Ten years have passed since Google co-founder Sergey Brin took to the stage during the keynote of the company’s I/O event to give the world its first real demo of Google Glass. It was a defining moment in the public understanding of smart glasses, albeit perhaps not in the way Brin might have hoped, as the tech became something of a byword for misconceived tech projects. But in this year’s keynote – just in time for the decaversary – Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a similar demo of the company’s next smart glass project. “Subtitles for the world”, was the description that stuck, providing live captioning of speech for the benefit of the deaf or hard of hearing, or for people speaking different languages. The focus, then, was on something Glass infamously lacked: a clear reason to exist.
Google’s return feels indicative of a wider push to reconsider the idea of spectacle-shaped XR devices. Last year, Meta (née Facebook) partnered with Ray-Ban for sunglasses with a built-in connected camera, an idea that – as with most of its recent innovations – appears to have been borrowed from another social media company, in this case Snap (née
