When Google debuted the Glass in 2013 (yeah, nearly a DECADE ago), it had a signature Google flaw – it lacked purpose. Now, with their newly unveiled demo at I/O 2022, Google seems to have finally found a purpose for their AR glasses. Hint, it ties in with the general theme of Google I/O 2022 – to help people.
I remember when Apple was still working on the Watch. There was this consensus that the company was looking to make a watch that was ‘wearable fashion’. Apple even recruited iconic designer Marc Newson and the ex-CEO of Yves Saint Laurent to help design the Watch. A few years later, the Watch isn’t perceived as a fashion-forward wearable – not even by Apple. Instead, somewhere down the road, Apple realized the TRUE purpose of the Watch, to be a health wearable. That moment of clarity seems to have come to Google too, although 9 years later – as they finally realized that strapping an Android device to your eye isn’t an AR headset. Instead, Google’s new augmented reality prototype hopes to allow people to make sense of the world.
After announcing a whole new catalog of products, including the Pixel 6A, Pixel 7 and 7 Pro, Poxel Buds Pro, Pixel Tablet, and Pixel Watch, Google gave us a taste of an AR Glasses prototype they’ve been working on (labeled Proto 29) that combines natural language processing and transcription to provide subtitles to the real world. Wear the glasses and, in theory, you can understand any language. The glasses pick up audio and visual cues, translating them into text that gets displayed on your lens, right in your line of vision. These virtual subtitles overlay on your vision of the world, providing a contextual, USEFUL augmented reality experience that’s leaps and bounds ahead of what the Google Glass was designed to do in 2013.
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