Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2 update is faster with better camera & USB-C

Posted:
in General Discussion edited May 2019
Google is continuing to push its Google Glass smart glasses as a way for businesses to improve how employees work, by updating the Enterprise Edition of the eyewear with better performance, an improved camera, and this time making the headset run on Android.




After years of experimentation with Google Glass, the search company effectively gave up on the consumer edition, instead electing to focus on producing a version that would work better for business. The 2017 resurrection of the project as Glass Enterprise Edition involved a weightloss program and an increased battery life, all for tasks such as replacing engine assembly manuals and other hefty tomes of knowledge employees may need to reference in their work.

On Monday, Google revealed Glass Enterprise Edition 2, a refinement of the product that sticks to the intention of being a workplace tool, but with some changes to make it more effective.

The latest edition uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 platform, using a more powerful quad-core 1.7GHz chip with a new artificial intelligence engine, supported by 3 gigabytes of memory. Google claims this will provide "significant power savings, enhanced performance, and support for computer vision and advanced machine learning capabilities."





Another major change is the shift to using Android, in this case Android Oreo, rather than a forked version dubbed Glass OS. The move is said to make it easier for companies to integrate their services and APIs into the hardware, as well as to improve scaling using Android Enterprise Mobile Device Management.

The optical display module offers a resolution of 640 by 360, while the camera quality is said to be improved with an 8-megapixel sensor and an 80-degree field of view. Onboard are three beam-forming microphones, a multi-touch gesture touchpad, dual-band 802.11ac Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5 support, accelerometers, a magnetometer, and a USB Type-C connection for charging and accessing data from another device.




To make the headset more durable in a working environment, there are new safety frames from Smith Optics that helps protect them from impacts or being dropped onto a hard floor.

The new model continues to be priced for enterprise customers rather than for consumers, at $999 per headset.

Google's continued work on Glass is unsurprising, as smart glasses, AR headsets, and similar technologies are still very much of interest to tech companies. This also includes Apple.

The iPhone maker is believed to be exploring the possibilities of smart glasses or a headset of its own creation, and has extensively worked on producing augmented reality experiences for iOS devices. This last element, the creation of ARKit, is potentially a major stepping stone to Apple hardware that uses the technology.

Apple CEO Tim Cook has also repeatedly touted the AR capabilities and pursuits of the company in interviews and investor conference calls, but outside suggestions and some related patent filings, it remains to be seen when, or even if, Apple will venture into the hardware field.
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Comments

  • Reply 1 of 22
    FolioFolio Posts: 698member
    Curious to see to what degree Google Assistant is integral to the upgrade. Enterprise is the way to get started. Little concern over looks, as field grows.
    KITA1STnTENDERBITS
  • Reply 2 of 22
    trashman69trashman69 Posts: 161member
    Google Glass - flogging a dead horse - Edition 
    SpamSandwichgrifmxAppleExposedwatto_cobra
  • Reply 3 of 22
    canukstormcanukstorm Posts: 2,694member
    Google Glass - flogging a dead horse - Edition 
    or maybe they realized the biggest opportunity for AR glasses is in the enterprise?
    KITA1STnTENDERBITSCarnagejeffythequick
  • Reply 4 of 22
    irelandireland Posts: 17,798member
    This will certainly run “Android”
    SpamSandwichwatto_cobra
  • Reply 5 of 22
    KITAKITA Posts: 392member
    Google Glass - flogging a dead horse - Edition 
    or maybe they realized the biggest opportunity for AR glasses is in the enterprise?
    Just like Microsoft with HoloLens 2


  • Reply 6 of 22
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Not exactly something that will set the world on fire. And it will probably never generate a profit for Google.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 7 of 22
    LordeHawkLordeHawk Posts: 168member
    I’m having trouble understanding the benefits to Googles system.  It’s not full AR, only 1 screen, no mention of the Google assistant, and an onboard trackpad that negates a handsfree experience.

    What’s a use case for these that isn’t better served by a powerful mobile device, computer, or automation?
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 8 of 22
    Eric_WVGGEric_WVGG Posts: 966member
    I know a guy who's working on a vertical/indoor farming startup. He's built a platform where the plants all have QR codes under them; workers can walk around the aisles and see at a glance which plants require water, have a fungus, are ready for harvest, etc. 

    Warehouse workers being given directions or orders amidst hundreds of thousands of crates. I once had a job working at UPS, loading boxes into trucks for cross-country transit. I had to check the zip codes of 60-100 boxes per minute to make sure I wasn't sending a California box to Texas. I could never keep the lists of zips correct, eventually washed out. Google Glasses would have been a godsend.

    There was good story about their use in surgery and medical settings.

    Google Glass is a great product. It's just not a great consumer product.
    Latkomuthuk_vanalingamCarnagebeowulfschmidt
  • Reply 9 of 22
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    LordeHawk said:
    I’m having trouble understanding the benefits to Googles system.  It’s not full AR, only 1 screen, no mention of the Google assistant, and an onboard trackpad that negates a handsfree experience.

    What’s a use case for these that isn’t better served by a powerful mobile device, computer, or automation?
    The AI article mentions at least two use cases. If you're truly curious Google has a Glass Enterprise page that offers several other endorsements from companies using it. 

    Also of some note Glass is not longer under the X umbrella, now graduating to the VR/AR solutions team. 
    muthuk_vanalingam
  • Reply 10 of 22
    chasmchasm Posts: 3,273member
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    AppleExposedwatto_cobra
  • Reply 11 of 22
    rezwitsrezwits Posts: 878member
    Hey, TINY ARM chips that use really really low amounts of power?  Who knew? /s
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 12 of 22
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Read about how the Glass Enterprise models work and how businesses and healthcare professionals are working with them.
    https://www.google.com/glass/partners/
    edited May 2019
  • Reply 13 of 22
    kimberlykimberly Posts: 427member
    Google Glass - flogging a dead horse - Edition 
    or maybe they realized the biggest opportunity for AR glasses is in the enterprise?
    Yeah, I looked at the video and the examples of use-cases were pretty interesting.  Given that both hands (and legs in some instances) are freed there must be a huge potential market out there. In the enterprise, function takes precedence over form. Never thought I would be giving Google a plug.
  • Reply 14 of 22
    Eric_WVGG said:
    I know a guy who's working on a vertical/indoor farming startup. He's built a platform where the plants all have QR codes under them; workers can walk around the aisles and see at a glance which plants require water, have a fungus, are ready for harvest, etc. 

    Warehouse workers being given directions or orders amidst hundreds of thousands of crates. I once had a job working at UPS, loading boxes into trucks for cross-country transit. I had to check the zip codes of 60-100 boxes per minute to make sure I wasn't sending a California box to Texas. I could never keep the lists of zips correct, eventually washed out. Google Glasses would have been a godsend.

    There was good story about their use in surgery and medical settings.

    Google Glass is a great product. It's just not a great consumer product.
    Yet...
    The Internet wasn't a consumer product either, and spent the first 25 years of its life as a tool for companies (big ones, like IBM), schools, and the military.  Once the bugs were worked out, the platform was refined, in the last 20 years (using 1998 as the breakout year for the Internet) has seen the improvements that we have now.

    I see enterprise making this a better platform, and eventually they'll be consumer editions worthy of consumers' money, just like cell phones, trucks, computers...
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 15 of 22
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Exactly...  Most companies I know and have worked at don't really want everything that they own being sent to the mother ship, and that's a huge NFW for corporations that value their data and their intellectual property.

    When I had a business and installed servers, and was talking about backup plans (they had RAID 1 and 5 arrays in them), they said, "I'm not worried, the failure systems you have are good enough!" to which I said, "OK, what if someone breaks in and steals your server?  Do you want all of that data gone?  Your insurance will cover the hardware, but how valuable is your data?"

    No one, from Intel to IBM to anybody that works with Defense will let these things on their property while they call home as part of their firmware.  Google makes Huawei look like pikers in this regard.
    watto_cobra
  • Reply 16 of 22
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Exactly...  Most companies I know and have worked at don't really want everything that they own being sent to the mother ship, and that's a huge NFW for corporations that value their data and their intellectual property.

    When I had a business and installed servers, and was talking about backup plans (they had RAID 1 and 5 arrays in them), they said, "I'm not worried, the failure systems you have are good enough!" to which I said, "OK, what if someone breaks in and steals your server?  Do you want all of that data gone?  Your insurance will cover the hardware, but how valuable is your data?"

    No one, from Intel to IBM to anybody that works with Defense will let these things on their property while they call home as part of their firmware.  Google makes Huawei look like pikers in this regard.
    Of course companies don't want everything they own turned over to some other company for their own uses. You're introducing a false dilemma since Google Glass Enterprise doesn't do that, obviously. Proof? They're used in medical offices and hospitals. Did you watch the video the AI article linked? 

    The rest of your post is simply constructed from assumption, other than your reference to a conversation you had at a data center once.

    edited May 2019
  • Reply 17 of 22
    gatorguy said:
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Exactly...  Most companies I know and have worked at don't really want everything that they own being sent to the mother ship, and that's a huge NFW for corporations that value their data and their intellectual property.

    When I had a business and installed servers, and was talking about backup plans (they had RAID 1 and 5 arrays in them), they said, "I'm not worried, the failure systems you have are good enough!" to which I said, "OK, what if someone breaks in and steals your server?  Do you want all of that data gone?  Your insurance will cover the hardware, but how valuable is your data?"

    No one, from Intel to IBM to anybody that works with Defense will let these things on their property while they call home as part of their firmware.  Google makes Huawei look like pikers in this regard.
    Of course companies don't want everything they own turned over to some other company for their own uses. You're introducing a false dilemma since Google Glass Enterprise doesn't do that, obviously. Proof? They're used in medical offices and hospitals. Did you watch the video the AI article linked? 

    The rest of your post is simply constructed from assumption, other than your reference to a conversation you had at a data center once.

    Agreed, my argument is a bit specious, but there are real reasons why I said what I said.
    AppleExposedwatto_cobra
  • Reply 18 of 22
    blah64blah64 Posts: 993member
    gatorguy said:
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Exactly...  Most companies I know and have worked at don't really want everything that they own being sent to the mother ship, and that's a huge NFW for corporations that value their data and their intellectual property.

    When I had a business and installed servers, and was talking about backup plans (they had RAID 1 and 5 arrays in them), they said, "I'm not worried, the failure systems you have are good enough!" to which I said, "OK, what if someone breaks in and steals your server?  Do you want all of that data gone?  Your insurance will cover the hardware, but how valuable is your data?"

    No one, from Intel to IBM to anybody that works with Defense will let these things on their property while they call home as part of their firmware.  Google makes Huawei look like pikers in this regard.
    Of course companies don't want everything they own turned over to some other company for their own uses. You're introducing a false dilemma since Google Glass Enterprise doesn't do that, obviously. Proof? They're used in medical offices and hospitals. Did you watch the video the AI article linked?

    I read the /partners link you posted, and the /glass main page.  Nowhere do I see anything that even remotely describes a scenario in which customers (or "partners", does glass even have customers that aren't "partners"?), can take advantage of glass without data being sent back to google.

    You're very good at finding any and all data related to google, and I'm interested enough to ask if you know how this works. I'm not going to dig through pages and pages of ToS, I already do too much of that every week as it is.
    StrangeDaysAppleExposedwatto_cobra
  • Reply 19 of 22
    gatorguygatorguy Posts: 24,176member
    blah64 said:
    gatorguy said:
    chasm said:
    While I am trying to applaud continued research in wearables and enterprise tools, the fundamental problems with Google Glass remain:
    1. Big and presumably weighty battery in the back on one side -- not balanced.
    2. Aesthetically unbalanced as well.
    3. Google camera recording you at all times.

    I'm pretty sure that doctor does not start his exams by saying "by the way, these glasses have a video camera in them that is recording you and sending that information to Google," so … I can only speak for myself, but Google's privacy policies (or lack thereof) and medical exams are a gigantic nope for me, and in general I will need to be asked to opt-in and give explicit permission (which will never happen) before looking at or speaking to anyone wearing Google Glasses.
    Exactly...  Most companies I know and have worked at don't really want everything that they own being sent to the mother ship, and that's a huge NFW for corporations that value their data and their intellectual property.

    When I had a business and installed servers, and was talking about backup plans (they had RAID 1 and 5 arrays in them), they said, "I'm not worried, the failure systems you have are good enough!" to which I said, "OK, what if someone breaks in and steals your server?  Do you want all of that data gone?  Your insurance will cover the hardware, but how valuable is your data?"

    No one, from Intel to IBM to anybody that works with Defense will let these things on their property while they call home as part of their firmware.  Google makes Huawei look like pikers in this regard.
    Of course companies don't want everything they own turned over to some other company for their own uses. You're introducing a false dilemma since Google Glass Enterprise doesn't do that, obviously. Proof? They're used in medical offices and hospitals. Did you watch the video the AI article linked?

    I read the /partners link you posted, and the /glass main page.  Nowhere do I see anything that even remotely describes a scenario in which customers (or "partners", does glass even have customers that aren't "partners"?), can take advantage of glass without data being sent back to google.

    You're very good at finding any and all data related to google, and I'm interested enough to ask if you know how this works. I'm not going to dig through pages and pages of ToS, I already do too much of that every week as it is.
    The OP said "everything going back to (Google)". Of course diagnostic data would be exchanged, and particularly so for a device that's still in the testing stages.  The clients private information no unless they've actively and specifically asked for it, and that is what that poster seemed to be warning about.

    I'll assume you have no issue with Apple collecting "diagnostic" data and I don't see anywhere that Glass Enterprise does anything more than that baring a client's request. I don't think you saw anything different than that did you?
    edited May 2019
  • Reply 20 of 22
    LordeHawkLordeHawk Posts: 168member
    Eric_WVGG said:
    I know a guy who's working on a vertical/indoor farming startup. He's built a platform where the plants all have QR codes under them; workers can walk around the aisles and see at a glance which plants require water, have a fungus, are ready for harvest, etc. 

    Warehouse workers being given directions or orders amidst hundreds of thousands of crates. I once had a job working at UPS, loading boxes into trucks for cross-country transit. I had to check the zip codes of 60-100 boxes per minute to make sure I wasn't sending a California box to Texas. I could never keep the lists of zips correct, eventually washed out. Google Glasses would have been a godsend.

    There was good story about their use in surgery and medical settings.

    Google Glass is a great product. It's just not a great consumer product.
    Thank you for the ideas, it helps.  The argument can be made these could also be automated with sensors and speed that can’t be matched by Googles solution.
    I get the point, but when Apple releases their AR, I see exponentially more capability and human productivity.

    watto_cobra
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