Early this year, Google officially announced the discontinuation of its Glass Enterprise Edition 2 headsets. After the debacle of enterprise-focused Google Glass, many believed that Google is still developing an advanced consumer AR headset. Google acquired Focals by North team in 2020 for this effort.
Today, The Information reported that Google has also killed the consumer AR headset development in March as part of the broad layoffs inside the company. Clay Bavor, who led the development of Google’s AR/VR efforts is no longer working in the company.
After cancelling the AR hardware development, Google is now focusing on developing XR software platform based on which OEMs can build the hardware. At this year’s IO conference, Google revealed that it is working with Samsung on an XR headset which will be revealed later this year.
The upcoming Samsung XR headset powered by Google will compete with Apple’s upcoming Vision Pro mixed reality headset.
The original Google Glass headsets were a commercial failure, prompting the company to pivot the AR product towards businesses and industrial customers. This revised approach gave birth to the Glass Enterprise Edition, which provided workers with a hands-free solution to stay connected. The second-generation update, released in 2019, was built on the Snapdragon XR1 hardware platform.
