Google is ending sales of its Google Glass eyewear, but insists that it will launch the smart glasses as a consumer product one of these days.
Google said that it will instead focus on “future versions of Glass” with work carried out by a different division to before.
But it means that the Explorer programme, which gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 will close.
It had been expected that once developers wrote some code to run on Glass it would be followed reasonably quickly by a full consumer launch.
However that did not happen and some feared that it would be it would be left in one of Google’s Beta hells for a thousand years.
Now it seems that that the Glass team will also move out of the Google X division which engages in “blue sky” research, and become a separate undertaking, under its current manager Ivy Ross.
Ross and the Glass team will report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest, acquired by Google a year ago.
Fadell told the BBC that the project had “broken ground and allowed us to learn what’s important to consumers and enterprises alike” and he was excited to be working with the team “to integrate those learnings into future products”.
Google says it is committed to working on the future of the product, but is not giving any timescale when we will see it or see through it. Intel had pledged to support Google Glass – Tesco launched a Google Glass app earlier this week.
Go figure….
