Google made the announcement that it would discontinue production of Google Glass in March of this year. Google Glass was a set of smart glasses that had the appearance of a conventional pair of spectacles and showed information such as e-mails, weather forecasts, text messages, and driving directions.
However, as a result of recent developments in the augmented reality (AR) industry brought about by companies like Apple, Meta, and Samsung, many people were looking forward to the next version of the company’s AR headgear, which was internally referred to as “Project Iris.” However, according to a recent article published by Business Insider, there is evidence to imply that Google may have scrapped the project many months after its primary developer, Clay Bavor, departed the company’s augmented reality group.
In the beginning, Google intended to release Project Iris as its own individual piece of hardware. The multinational technology corporation purchased a Canadian firm known as North in 2020. North worked on developing smart glasses and even gave a demonstration of the glasses’ capacity to interpret. Google said in July of the previous year that it would begin testing AR prototypes in the real world.
What went wrong?
During the development period, it was stated that there were a lot of layoffs as well as ‘constantly altering plans’ about Project Iris. In addition to Clay Bavor, who was in charge of VR and AR at Google, another developer named Kurt Akeley has left the company. It is also believed that the internet giant has terminated its internal development of AR gear; nevertheless, it seems that certain staff will still stay at Google Labs to continue testing and developing AR technology.
Is Google done with AR headsets?
Although it would seem that Google has given up on the augmented reality (AR) market, this is not quite the case. At the beginning of this year, Google, Samsung, and Qualcomm made the announcement that they were collaborating on the development of a mixed-reality headset. Samsung would be in charge of creating the Qualcomm processor that would power the headset, and Google would be in charge of creating the headset’s software.
Given that there are still certain teams at Google working with augmented reality (AR), two workers have speculated that the firm may one day revive Project Iris. In addition, it seems that the employees who are still employed at Google’s AR Labs branch are now working on the development of software that will be used to power future XR (Extended Reality) devices.
However, the current claim adds that the technology giant is also working on a micro XR’ platform for AR glasses, in addition to confirming that Samsung’s future XR headgear would operate on a customised version of Android. Google made this announcement a month ago. It is possible that the prototype platform known as ‘Betty’ may ultimately be licenced to manufacturers in a manner similar to how Google licences Android.
