After many months of silence, Google’s finally scrubbed the internet clean of its weird wearable consumer experiment known as Google Glass. Spotted by 9to5Google, Glass-related accounts on Google+, Twitter, and Instagram have been shutdown with only Google+ giving any kind of parting farewell:
Hi Explorers, we’ve had a blast hanging out with you on G+ throughout the Explorer Program. From now on, if you have any questions about your Glass, you can get in touch with us here.
With its social death, Google Glass’ public face turns inward, and the implication doesn’t need too much explaining right? Glass never should have been presented as a consumer technology—not even close. Indeed, its consumer flirtation in the form of the problem-riddled Explorer Program begat assaults and creepy invasions of privacy—and more importantly, it didn’t garner lasting interest from most people, despite a lot of early curiosity. In other words, it was a catastrophic failure.
Though the company seems to have abandoned any short-term hope for consumer Glass, Google’s actually launching into a new era with the tech, in the form of an Enterprise Edition model, now under the direction of the new Project Aura. In the waning days of 2015, Google outed the new-but-not-really-that-new design for the specs in an FCC filing. Problems remain, though, and it seems clear that bringing Glass into the workplace doesn’t necessarily make it a magically successful idea.
If you’re one of the few individuals who felt destined to plant the Google Glass flag into the topsoil of some unexplored technological tundra, Google’s just left you out in the cold.
Contact the author at darren.orf@gizmodo.com