Google is discontinuing the Google Glass Enterprise, and it’s over with the early AR project

Alphabet’s Glass is used in manufacturing

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Google announced, on Wednesday, that it has stopped selling its smart glasses from Glass Enterprise on its website. The company said Google will also stop supporting its software in September.

The move marks the end of the line for one of the first – and still one of the most popular – smart glasses production lines from a major tech company.

Glass Enterprise was the successor to Google Glass, a lightweight glass product that displays small bits of information on a transparent screen in the user’s field of view.

Glass was first sold to developers and early adopters in 2013 for $1,500 and quickly captured the imagination of tech enthusiasts. But despite the support of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the Glass project at Google was never recognized as a flagship product. Built-in camera led to Fights over privacyand the product has become the butt of jokes On TV late at night.

By 2017, Google was positioning the product as a tool for organizations to perform applications such as streaming healthcare appointments or training workers on the factory floor.

Google recently released a new $999 hardware version in 2019.

Google’s decline comes as competitors including Meta and Apple invest in augmented reality and virtual reality technology that may end up in devices more advanced than Google Glass.

Meta has released Ray-Ban smart glasses with cameras but no display, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spoken publicly about a final Google Glass-like shape for the product line.

Camel It said Set up a virtual reality headset that can use video from outward-facing cameras to view the outside world, such as a transparent lens.

Microsoft has its own augmented reality glasses for businesses, the HoloLens, but the company It said He laid off parts of the team working on it earlier this year, and the device’s creator, Alex Kipman, will leave the company in 2022.

Ceasing to use Glass does not mean that Google has given up on augmented reality or smart glasses. Last summer, Google showed off a different pair of smart glasses that can translate and transcribe speech in real time, and said it will continue to test augmented reality glasses prototypes in public.