Google Glass can return – but it must clear four big hurdles first

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jan/16/google-glass-return-four-big-hurdles

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Congratulations to Google Glass: production may have been halted on its current form, but it will return – and this time as a fully fledged product.

Graduating from the company’s R&D division, Google X, to proper product status, and coming under control of Tony Fadell, widely seen as the father of the iPod, is a huge vote of confidence from Google.

It all points to Google’s desire to make Glass a genuine consumer-focused gadget, rather than the niche-interest product which appealed to the “explorers” who were prepared to pay £999 to be fancy beta-testers.

But there remain several big hurdles Google needs to clear before it can realistically sell its smartglasses in scale.

1) The image problem

Google didn’t see the insult “Glasshole” coming, according to the Wall Street Journal. “The word Glasshole was a surprise to me. None of us had thought about that,” a former Google X executive told the paper.

And because the company couldn’t guess that some people might abuse the possibilities presented by a face-mounted camera and screen, it was also unable to counter the perception that every Google Glass user was, in some way, potentially a bit of an arse.

That means that before the company can sell new versions in large quantities, it needs to ensure that it’s got an answer to that perception.

2) The other image problem

You don’t look cool when you’re wearing a Glass. The company’s been beset by mocking stereotypes, from cringeworthy photos of Glass-laden tech influencers such as Robert Scoble and Marc Andreessen to on-the-nose satire like the Minorities Wearing Google Glass tumblr (a blank page), and none of that is going to change until cool people wear it. And cool people aren’t going to wear it until that changes.

Worse, even Google’s own staff don’t seem to be eating their own dogfood. Sergey Brin, the company’s co-founder, is happy to wear the device out and about (leading to viral photos of him in glass on the New York Subway), but others aren’t so keen. Take a look at any given Google exec speaking on stage, and odds are they won’t be wearing the device – which is a problem for something which is supposed to be the birth of “ubiquitous computing”. If Google’s own staff are worried that Glass means that they won’t be taken seriously, what should the rest of us think?

3) The battery life

Among current Glass explorers, the number one complaint is that the glasses just don’t last long enough. The need for a slim profile means that the battery pack is necessarily tiny, and there’s no easy way to make the device last longer without making that pack bigger.

One possible trade-off would be to make the same decision that Apple has taken with its own wearable device, the Apple watch, and limit the next generation of Glass to being an exclusively tethered device. Currently, it can connect to a phone via bluetooth, or to wifi network for phone-free use. Losing the latter option, and limiting the device to low power bluetooth, could be the crucial difference between having to recharge it midway through the day, and making it to bedtime without a problem.

4) The, yes, but WHY?!

But at its heart, the next stumbling block for Google is to answer the question on everyone’s lips: what’s the actual point of Google Glass? With its limited stock, and thousand-pound price tag, the device has so far only had to market to the sort of early-adopters who have faith that a wearable computer is the obvious next stage in human development.

But to become an actual hit, rather than a niche interest, the company has to convince normal people that they need access to a low-res screen in the corner of their eye every waking second. And that’s a hard sell.