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Comment by WhatIsDukkha | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure a lot of people actually got to try google glass.

I'm loving (and developing in) VR, and interested in actual AR. Glass was a deadend as soon as I actually put one on.

I found it to be pretty much as if you were holding up a smartwatch beside one eye, that you could turn your eye and look at in focus.

There is no overlay of the real world. You are either looking at watch beside your eye or the real world.

The blurry screen was always kind of off to the side and annoying when wearing it.

Just as if holding a wristwatch up to the side of your head would be.

If that sounds bad to you, yes that's why it failed.

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Yeah, I always got annoyed when the media kept referring to Glass as "AR", when in reality it was mostly just a quick way to get notifications and such without pulling your phone out of your pocket. If Glass counts as AR, so does my smartwatch.

"Notifications" is a bit of an under-sell for what a crappy text-screen that's by your eyeball can accomplish, when combined with a camera and microphone and bluetooth-paired to a phone.

Glass could (can?) do the Word Lens "translate what I'm looking at" thing better than a phone can—not in visual fidelity, but in fluency of use. It can also just let you read a book on the bus without holding your arm in front of your face. Neither of those are strictly AR, but nor are they things you could accomplish with a pager.

When I tried it I found the main problem was the voice recognition was just awful. Think 90s awful. Very surprising considering Android's voice recognition is now near flawless, even when I mumble.

I mean it was pretty clear before trying them that they would be more annoying to wear than their worth, but if the voice recognition was good I could see at least some people using them.

The reaction when we had one at work was "well this is kinda crap, doesn't do much, and there's no way to wear it without looking like an asshole".

It was clever, but it was basically the worst possible experience at everything it did for most people.

I don't doubt the utility of it for niche tasks or users but as a general consumer product it was never going to take off

I tried Glass but returned it after a few weeks. It failed for me because it didn't provide enough value for the hassle it added. The main pain points for me were that it wasn't particularly comfortable, had poor battery life, didn't offer enough useful features (at the time at least), and that a large amount of people I met in a day wanted thought they should ask about it, want to try it, etc.

"a large amount of people I met in a day wanted thought they should ask about it, want to try it, etc." it used to be like that with mobile phones :) I think as an early adopter you need to accept that bit with good humour!

> The blurry screen was always kind of off to the side and annoying when wearing it.

That sounds better than the alternative, actually—I can only imagine how distracting it would be if there was text that was clear and crisp floating in my field of vision even when I was trying to look at something else.

Yes. Its sad it got hyped like AR, and not left alone to be it own thing.

I can see it being perfect for some people like mechanics who need their hands free, but could also use a screen for documentation.

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