Google Glass 3.0? Google acquires smart glasses maker North

The latest acquisition of Google Hardware is North, a laptop computing company that most recently was making smart glasses that looked like a successor to Google Glass. Google Vice President of Hardware Rick Osterloh announced the purchase on Google’s blog and said, “North’s technical expertise will help as we continue to invest in our hardware efforts and the future of environmental computing.”

North developed and launched a pair of smart glasses called “Focals”, which were the closest thing we’ve seen so far to smart glasses that looked like regular glasses. First, the company did not neglect the “glasses” portion of “smart glasses” and provided the frames in a variety of styles, sizes, and colors, with prescription lens support. The technology was also noticeably less invasive. The surface of the Google Glass screen was a transparent block that was absentmindedly placed in front of the user’s face, but the Focal screen surface was the lens of the glasses. A laser projector protruded from the thicker than normal temple arms and shot at the lens, which has a special coating, allowing the projection to reflect light into the eye.

As you can probably guess from the thicker arms, all of the computer and battery components were inserted into the arms. The device worked in much the same way as a smart watch, connecting your phone to the Internet for personal data. Not being a part of the Google or Apple ecosystem duopoly meant a lot of app and ecosystem issues, but the glasses supported pop-up notifications, calendar display, weather, navigation, Uber, and some form of messaging support. There was even Amazon Alexa support for voice commands. Like Google Glass, focal points are not augmented reality; they are just a transparent screen that shows flat images, more like a smart watch for your face.

The other input mechanism was pretty wild: a joystick ring. You wore the ring around your index finger and were able to clench your fist and control the small bump on the joystick with your thumb, allowing directional navigation through the user interface.

The focal points had some problems, mainly due to the details of the laser beam scanning screen (LBS). The laser protruded from the temple and was reflected in the lens of the glasses and entered the pupil. The angles would not function as a straight reflection, so a holographic coating on the lens of the glasses was needed to act as a tiled mirror, directing laser light at the eye at the correct angle. The effective sweet spot was incredibly small, so much so that Focals required each customer to show up at a physical store and scan their head in 3D to allow them to have a pair of custom glasses made. Even then, the screen was small (North’s marketing images, which showed a lens fill image, were not accurate) with only a resolution of 300×300 and a 15-degree field of view.

The Focals ranged from $ 600 to $ 1,000, depending on their color and prescription needs, and they launched in 2019. By all accounts, the company was not working well before Google bought it. After the launch in January 2019, Focals laid off 150 employees in February 2019, a substantial part of the “more than 400 people” it employed. Josh O’Kane, the journalist who revealed the acquisition story of the Toronto-based Globe and Mail, said on Twitter: “We have learned that the company probably sold very, very few Focals and was running out of money.” The company has planned a Focals 2.0 with a better screen and a lighter body, but with the acquisition of Google, those products are canceled.

The contribution of Google’s smart glasses was, of course, the infamous Google Glass, which launched in 2012 and basically closed as a consumer product about two years later. (North CEO Stephen Lake actually called Google Glass “a massive failure” in a 2019 tech talk. Uncomfortable!) Most people would think the product is dead, but Google quietly turned Glass into an enterprise product for assembly line workers, mechanics, doctors, and other professions that could benefit from hands-free computing. Glass’s new hardware came out as recently as 2019, with the “Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2” featuring a modern 10nm Qualcomm SoC. With Apple reportedly building a set of smart glasses, the consumer market is likely to heat up again soon.

The North acquisition is the latest in an explosion of purchases from Google’s hardware team. Google bought Fitbit in 2019 for $ 2.1 billion, its fifth largest acquisition in history, and the purchase is still awaiting regulatory approval. Also in 2019, Google purchased $ 40 million worth of technology and an R&D team from Fossil Group, a Wear OS smartwatch OEM. In 2018, Google closed a $ 1.1 billion deal with HTC, which led the Pixel smartphone design team to the company.

North listing image