Google ends enterprise sales of Google Glass, its augmented reality smartglasses

Google has stopped selling its Glass Enterprise astute glasses, the institution announced connected Wednesday on its website. Google volition besides halt supporting its bundle successful September, the institution said.

The determination is the extremity of the enactment for 1 of the archetypal -- and inactive 1 of the astir recognized -- astute glasses merchandise lines from a large tech company.

Glass Enterprise was the successor to Google Glass, a lightweight glasses product that displayed tiny bits of accusation connected a transparent surface successful the user's tract of view.

Glass was archetypal sold to developers and aboriginal adopters successful 2013 for $1,500 and rapidly captured the imaginativeness of tech enthusiasts. But contempt backing from Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Glass task astatine Google ne'er caught connected arsenic a mainstream product. The built-in camera led to fights implicit privacy, and the merchandise became the butt of jokes on late-night television.

By 2017, Google was positioning the merchandise arsenic a instrumentality for enterprises to execute applications like streaming healthcare appointments oregon grooming workers connected a mill floor.

Google astir precocious released a caller $999 mentation of the hardware in 2019.

Google's retreat comes arsenic rivals, including Meta and Apple, are investing successful augmented world and virtual world exertion which could extremity up successful devices that are overmuch much blase Google Glass.

Meta has released Ray-Ban smartglasses with cameras but nary show and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken publicly astir a Google Glass-like last signifier for the merchandise line.

Apple is reportedly preparing a virtual world headset that tin usage video from outwards-facing cameras to show the extracurricular world, similar a transparent lens.

Microsoft has its ain augmented world glasses for businesses, HoloLens, but the institution reportedly laid disconnected portions of the squad moving connected it earlier this year, and the device's creator, Alex Kipman, left the company successful 2022.

The discontinuation of Glass does not mean that Google has fixed up connected augmented world oregon smartglasses, though. Last summer, Google previewed a antithetic brace of smartglasses that could construe and transcribe code successful real-time, and said it would proceed to trial augmented world glasses prototypes in public.