What seemed likely months ago now seems even more so: Google is reportedly entering the AR headset race . What’s weird is that Google has …
What seemed likely months ago now seems even more so: Google is reportedly entering the AR headset race. What’s weird is that Google has already been here before. Years and years before. I wore Google Glass in 2013 on my train commute. It was my first pair of smart eyewear. I also used Google Daydream, Google’s VR goggles that worked with Android phones. I tried Lenovo’s standalone VR headset that worked with Google’s Daydream VR software. I’ve talked with Clay Bavor, head of Google’s previous AR and VR efforts, about the ways the company ended up shifting from hardware back to utility AR apps on phones. The last time I spoke to him, he told me Google was entering a period of „deep R&D“ on the future of AR and VR. According to a report from The Verge Thursday, Google’s next AR headset, codenamed Project Iris, sounds a lot like other upcoming headsets. The hardware blends the outside world through cameras onto a worn display, which sounds like mixed reality in VR. Meta’s next headset promises this, and I’ve tried a high-end Varjo headset that achieves this now. Google’s Project Iris, according to the report, may not arrive until 2024. Google has been in VR and AR for a long time. And its absence from the current, and currently heating up, landscape and its metaverse-infused hype feels bizarre. Google seems like a key piece in the puzzle, and maybe the most necessary one to figuring out the future of smart glasses. Qualcomm’s recent efforts to develop smart glasses that work with phones seems like the answer to the question of how advanced glasses can be worn and used without being annoying or impossible to operate. Niantic, Snap and Meta, formerly Facebook, have similar efforts in the pipeline. No one’s getting rid of the phone in their pocket, not now or anytime soon. Glasses stuffed with processors are bound to have terrible battery life, at least for now.
