Google has announced today that it will no longer be selling its Glass Enterprise Edition 2 headsets, with support set to be discontinued later this year.
After the commercial failure of its original Google Glass headsets, the company segued the AR product into a solution for businesses and industrial customers, intended to allow workers to stay connected in a hands-free way. This lineup, dubbed Glass Enterprise Edition, received a second-generation update in 2019, which was built on the Snapdragon XR1 hardware platform.
Google has updated many of the pages related to the Google Glass Enterprise Edition to announce that sales of the headset have been discontinued as of March 15. For existing Glass Enterprise Edition customers, Google will continue to support the headset until September 15, 2023, though the company has said that “no software updates from Google are planned.” Instead, “support” here means that customers will be able to receive replacement devices under the existing programs until that deadline.
After the deprecation date, all existing headsets will continue to work as normal, and third-party developers will still be able to update their applications, which are usually responsible for any business-specific tasks. One caveat, though, is that Google says the “Meet on Glass” app that launched less than a year ago is only guaranteed to work until the September 15 deadline, after which the app has the potential to break.
The discontinuation comes at a curious time for the Google Glass lineup, as the platform recently gained an early access program to test deeper integration with Google’s Pixel phones through a new companion app. That preview brought integration with common Google apps and services, including Google Tasks, Google Translate, and Google Camera.
Meanwhile, Google has been continuing its work on Android-powered AR headsets. For instance, our team found signs of Google working on the types of smart ring controls seen on the Focals by North (a company that Google acquired). Last May, at its annual I/O conference, the company even showed off an in-progress live transcription and translation feature on AR smart glasses.
Image: Google
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