strangers try it. And I think the caption of this photo was something to the extent of like, you thought I was kidding.

The really, you know, if you put glass hole in the dictionary, you just put that picture next to the definition. And I think people will get it. Just tells you everything you need to know. Yeah. It does. That's unfortunate. All right. So we're actually, this is the wild part.

We're almost at the end of the story here. So glass is simultaneously becoming sort of everywhere and ubiquitous. this, and in the middle of 2014, Google makes them available to everybody. They changed some of the leadership. Bob Bak Parviz actually left to go to Amazon because Amazon had just made the fire phone, and why wouldn't you want to go work at Amazon? But at this point, like, I think the narrative fight is over, and Google has lost. And they reduced the price to $1,000, I believe.

But that's not enough to fight the stigma. Right. So in May, they become available to everybody. And then Google I.O. happens with essentially nary a mention of Google. That's so insane. And I think at that point, you can basically look at it and it's over. And at that point, for the next 18 months or so, it doesn't die, but it sort of loses steam. Again, this is like the people who were excited about it are no longer excited about it. And so it just kind of starts to die. And then Astro Teller, who runs the Exhibition, the guy on the rollerblades,

he gave a quote later that he said when we originally built Glass the work we did on the technology front was very strong and starting the Explorer program was the right thing to do to learn about how people use the product. Yeah, agreed. Where we got a little off track was trying to jump all the way to the consumer applications.

And then this is a line from the story where he says it, he pauses. We got more than a little off track. So January of 2015, the Google Glass website switches to just saying thanks for exploring with us. That was it. That's so sad.

Tony Fidel. Tony Fidel, father the iPod, one of the people who helped create the iPhone, dude who did stuff at Nest, is put in charge and actually says that more is going to happen. Glass is not dead. Glass is not over. They have big plans. There were reports of a cheaper model coming soon. And it never did. But Glass did live one more life.

Mm-hmm. What was that life? Google Glass 2. I remember this being announced and everyone was very shocked. And then also very unshooked when what they announced it to be was an enterprise, more of a training sort of AR application for people that were building components and like car, you know, when you're putting together a car in a factory or something like that. That was actually what I tried at the Moonshop factory. You built a car? No, but I did do components like sorting with the Google Glass 2 on there.

And yeah. Notably, can you tell me what year this happened? This was about 2017. Yes. So notably, 2015, I believe, was when like Windows AR and HoloLens started coming out. And there was this blip in time where everyone, like a magic leap, everyone was so interested in the applications of AR. And I think that Google was thinking, wait, we built that already. Right.

If this hype, yeah, let's pivot. Let's pivot to enterprise. Which is what I always said. You always pivot to enterprise. Well, it solves a huge problem because if the big cultural issue is privacy and you're in enterprise, well, you kind of eliminate all the privacy issues because you're just wearing it for one specific purpose for a temporary period of time and then you take it off. And that's just the only way that it was ever going to survive given the context of the glass hole. Yeah. Yep.

But Enterprise Edition 2 also came out in 2019. Okay. So they have, they still were doing this. I don't, I would like to know, I would love to hear from someone in an enterprise scenario if they're using this because I've never heard of anyone actually doing it. But they, you know, they retrofitted it to add some extra components. They have some like eye shield stuff now so that it doesn't like that. Yeah.

Construction worker shield. It's protective eyewear as well as some AR applications. Right. Like one of the things I thought was most interesting was, I forget which company it was, but I think it was a shipping company. they were using the glasses to scan items as they moved them around. Like if you have to like scan inventory in and out, having that camera be on your face makes a ton of sense.

That's what I was doing. That's a good point. I was trying to remember the demo that I got with the Enterprise. I think it was Enterprise 2. And it was just like, oh, you can take this from this container, scan it, put it in that container. Isn't that so cool? And I was like, I guess.

I guess. But if you have to do that, you know, 10,000 times a day, then it would probably be useful. A thing I learned, by the way, was that whether, that should be what Glass is for or whether Glass should be like a mainstream consumer application was a debate inside of Google all the way back to the beginning of the product. And there were people who fought tooth and nail that like this is a useful enterprise tool that we should make for people to do enterprising things with.

And then there were people, and by people I mean Sergey Brin who were like, this is the future of computing and it completely changed the course of the product forever. He's not the only one that still thinks that. He sure isn't. So this is that. That's the end of the Google Glass. story. But V, I don't think it's over. It's not over. Like we're back. We're back. We're so bad. Google. Well, you know, like it takes a detour away from Google and into meta, because meta has

basically revived this in the consumer consciousness with the, with the, with the re-metta, Rayban, the regular, no, no, the regular meta-ray bands because. Not to be confused with the Rayban metas. Not to be, oh, God. I really hate how the, They changed up the namings of this. But, okay, so the Rayban metas were the things that changed it because, you know, it got it back into the consumer space. You know, there's vloggers out here. So now recording in public is a lot more accepted. We're more likely to ignore it.

So, like, things are starting to line up. And now Google is basically like, we pioneered the stuff, Android XR. Google Glass prototypes. Like, last year, I tested again. I went into a tiny little room where they showed me Galaxy X-R, and I was like, okay, whatever, that's Apple Vision Pro Doop. Show me the glasses. And I tried like five or six different prototypes that they had. And I went, oh, my God, you guys never stopped. You jerks never stopped really tinkering around with this. And, you know, it was pretty impressive. There were versions that were monocular, which means it was only in one lens. And there were versions that were pinocular in both lenses. The quality was a lot better. They, you know, stuff AI into it now. And the narrative, is like, what we were waiting for was Gemini. Okay. This is, yeah.

Can I give you an alternate theory? And this is what I want to end on before we get to the version of history questions. A thing I have heard from people in a position to know is that they believe Google Glass was not only a failure, but was such a spectacular cultural failure that it made everybody gun shy to try this. So we got an email from Richard. And Richard was got it in, uh, in college. Richard could afford it. No offense. Wow.

But Richard said he really liked that it was a heads-up display. It had all this up. But he says, it was a taste of the future. I used to ride a longboard at the time and being able to just play music through the mediocre bone conduction system. See texts come in at a glance and check a map as needed while also having a POV camera. All without needing to take my eyes off what was ahead of me, except for a quick look up for an instant. That felt like a video game promise of the future. You know, it's so funny.

I used to ride around Santa Cruz with my electric longboard with the snap. Jacks, we did the same day. Of course you did. That seems exactly correct to me. And what Richard says is, which I thought was really interesting, is that it was basically a, like, I had to put it on on purpose and choose to use it in a way that even some of the wearables

we have now are much more like thoughtless. You just sort of put it on kinds of decisions. Yeah. But okay, we're going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to do the version of history questions. Then we're going to get out of here. We'll be right back.

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Question number one is where does Google Glass fit on the time matrix? The time matrix is two things. It's right idea or wrong idea, right time or wrong time. And we have to put it in a quadrant. Was it the right idea at the wrong time? Was it the wrong idea at the wrong time? Where on the matrix does it belong? We can forget about the right time.

It obviously was not the right time. Yeah, it's clearly on the wrong time. I think it's a philosophical debate as to whether it was the wrong or right idea. I think do you want this is still so very much an open question 13 years later. Like if you're thinking about yes, I believe in the future of AR and smart glasses, then it was the right idea at the wrong time. If you think this is the most dystopian shit you've ever heard of, that it's 100% the wrong idea at the wrong time.

I'm going to kind of, as the wearables lady, say it was the right idea at the wrong time, because just in all of my reporting, I think there are genuine use cases for this technology that are great. Whether it's the use cases that big tech thinks it is, because they seem to think it's this general computing, going to replace your phone 24-7 device, and I genuinely do not believe that that is the right application for these. So I'm just going to say right idea, my version of it, right idea, wrong time. That's my case. I want to say right idea wrong timeline because in the timeline that we were headed towards, that Google was headed towards that they clearly wanted with ambient computing,

the frequency of which they used that phrase at Google I.O. after Google I.O. just increased rapidly as Google Assistant became more into their zeitgeist and more of the thing they were focusing on. If that had stayed at their primary thing that they were, their primary masthead that they were moving towards, I think it would have been the right idea. Because the idea, again, was contextually give you the information you need without having to, like, go into your phone, get out of the world, keep doing things with your kids, all that kind of stuff. I don't think they've given up on that, though, because I've heard it from a lot of Google execs. I mean, it might just be the wearables division that's, like, really hammering on that. Project Astra, which is like the big multimodal AI future, that's exactly.

exactly what you're talking about. They've been at this since like Google lens a million years ago, right? Like this idea of like how do we keep your your life and your computing aware of each other? Yeah. I agree with you that it's the right idea. And B, I think I think it's still what Google wants to do. I think there's still, you know, I've had a bunch of conversations with them on the last couple of months and ambient computing still comes up there. So I think to David's point that they really do believe that it's a like we touched a high. hot stove and now we're just a little afraid, but we still believe this is the right idea. So I still think we're in the timeline. I suppose it feels like with the AI bubble that they kind of veered in this other direction of, like, yes, some of these AI, some of the things these AI platforms are trying to do is to automate things for you. And obviously, it's all contextually based. But at the time, it felt like, oh, we noticed that you walked into your house like every day at the same time.

we're going to start dimming your lights when you leave. Right. That was their focus. And now it's like, talk to a robot. I agree with that. So it's a little bit different. I think it's because they discovered how hard that thing you just described is to actually do in the world. But it is, I agree with you.

And I do think it's the right idea. But I think I'm good with right idea wrong. Yeah. I think that's good. I think this is where it lives. Yeah. All right. Question number two.

Was Google Glass Peak anything? I have a few, but I'm curious if either of you have thoughts. It was peak glasshole. Peak glasshole. It was peak glasshole. I'm going to say it was peak live demos. Yeah. It was definitely, it was it was peak Sergei in every way.

Like for good and for bad, it was Pete Sergey Brin. It was peak tech cringe. But it didn't feel cringe at the time. Was it peak Google? Yeah. I don't think so. I think. Depends on what you mean by Peak Google.

Yeah. It's like we mean peak Google of them going hype, high, pipe. Oh my God, this is a thing. And it's dead. I mean, I would say that is in a certain way sort of peak Google. Yeah. But I think like just kind of what you were talking about earlier in terms of like our relationship with Google and what people thought Google was as a company then. Yeah. It was like, Save the World.

You know, it was. Project Loon to me is peak Google. Ooh. Project Loon was there over developing countries. That's good. You fly blimps and you give everyone internet for free. I used to talk a lot about how I liked Google's basic trade where it was like, we're going to. to give, we're going to go out of our way to give everyone access to the internet because

we're going to make a ton of money because they're going to use Google products. And for so many years, I was like, I'm cool with that. Yeah. And then I realized that was, that was, I was dumb and wrong. And that's fine. Well, then meta did that, but the only websites you could use are meta was. Right. Okay. So I, I think, I agree. Were they peak smart glasses? No. No. Okay. All right. Question number three. If you could time travel back and build this thing yourself. I'm putting you in charge in 2011 of Google Glass. Could you make it more successful knowing what we know now? Yes.

I think this might be the easiest yes of all time. It's so easy. Just don't make it look like that. Oh, come on. Make it look more discreet. Don't do whatever that marketing rollout was where you just. I just add a tally light. That's all I think is.

That's one. It's an LED. You could kind of fix it in one meeting. I feel that way. I don't know. I mean, there's just a lot of different things. but I think don't be a jerk would have helped them a lot, be a little bit more proactive and think about the privacy question because they were caught very on the back foot with the privacy question. So then it makes it look like you didn't think about this thing.

Have a use case for people. Explain how you're going to use this. Explain why you would want this. Also notably probably why the Vision Pro is not doing well because there is not a use case. Everybody's like, it's a monitor for my Mac. I have one of those. I can watch a movie alone. Yeah.

Cool. I do think if it were me, I would have done Sergey Brin stuff to marshal all of my resources towards making video chat happen and make that the like killer app of Google Glass. I don't know if it would have worked. But that would have been the one thing where I'm like. Yeah, the weird thing is like, because you like Apple had to invent the whole thing with your persona because then it introduces the question of, yeah, you can see the other person, but they can't see you. I guess they could see your first person view if you wanted. Yeah. But that works.

The other thing I would have done was I would have skipped trying to go straight to the consumer with it. And what I would have done, because when I recently went on vacation to Italy, I realized that the meta-rayband display was most useful to me as a tourist. So I was like, oh, just give these to museums. Have them. Oh, talk to you about. Talk to you about the things that you're seeing. That's a great point. Give them to opera houses and theaters.

You can see subtitles. And then not only do you get normal average people going and getting familiarized with the tech thinking it's not scary, you get them to go like, oh, this is why I would want this. Oh, how else could I use this in my life? You know, Nintendo did that with the Nintendo DSI. They gave it to museums and you would go around the museum and take pictures of things that it would tell you about them. I remember they recently canceled that and it was like a big deal. Sad. But that's another episode.

Question number four. Will the youth ever make it cool again? Google Glass? Yeah. Is there a, is there a, like, retro nostalgia? No. Yeah. This would have worked if there were shorts and reels in 2012, but we were just not there

with social media yet. Yeah. Yeah. Wait, that, okay, that's a fun counter future. Like, if Google had been like, okay, actually, what we're going to do is instead of whatever weird nonsense we did with Google Plus, we're just going to do TikTok. Yeah. Yeah.

And Glass was a TikTok camera on your face. I think that would work. Maybe that's how we make it. Yeah. That's our time track. I think so. I think you're probably right. It's legitimately why the meta glasses are working now.

Because it works with the content. Well, first of all, we have a content creator sphere that's not YouTube, right? That's like short form content is a thing. You know who owns YouTube, by the way? Google. I mean, you know, they could have done, if they had done shorts way back then, you know, this might have had some sort of gumption because, you know, what do kids want to be these days? They want to be influencers. So they have this built-in content creation tool pathway.

It's actually a very funny way to think about this thing. If they had just gotten rid of all of the ambitious stuff and just said it's a face camera for vertical short form video. It's a face GoPro that's not ridiculous. Which meta, I don't think meta anticipated that either. No, they didn't. They were shocked. They were surprised. Yeah, they're just like, we need to, you need to be able to talk about the world.

And every single time someone has used the Rayvan meta or whatever the hell they're called. They go, oh, yeah, I can ask about that, huh? Like, they always forget. Listen, I went to the Vatican Museum. I was testing out because, you know, they say, use it in a museum, do whatever. And I was like, okay, let me test it. First of all, the Vatican don't have Wi-Fi. So I'm on crappy international data.

I'm going like, what am I looking at? And for nine out of ten times, it was just like, you're looking at a marble bust. One time it could tell me what marble bust I was looking at. And so, you know, I'm like, that's another one for the nothing has changed files. That's my, yeah, that was my experience, very much so with the Humane AI pin, standing in front of a giant statue of Abraham Lincoln. It's like, you're looking at a square marble object. Oh my gosh. Not at all.

That's not what it is. Okay. Yeah. What feature of this product should every current version of this kind of product have? What would you take off of Google Glass and ship on the Meta Rayban glasses? I have an answer. I like the way that they showed the notification system working in the demo videos. The little pop-upy circles that just kind of appear in front of you.

Yeah. That was nice. I agree. Yeah. They're sort of doing that with the various versions of these. Nothing for you. Nothing for me. I think the only thing I could argue is the light weightness of it, like that concept of it being quite light on your face.

Because most of my issues with current smart glasses is that they're, They're not comfortable. They don't, I can't wear them long term. I just can't. So, yeah, the lightweight. And otherwise, I'm just like, great idea. Like, throw out most of this form factor. Yes.

My answer is kind of related versus going to be the modularity of it. Like, I think they sort of designed and built it wrong. But the idea that you can take off the lenses when you're inside or whatever and want to just have the display but not be wearing sunglasses. Like I have a pair of the metterray band sunglasses and they're sunglasses, which is useful when they're sunglasses. Right. And I'm not going to sit at my desk at work and wear sunglasses. Or if you're in a museum. Right.

I mean, they have transition lenses, but it costs more. Yeah. Right. And even that, like I don't wear glasses because my vision is sick. I feel like I've mentioned this before. Like, I have really, like, choice. Me too. Wow.

Okay. 20. David Sauer here. But I like the idea of, like, if you're going to give me something like this, I want one that is both useful as glasses when I want them to be glasses and then not even sort of affectation glasses, just not glasses when I don't want them to be glasses. I don't think Google did it right, but I think like directionally that idea was an interesting one. And I would like to see somebody better at design try to do it. All right, three more questions.

These are the Hall of Fame criteria questions. In order to get into the Virgin History Hall of Fame, it has to satisfy all three of these criteria. No. Hall of Fame question number one. Did this product do something truly new? Kind of? Kind of. Really?

I think it's an easy, yes. I really do. Yeah. I mean, if you want to be pedantic. Just think about the, like, response to that first video in 2012. Yeah. That it was like they've invented a new kind of relationship with technology. Yeah, I was going to say, like, there's no way this was the first head mounted wear it all the time of the thing.

But it was so close to the invention of the smart. And the way that the U.X worked on smartphones and just transitioning that over to a headset display, that it was pretty novel at the time. It was like the first version. Why are you hesitant? No, I'm just saying like on a technicality to your point, it's not the first head mounted display. No. This is like this tech has been around for 60 years. Like it's a old technology. But like in the history of it, did it do something new? I would say it's the first like Google will say it's not consumer. but it is the first consumer of smart glass. So yeah. Yeah. Okay. All right.

Hall of Fame question number two. Was it either remarkably good or remarkably bad? Both, honestly. It was remarkably... If it's both, is it neither or is it both? It's both because it was remarkably bad in the sense of like, if you're going to pitch this technology, you absolutely did not land it. But it was remarkably good in the sense that like you actually made a thing that made

people see what the vision was. That's the thing. It's a hard, that's a hard question because the human AI pin is remarkably bad and then it just did not work at all. Correct. Yeah. This did what Google said it could do. Yeah. So it's not remarkably bad.

It just remarkably failed. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the story of it is remarkably bad in a lot of ways. But the product itself, I'm not sure, was remarkably bad. It wasn't. Yeah. Like, I really, to your point about history, remembering this a little bit more kindly,

it was ahead of its time in many ways. Like the product itself for the components that were available at the time, for where the culture was at the time, the engineering that went into it, it's actually remarkably good in my opinion. They just got a lot of things wrong about what people wanted. So like in that sense, they remarkably out of touch. They also did it before because this was still during the big data era like wave.

And this was before the IoT wave, which happened more in 2015, 2016. So considering they had to make it that small and they were still able to even have five hours of battery life on a thing that should have probably used more power than it did, better than you would expect. Something in that era on your face, you would expect to last like two hours max. Max. Max. Because even now, like a lot of those products, like Vision Pro last two hours, you know what I mean? Yeah. With the big ass battery.

I will say you're making me realize that maybe the answer to the time travel question is go back in time and just don't let Sergey Brin's. see it. And like, seriously, like, there's a case of, like, what if you had just let this thing exist inside of the Moonshot factory for five more years? Let them develop it and not let it get better, let them build it, let people get more use to technology. Like, if this thing had shipped after the Apple Watch and after we'd had a lot of questions or a lot of debates about what it means to have technology on your body and how we should have our relationships, like maybe if the first version of this thing comes out in 2017, it's received completely different. Yeah. It would be. I mean, the privacy question, I think, is.

the biggest thing and no one has really answered it in a way that makes sense. But I think if you took it, if Sergey Bren had not been allowed to see it and had been allowed, we had let them cook just a little bit longer. I think, you know, this would have hit very differently. Yeah, I think so. Also, Google Lens came out like 2017. So that implementation in this is basically what meta is trying to do now, except it would have been more obvious to use it for that purpose at the time. Totally. Because people were using Google lens all the time to identify plans. Yeah, I say this about the meta.

That's exclusively what I use it for. Yes. It's awesome. I say this about the meta glasses all the time is that they have thought of nothing original. And as we've said in this, they've thought of nothing original. All they did was nail the execution. Right. No, all they did was call someone who knows how to make glasses. The nail the execution is what I'm saying. Which is why Google is now working with someone who knows how to make glasses for their Astra. Yeah. Yeah. And so all they did was nail the execution. And all Google did. didn't do was nailed the execution.

Yeah. Just that. Just that. Just that. So, all right. I think if the question is remarkably good or remarkably bad, I think glass fails. I think it exists somewhere between. It's so difficult. It's... I do feel like it should be in the Hall of Fame. I do. It is so important. Yeah. It's so iconic. All right. Well, let's see

if it passes number three, which is, did Google Glass have a lasting? Yes. Yes. In the history of smart glasses, there's going to be a whole chapter dedicated to Google Glass. Everything that has come after in this space, you can trace back to this. The genesis of it, the ideas of what we should be doing with smart glasses, the mistakes that we are currently making, the issues that we're currently not solving, it all goes back to Google Glass. But are you sure that the whole nothing

has changed thing means maybe Google Glass wasn't that important? Maybe we learned nothing from Google Glass. No, it was important because it is like the touchstone. Like, anytime I have to explain things to people, it is the touchstone I go back to because it is the thing that everyone remembers. Like when we have this conversation, the fact that glass hole was coined from it, and that's going to be used in perpetuity. That's the thing that we use forever. You know, the lessons that people have learned in design from it, like we saw that patent with the little smart ring.

Those are things that people are still exploring. Just the idea of the projection that being in one side, the use cases, is it enterprise, is it not? These are all things that started with this device. Yeah. And so like if we were to have a history textbook, there would be a whole section and chapter dedicated to this one thing and the lessons that we've learned from it. So I think that's a huge impact. Yeah. When I think about the iconicity of consumer technology, the humane AI pen is going to be a blip that nobody cares about. You know what I mean? But this is a thing that feels like a cultural touchdown. Like it also failed. It also had similar problems. But it is a thing that people will continue. continue to talk about. Nobody's going to talk positively about the human AI band. I don't think anybody, I think it's five years away from being essentially lost to the ether of technology. Yeah, exactly. Google Glass

will not. All right. Yeah. Google Glass, welcome to the version history Hall of Fame. It's an honor to have you here. I did not think it was going to get in, but I think it's the right call. I feel good about it. All right. It's time for us to get out here. David, put these back on. You clearly look the best of the three of us wearing these. So put those back on. Thank you to both of you for being here. This was delightful and good fun and I look forward to doing this with many more failed wearable, iable products. If you want to support this and everything that we're up to, uh, subscribe to the Verge. If you subscribe to the Verge, you can also listen to this podcast ad free. It's very simple. People really like it.

We'd love for you to do it. We will be back next time with more weird gadgets that may or may not be the Hall of Fame. And may or may not look as good on David and Mel's face. We'll see you next time. Version History is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Victoria Barrios. River Branson, Eric Gomez, Owen Grove, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, Andrew Marino, and Alex Parkin. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane.

Studio support from Matthew Heffron. Our theme music is composed by Brandon McFarland. Be sure to follow the Virgin History podcast feed to get all of our new episodes as soon as they arrive. And to support everything that we do here at The Verge and get access to ad-free podcasts, including this one, subscribe to The Verge.