Google showed off new smart glasses at I/O 2022, but we need more features for a commercial success.
Google Glass was the company’s first foray into smart eyewear back in 2012/2013, touting features like a projector-driven display, touchpad, camera for photos and video recording, bone conduction audio, and voice commands. It certainly made for an innovative but ultimately unsuccessful first try, eventually finding a small niche for itself in the business world.
It looks like Google isn’t giving up on consumer-oriented smart glasses just yet, as it demonstrated a prototype for an unnamed pair of glasses at its I/O 2022 developer conference. The new glasses seem similar to the spectacles touted by startup Focal, which was acquired by Google in 2020, with the search giant demonstrating live translations and real-time transcriptions.
This is certainly a cool proof of concept and we don’t know if Google plans to commercialize this product or not. But the company needs to bring plenty more to the table if it wants a future pair of smart glasses to succeed with a wider audience. Here are some features we hope to see on a potential Google Glass successor.
Google’s own video indeed showcased real-time transcription of speech, demonstrating how hearing-impaired people could benefit from the tech. But how about sign language translation and interpretation?
It sounds super high-tech, but Google announced a web game in December 2021 to help people learn sign language. The company also announced on-device hand-tracking tech back in 2019 (see the screenshots above), laying down the foundation for sign language applications. So we’d love to see sign language to written or spoken language translation on a future pair of Google smart glasses.
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