Google Chairman says in an interview with the Wall Street Journal that Google Glass is not dead and will make a comeback.
Google stopped selling Google Glass and killed its developer program early this year. Google Glass turned from cool to mega uncool in now time. Wearers of Google Glass have been called “Glassholes” and establishments have banned Google Glass from their premises. The backlash must have been surprising for Google. The main issue of Google Glass is that a camera is constantly filming what the wearer sees. The privacy concerns are enormous.
In an interview published today on the Wall Street Journal, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt still holds on to the Google Glass idea. He said: “It is a big and very fundamental platform for Google. We ended the Explorer program and the press conflated this into us canceling the whole project, which isn’t true. Google is about taking risks and there’s nothing about adjusting Glass that suggests we’re ending it. Glass, like Google’s self-driving car, is a long-term project. That’s like saying the self-driving car is a disappointment because it’s not driving me around now. These things take time.”
The big difference between self-driving cars and Google Glass is that the public did not come out swinging at it yet. Google has not only to solve a technological problem with Google Glass, but also a PR one. A new version of Google Glass would need to convince people that they are not filmed and photographed anytime.
Augmented reality technologies and displays inside glasses is certainly a highly interesting wearable that could change how we communicate and use the web. Let’s see what Google will come up with. Now they work on Google Glass in secret under Tony Fadell’s leadership.