
Google Glass is still around and just got its first update in nearly three years - janober
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/21/google-glass-is-apparently-still-around-and-just-got-its-first-update-in-nearly-three-years
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thomasfedb
If there are any Googlers around here: I'm a medical researcher from Australia
and we had really encouraging preliminary results with Glass in operating
theatres. We'd love to continue the work but need to be able to buy/acquire
about a dozen units. We've tried reaching out to Google via their Glass for
Work page, but didn't get a reply.

Our pilot study:
[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26992465](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26992465)

~~~
thomasfedb
Ah yeah, my bad, forgot I never set up my profile. Best email is
thom@sfedb.com, my supervisor's email is in the paper, but best to contact me.

~~~
nickthegreek
email sent. I might have up to 3 pairs for sale. I'll contact my buddies who I
got into the program.

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dsl
If anyone from the Glass team happens to read this:

A very good friend of mine has an uncorrectable problem that basically gives
him double vision all the time. I got Glass for him as a gift, and it changed
his life. Emails, text messages, directions, all over a single eye so it was
clear. Thanks for pushing a much needed update so he can start using them
again.

~~~
8note
I've got that problem; it's correctable either with prim glasses, or with
surgery to tighten up some of the muscles that control your eyes

You can also do some practice with 3d pictures to build up better control. I
made a thing for that that uses red/cyan 3d glasses.
[http://web.uvic.ca/~jhedin/Other%20Work/tranaglyphs/](http://web.uvic.ca/~jhedin/Other%20Work/tranaglyphs/)

~~~
plopz
I have double vision due to an astigmatism that caused amblyopia. My
optometrist said that the astigmatism is correctable with surgery or glasses,
but I would need to train the eye with physical therapy to deal with the
amblyopia which wasn't guaranteed to work since it wasn't detected early on in
my childhood. I've never bothered since I'm so used to double vision it never
bothers me. Have you had luck improving the double vision?

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WhatIsDukkha
I'm not sure a lot of people actually got to try google glass.

I'm loving (and developing in) VR, and interested in actual AR. Glass was a
deadend as soon as I actually put one on.

I found it to be pretty much as if you were holding up a smartwatch beside one
eye, that you could turn your eye and look at in focus.

There is no overlay of the real world. You are either looking at watch beside
your eye or the real world.

The blurry screen was always kind of off to the side and annoying when wearing
it.

Just as if holding a wristwatch up to the side of your head would be.

If that sounds bad to you, yes that's why it failed.

~~~
Ajedi32
Yeah, I always got annoyed when the media kept referring to Glass as "AR",
when in reality it was mostly just a quick way to get notifications and such
without pulling your phone out of your pocket. If Glass counts as AR, so does
my smartwatch.

~~~
derefr
"Notifications" is a bit of an under-sell for what a crappy text-screen that's
by your eyeball can accomplish, when combined with a camera and microphone and
bluetooth-paired to a phone.

Glass could (can?) do the Word Lens "translate what I'm looking at" thing
better than a phone can—not in visual fidelity, but in fluency of use. It can
also just let you read a book on the bus without holding your arm in front of
your face. Neither of those are strictly AR, but nor are they things you could
accomplish with a pager.

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drewg123
I tried GG when I was working for Google at some event where the team came to
your building and let interested people try it. I was quite enthusiastic about
it before trying it, but actually using it for 5 minutes really turned me off.
I think that this might be because I don't normally wear glasses. I found
looking slightly askew to focus on the presented info was awkward for me (eg,
maybe it was natural to somebody who wears bifocals). I also found the weight
a bit unnatural.

To me, Android Wear was a much better fit for what I wanted from GG. Eg,
notifications, navigations, music controls, email/text without having to pull
out (and unlock) my phone. (and I hadn't worn a watch for 15-20 years before
getting my first Android Wear device).

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Warvick
GG would become so much more popular if it would aim at certain niches first,
like security, technicians, doctors and public servants (partially the way
Segway did) - it should invest in showcase apps that cater for those niches
and build up market from there.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
Last month a few eviction notices were served in my building. The guy who was
delivering them was wearing GG, presumably to legally document that the
notices were served.

~~~
beachbum8029
You must live in CA.

~~~
Eric_WVGG
NYC

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k__
I think what kept Glass from going through the roof was the camera.

The whole thing would probably be awesome in its own with just display, GPS
and compass.

Many people feared for their privacy and the people using the Glass were
considered douches because of this issue.

~~~
beachbum8029
Yet none of those same people have an issue with taking their phone out of
their pocket constantly and glancing at it which has... a camera on the front!
But I could see the issue of never knowing whether or not the glass camera is
recording and whether that recording is going to wind up on youtube.

~~~
TeMPOraL
You never know when the smartphone camera is recording either.

~~~
k__
Wearing a Google Glass is like someone pointing a smartphone cam in your face
all the time.

Yes, you get all the fancy AR stuff with camera, but I think you could still
build a nice HUD without the cam.

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L_Rahman
The last two responses in this thread - industry applications (operating
theatre) and medical use (double vision) - are the things Google should have
focused on all along.

A tiny floating screen in the corner of your eye is most useful when:

1\. You can't readily access the screens that are in your pocket or desk.

2\. You need to look at a screen and the world around you at the same time.
The screen may possibly overlay on the world around you.

~~~
digi_owl
I think that was the plan of the original team all along, but then Brin
happened. It was him that orchestrated the whole stunt at IO to unveil it,
driving the hype through the roof in the process.

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snarkyturtle
NPR just did a story this year that it's being used in the manufacturing
industry, so it's still being used, just not for leisure:
[http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/03/18/514...](http://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/03/18/514299682/google-
glass-didnt-disappear-you-can-find-it-on-the-factory-floor)

~~~
hammock
TLDR it can find barcodes and scan them faster than the human eye can. Yeah
fascinating.

~~~
Retric
"I don't have to leave my area to go look at the computer every time I need to
look up something," Is a little more than just a bar code scanner.

Considering how important some seemingly minor assembly problems have been
this is probably a lot more valuable than you might think as it reduces people
guessing vs. going to the effort to look something up.

~~~
hammock
That's not a glasses advantage though. The smartphone in my hand does that (my
smartphone, an overpowered barcode scanner)

~~~
skinnymuch
A specially made hand held device could do it too, but it would still be a
problem because you're using hands.

~~~
hammock
Could put it on your wrist, like QBs have. A fragile device on your head, over
your eyes, still doesn't seem like the best solution.

~~~
Retric
Most safety equipment is designed for glasses and also works with google
glass. Further, you want nothing strapped to you when dealing with heavy
machinery not even a watch which means you would need to keep it in a pocket
and use your hands to manipulate it.

PS: Even rings have cost many people their fingers.

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QittyQat
Nice! I really like Google Glass, the only issue I have with it is the reduced
battery life. I wish there were a supported way to replace the battery. Or is
there?

~~~
bblough
I didn't replace the battery, but back when I used mine regularly I bought an
external battery specifically made for it.

The company that made it still has its website up, but there doesn't appear to
be a way to order. So they may be out of stock. But you could always try to
contact them, I suppose.

In a similar vein, I guess you could always get an USB battery pack and a thin
USB cable that's long enough to reach to your pocket. I don't think it's
ideal, but it might be better than nothing.

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javindo
Does anyone else get the impression that this might have just been an intern
project* or similar?

Seems very odd for a seemingly minor iterative update to pop up out of nowhere
after such a long time otherwise.

* The update, not Google Glass itself

~~~
ocdtrekkie
I actually commented in the previous discussion about this update. (This post
is technically a dupe.)

But my assumption is that someone at Google still uses their Explorer Edition,
and fixed some pet peeves of their own to support newer Android phones better,
maybe they added the keyboard input because they needed it, etc. And then just
decided to go ahead and get it released to everyone because the work was
already done anyways.

~~~
puzzle
At Google you just don't get something released to the public, let alone to
people that paid for a device which an update could brick, on a whim. Even if
someone outside the Glass team did all the code changes, they would need
someone on the inside with enough permissions to actually sign and push out
the OTA images.

I suspect this is a backport of work that was done to support the new Glass
for Work program.

(I used to work at Google, on teams other than Glass, although I know former
members.)

~~~
ocdtrekkie
My comment perhaps could've clarified that there was likely some bureaucracy
involved in release. I wouldn't even be surprised if my hypothetical Explorer
Edition user was a member of the original (or current) Glass team. But likely
that it was more of a 20% thing than their job.

But I am dubious this has to do with Glass for Work, because Enterprise
Edition has been out a long time, and surely has had updates long before now.
It's unlikely that Enterprise Edition is still built on the archaic platform
Explorer Edition is built on (Android 4.x on an OMAP processor that was
already old when Glass was first released). And there is little to no reason I
can fathom for Google to expend Glass for Work resources on backporting fixes
to a device that's been abandoned for over three years.

------
hkmurakami
It's been used in medical fields for quite some time. Technology exists
outside of the consumer space but I guess the popular press likes to ignore
that.

------
jimrandomh
A bit of historical context. Glass unofficially supported Bluetooth keyboards
up to version XE11 (that is, November 2013). Version XE12 contained one major
bug which, while it didn't break keyboards themselves, did break most of the
non-Glass Android apps you'd want to use a keyboard to control. Version XE16
was a four-month rewrite, which replaced the Bluetooth stack with one that
couldn't handle keyboards (and bricked a lot of devices and broke a lot of
other things.) At that point something went very very wrong with Google's
internal politics, and despite there being both internal and external demand,
work to repair keyboard support was blocked in favor of fixing crash-bugs.
Combined with Glass being closed-source, an overly-aggressive auto-updater
that made it hard to stay on XE11 or XE12, increased memory usage that
exceeded what the existing units had, and poor communications from Google,
this caused the Glass community to turn on Google and become hostile.

Three years later, version XE23 adds support for Bluetooth keyboards, and
makes it more official (so you don't need an awkward procedure involving
sideloading parts of cell-phone Android).

So I interpret this a sort of three-years-later apology. For which, thank you,
it's overdue but is a nice gesture. Source code would also be nice, as would a
public post-mortem of what the whole mess looked like from Google's end.

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throwaway2016a
I'll have to dust off my glasses and install this. I never got the hang of it
because the screen is about 1/2 cm too high for me so I have to uncomfortably
force my eye to look straight up. No matter how I tried to position it on my
head I always had that issue...

There was also the whole thing about people thinking you're an ass for wearing
one. And they are very rare in New Hampshire where I am so they stick out like
a sore thumb.

~~~
falcolas
If it's too high, try widening the nose pads a bit. That's what usually sets
the height of glasses on your face.

~~~
throwaway2016a
> If it's too high, try widening the nose pads a bit. That's what usually sets
> the height of glasses on your face.

Thank you for the advice.

Trust me, I have. Many times and many ways. It helps (a lot) but it is still
too high. What does fix it is raising the arms it up so they aren't directly
on my ears. But there is no way to keep it in that position.

~~~
falcolas
Odd. The screen must be a noticeable bit in front of the nosepads then, to use
them as a pivot that lowers the screen.

Can't wear them further down your nose (re-bending the ear hooks if
necessary)?

I realize you've probably tried it (sorry!), so feel free to ignore my
suggestions, but it's triggered one of those "there must be a solution!"
quirks I have.

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dawnerd
I'm kinda sad I never took advantage of their invite to buy one. Would have
been a cool piece of Google history to have sitting on a shelf.

~~~
jonnathanson
It was going for $1,500 at the time, making it a particularly expensive thing
to have bought as a conversation piece. The price was a serious flaw in
Google's rollout strategy, perhaps more than anything else. They were trying
to do a small alpha/beta, while also marketing the product as "cool" and
exclusive at the same time.

The product was _very_ very very MVP and alpha-like, but came at a finished-
product price tag. I have to imagine that this strategy reaulted in a very
small and non-representative test cohort of wealthy tech geeks in the Bay
Area. Many of them no doubt purchased Glass as an in-crowd signal, with little
serious intention of dogfooding the product or developing for it.

Hardware at that pricetag can't just be soft-launched like software. When you
charge $1,500 for a device in basically v0.1, you're setting people up for
disappointment.

~~~
PeterisP
It's reasonable and expected for early stage hardware to be much more
expensive than a later mass produced piece; both on the cost side and on the
demand side.

If you release a v0.1 bleeding edge device, your per-unit costs are huge, and
you also target it at people who _really_ need or want it's specific
functionality, and thus aren't price sensitive.

For any class of such technology the price comes down only when the tech is
tested and mass produced. If anything, they should have sold it at $3000 or
$5000 to get more feedback from its use as a small alpha/beta in practical
niche domains where it's really needed, not as a consumer device used as a
fashion item instead of testing its practical application.

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digi_owl
For all this talk about recording everything, don't the Glass sport a bright
LED up front when the camera was in use?

~~~
knorker
Do snap's spectacles?

~~~
digi_owl
Thing about them is that you have to manually reach up and press a button, and
that records 10 seconds.

Maybe they can be modified to record continually, but up front they are much
more limited than Glass.

~~~
knorker
Glass was never always-on recording. Yes, you could wink to take a photo and
not use your hands, and yes by touching it _multiple times_ you could start
recording and even have more than 10s.

But they were never a "life recorder", just like I assume Spectacles aren't.
Still Spectacles are not getting creep-accusations and hate, as far as I can
see.

There are life recorders though. They've also not gotten the hate Glass got.

------
KirinDave
Yeah, mine suddenly started working again. It got stuck in a weird loop a few
months ago. I don't think I have an update but I think they fixed an oauth
bug.

------
whyagaindavid
On a lighter note, people complain about google over updates. See they are not
bad!

~~~
spullara
People are incorrectly complaining about google when they should really be
complaining about the OEMs. You can blame google for that business model but
generally they aren't deciding when Android phones get updates.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
This is incorrect. People are often complaining about the OEMs, when you
really should be blaming Google. Google designed the way the OS handles
updates, and it also sets the terms that OEMs have to agree to in order to
sell Android devices with Google Play Services included.

Google controls the entire table here. But they want you to blame all of the
different OEMs rather than looking at the real culprit in the middle of all of
them.

~~~
digi_owl
Samsung has Tizen sitting in the wings if Google gets too pushy. HTC would not
hesitate to make a deal with Microsoft. LG owns WebOS, and is actively using
it in their smart TVs. Huawei, ZTE and such can just fall back on Chinese
infrastructure.

The only ones that would be affected would perhaps be Sony, this new Nokia
that's rising, and various white box manufacturers.

Google really do not have as much control as one would think.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Any OEM doing this except maybe Samsung would immediately go out of business.
Feel free to let me know if you ever have a practical example of someone
successfully leaving the Android monopoly ecosystem and not falling flat on
their face.

Also, bear in mind, OEMs have no reason to object to Google controlling
updates. They'd still be able to customize the experience with apps and
themes. And they'd save boatloads of money as Google handled all the update
testing and distribution.

Of course... Google doesn't want to pay for that, and that's why they leave it
on OEMs.

------
pavement
Three years later and I still find the idea obnoxious and pandering to the
unseen apparatus of encroaching social control.

~~~
taneq
I don't think it's that much of an issue if each person has a video record of
stuff they've seen. I mean, we already have this in a squishy lossy human way.

Where I do think it's an issue is when every person's viewpoint is piped back
to the Borg mothership.

~~~
pavement
I think it's suicidally bad for this to become the default norm for human
interaction. Among strangers it's a horrible idea, and among loved ones, a
thousand times worse.

If social interaction has begun to feel rigid and sterile already, this sort
of thing represents a deep freeze beyond anything we've ever experienced.

Everything points to confession and contrition now. Emotions become bottled
and pressurized. Stiff behavior modification leaves no release valves.

Go ahead and experiment with this, if you don't believe me. I'll check out,
without hesitation. I'll take my business elsewhere, anywhere.

~~~
zeveb
The Black Mirror episode about exactly this got it right, I think.

Forgetfulness is a blessing!

