Google is closing the consumer-facing aspect of its Glass program, leaving the enigmatic eyewear to sink or swim in business markets.
Company officials have announced they will no longer sell the $1,500 interactive eyeglasses through the Explorer Program, which the company launched in 2013, and are shifting Glass out of the secretive Google X labs and into a separate unit under the direction of Tony Faddell. Faddell launched and runs the Nest home automation business, which Google acquired last year.
Faddell recently told the BBC that the Glass project had "broken ground and allowed us to learn what's important to consumers and enterprises alike," and that he would be working "to integrate those learnings into future products."
Analysts have alternately termed the news as a sign of Google Glass' failure and a shifting of the still-promising product's priorities.
Here's what those associated with Google Glass posted on the Google+ site:
"It’s hard to believe that Glass started as little more than a scuba mask attached to a laptop. We kept on it, and when it started to come together, we began the Glass Explorer Program as a kind of 'open beta' to hear what people had to say.
Explorers, we asked you to be pioneers, and you took what we started and went further than we ever could have dreamed: from the large hadron collider at CERN, to the hospital operating table; the grass of your backyard to the courts of Wimbledon; in fire stations, recording studios, kitchens, mountain tops and more.
Glass was in its infancy, and you took those very first steps and taught us how to walk. Well, we still have some work to do, but now we’re ready to put on our big kid shoes and learn how to run.
Google had planned on releasing a new version of Glass this year, but company officials have been mum on when that might happen. Other rumors had the company replacing the out-of-date Texas Instruments chip in Glass with a more powerful processor built by Intel and partnering with the likes of Luxottica to produced a more edgy, fashionable version of the eyewear.
Healthcare has been one of the more promising markets for Google Glass, spawning a wide variety of projects, partnerships and start-ups. Earlier this month, Augmedix, a start-up launched out of Stanford in 2012 and focused on developing Google Glass for healthcare, announced an infusion of $16 million in Series A funding, raising its total cash raised to about $23 million.
Another project apparently hasn't fared so well. Palomar Health in San Diego launched a Glassomics Lab in July 2013, but the project's website has since been discontinued, the executive running the program has moved on and the Facebook page hasn't been updated in quite some time.
Still, Rafael Grossman, a Bangor, Me.-based physician generally regarded as one of the most ardent supporters of Google Glass, recently blogged that the eyewear has a future in healthcare.
"Glass really represents a breakthrough in technology and the expansion of our vision on its use to improve what we do as medical providers and educators," he wrote in a Jan. 6 blog. "Obviously, it is not a perfect device YET, but a first edition, with several upgrades already, that broke ground in order to place a computing-communication platform and a camera in front of our line of vision, allowing us to get and to share information for a particular purpose. Never before has such a device, of its size and capabilities, been made available to the general and specialized consumer."
