Vector Media Club #1 - Google Glass by Quinn Myers

Google Glass was first teased over a decade ago now. It might take another ten years or more before AR glasses (under however broad a device definition you like) reach mass adoption. It's very likely, then, that many developers and engineers who might someday work on those glasses either won't have lived through the rise and fall of Glass or will have fairly distant memories of it.

Quinn Myers' book on Glass builds to a provocative argument for why we should remember the failure of this particular Google project, and in the process provides what is probably the best examination of the Glass Explorer Program we'll ever get. People who believe AR glasses will someday replace smartphones and other personal devices might take issue with Myers insisting that "we must never stop dunking on Google Glass," but I believe the book is a must-read for anyone working on AR glasses regardless.

Myers secured interviews with two of the key figures behind Glass, Babak Parviz and Sebastian Thrun, and he deftly weaves their stories from development and assessments of where Glass went wrong into the book. An account of the Glass skydiving demo at Google I/O 2012, anchored also by an interview with skydiver J.T. Homes, frames the first few chapters–and Parviz's vivid recollection of his fears around the demo is practically worth the price of the book on its own.

But anecdotes like that are only part of the appeal, with that one arriving after dozens of pages melding contemporary reports, analysis, and stories from Thrun and Parviz into an insightful tale of Glass's early development and the initial hype that swirled around the project. Every moment Myers walks readers through, whether behind-the-scenes or memorably public (like The Daily Show's Glass takedown) is never dry nor lacking in appropriate context.

The unique perspective Myers brings to the ups and downs of Glass also complements the solid research and interviews. As Myers told me, he wasn't intimately familiar with Glass when he set out to write the book. His curiosity about the project's arc and delight in the details of odd marketing and design moves gives  the book the feeling of following Myers down a deep and quite entertaining rabbit hole.

That Google Glass, the book, is part of a series called "Remember the Internet" is not incidental to its structure. Shaped by his years of experience reporting on all kinds of topics in online culture, the path Myers takes through the Glass story also becomes one describing the decade-ago internet. There are many references to still-thriving websites and, of course, Matt McGee's Glass Almanac (now frozen as it was in 2015) is cited often–but Myers also endeavors to present information from sources more prone to deletion and erasure. One apparent nail in the Glass coffin is heralded in the book by way of a Reddit post, and the demise of Google+ looms large in the chapters where Myers focuses on the people who loved using Glass and kept doing so for years.

For those hoping to succeed where Google fell short, there are gems to find in the book's quotes from Explorer Program participants like Allen Firstenberg. After all, with so much that Google arguably shouldn't have done or at least could have done better, people interested in building out AR's consumer future surely have something to learn from the people who stuck with Glass even as its reputation soured and updates ceased.

And yes, maybe you won't find yourself nodding along with all the book's criticisms of Google and other tech giants; maybe you're convinced that the Glass uproar around privacy and surveillance is slowly becoming a non-issue as more cameras dot our devices. There's a kind of optimist point of view I've encountered in some immersive tech spaces that would pass on a book like this, dismissing it as too jaded or simply rehashing a long-concluded debate about "Glassholes."

But in so many ways, much of what Myers covers from the fall and aftermath of the Explorer Program feels almost prescient. As more sophisticated glasses come and go in the years ahead, we're almost guaranteed to see some familiar problems Glass raised play out on a larger scale; not just the moments of backlash but ones that flew under the radar because they affected Glass users. The Glass Explorer Edition may have only gone mainstream as a punchline and not a product, but that doesn't change the fact that it had a complete lifecycle from launch to its last update. I suspect Glass still had more active users at its height than many glasses that have followed it since, and it'd be a huge loss if large parts of the Glass history were largely kept within Google or lost to link rot.

Thankfully Myers has done a lot to prevent that loss. I'd say that if you're in AR and unless you worked on Glass yourself or were an actively engaged part of the Explorer Program, then there's likely a lot you can learn from his book.

You can find more about Google Glass by Quinn Myers at this website.

Thanks for being a Voyager-level supporter of Virtual Vector. While this entire publication is something of an experiment, what I'm trying to do with these Vector Media Club reviews is definitely a stretch for me, so I really do appreciate your interest and welcome any and all feedback. Thanks also for your patience as I catch up with these–getting clobbered by Covid recently didn't make this any easier, but I'm planning to stick close to weekly with these until we're back to the regular schedule. If you've got any questions, comments, or suggestions for future Vector Media Club picks, please email me at mathew@virtualvector.xyz