What they didn’t know was that Alphabet was commissioning a small group to develop a version for the workplace. The team lives in Alphabet’s X division, where Glass was first developed as a passion project of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Now the focus was on making a practical workplace tool that saves time and money. Announced today, it is called Glass Enterprise Edition.
That’s what Erickson wears every day. She works for AGCO, an agricultural equipment manufacturer that is an early adopter of Glass EE. For about two years, Glass EE has been quietly in use in dozens of workplaces, slipping under the radar of gadget bloggers, analysts, and self-appointed futurists. Yes, the population of those using the vaunted consumer version of Glass has dwindled, tired of being driven out of lounges by cocktail-fork-wielding patrons fearing unwelcome YouTube cameos. Meanwhile, Alphabet has been selling hundreds of units of EE, an improved version of the product that originally shipped in a so-called Explorer Edition in 2013. Companies testing EE – including giants like GE, Boeing, DHL, and Volkswagen – have measured huge gains in productivity and noticeable improvements in quality. What started as pilot projects are now morphing into plans for widespread adoption in these corporations. Other businesses, like medical practices, are introducing Enterprise Edition in their workplaces to transform previously cumbersome tasks.
They obviously followed my advice from way back in 2014, well before the Enterprise Edition was announced. Totally.
In all seriousness, this is the perfect market for devices like Glass. I don’t feel like these kinds of devices have much of a place in our personal lives, but in our professional lives it can improve safety quite a bit by giving people access to information that would otherwise require them to look away from what they are doing.
I’ve seen videos of people using augmented reality on tablets in construction. Supposedly it would show you where pipes and wires, etc. are in the walls. I have no idea how good it worked in practice, but they had a whole process around how documents would be stored and how long, etc. so they seemed pretty serious about it.
It would be a good fit for this too, I think.
5 or so years ago I saw/heard of this type tech being prototyped/used in the field (survey/engineering). Use a tablet to view an area and get automated aligned overlays onto that view. And not just tablets, but VR type helmets as well…
Future at workplace. Remains the issue of the harvesting capability being Totalitarian, in a global sense.
Remembering old movies like Ghost. What happens when you have the POWER to go anywhere? To be the INSIDER of the whole World?
count on there being competition in this area soon. For assembly lines we’ve had robotics take over, sometimes with human assist. Now we get low volume production AND repair/refurb with better computer assist. Another productivity boost.
Yes there are privacy and other issues to work out, but these devices are awesome, and I can’t wait until they are mainstreem.
The real reason Google dropped it was probably a combo of the tech not being ready in a way that makes them work and not look stupid, and also the lack of a blue print to follow. Google is not a hardware products company any more than Microsoft is (though MS has been decent at it of late), and like Microsoft before them, they need a template to follow.
Once Apple releases something in this space for them to photocopy, Google will revive Glass for the masses.
No, you have that backwards. Google will perfect its glasses and then Apple will come out with a stylish version and pretend like they invented it just like they did when they finally introduced a large screen iPhone.
I do not trust Google so I probably will not buy these glasses anytime soon.
Invasive
We are NOT obviously Rasputin, Thom. The less Oracle 🙂
Apart from Enterprise Services, I’m sure there are dozens of niche _consumer_ markets that could be served by Google OEM hardware and some custom development by a specialized company.
As an avid paraglider pilot, I would love to see reality slightly augmented with flight indications floating in one corner of my glasses: Variometer, altimeter, wind data, ground speed, glide path, airspace restrictions, waypoint stats… There is quite a lot of data to keep in mind, and I currently see it presented in a small, lo-res, very busy display that is strapped to my thigh and requires letting go of the flight controls and taking my eyes away from the world around, to push some buttons for limited interaction.
This is an extremely small market, covered by small companies like Flytec or Flymaster, which could probably never develop and market hardware like Google Glass. But maybe Google can provide them with OEM hardware at a good price, and let them devote themselves to the software, which with such limited deployment is still bound to be expensive.
However, this model would probably fail if these niche customers need only do an expensive download from the Play Store onto off-the-shelf hardware. I can see many of my colleagues putting down more than 500€ for a box with the flight glasses, but I would be surprised if any one payed 150€ for a program that turned a Google Watch from useless into the best flight computer ever.