Google Glass Two.0 Is a Startling 2nd Act
Don’t call Heather Erickson a glasshole.
Yes, that’s Google Glass on her frames. But she’s not using it to check her Facebook, dictate messages, or capture a no-hands movie while railing a roller coaster. Erickson is a 30-year-old factory worker in rural Jackson, Minnesota. For her, Glass is not a hip way to suspend apps in front of her eyeballs, but a tool—as much a instrument as her power wrenches. It walks her through her shifts at Station fifty on the factory floor, where she builds motors for tractors.
Steven Levy is Backchannel's founder and Editor in Chief.
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No one at Erickson’s factory is worried that the consumer version of Glass, after an initial burst of media glory, was condemned for bugginess and creepiness, then ushered into a gadget version of the Bardo. The original Glass designers had starry-eyed visions of masses blissfully living their lives in tandem with a wraparound framework and a lil’ computer screen hovering over their eye. But the desire quickly gave way to disillusionment as early adopters found that it delivered less than it promised—and users became the target of shaming from outsiders worried about privacy. Within three years, Alphabet (the parent company of Google and its sister company, the “moonshot factory” called X) had given up Glass for good—or so people assumed.
What they didn’t know was that Alphabet was commissioning a petite group to develop a version for the workplace. The team lives in Alphabet's X division, where Glass was very first developed as a passion project of Google cofounder Sergey Brin. Now the concentrate was on making a practical workplace instrument that saves time and money. Announced today , it is called Glass Enterprise Edition.
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That’s what Erickson wears every day. She works for AGCO, an agricultural equipment manufacturer that is an early adopter of Glass EE. For about two years, Glass EE has been calmly in use in dozens of workplaces, slipping under the radar of gadget bloggers, analysts, and self-appointed futurists. Yes, the population of those using the vaunted consumer version of Glass has dwindled, tired of being driven out of lounges by cocktail-fork-wielding patrons fearing unwelcome YouTube cameos. Meantime, Alphabet has been selling hundreds of units of EE, an improved version of the product that originally shipped in a so-called Explorer Edition in 2013. Companies testing EE—including giants like GE, Boeing, DHL, and Volkswagen—have measured giant gains in productivity and noticeable improvements in quality. What embarked as pilot projects are now morphing into plans for widespread adoption in these corporations. Other businesses, like medical practices, are introducing Enterprise Edition in their workplaces to convert previously cumbersome tasks.
The difference inbetween the original Glass and the Enterprise edition could be summarized neatly by two pictures. The very first is the iconic photo of Brin alongside designer Diane von Furstenberg at a style display, both wearing the tell-tale wraparound headband with display stub. The 2nd pic is what I eyed at the factory where Erickson works, just above the Iowa state line and ninety miles from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Workers at each station on the tractor assembly line—sporting eyewear that doesn’t look much different from the safety frames required by OSHA—begin their tasks by telling, “OK, Glass, Proceed.” When they go home, they leave their glasses behind.
These Jackson, Minnesota, workers may be onto something. A latest Forrester Research report predicts that by 2025, almost 14.Four million US workers will wear wise glasses. It wasn’t referring to style runways. It turns out that with Glass, Google originally developed something with promising technology—and in its very first effort at presenting it, failed to understand who could use it best and what it should be doing. Now the company has found a concentrate. Factories and warehouses will be Glass’s path to redemption.
A workplace version is fairly a shift for one of the most hyped products in Google’s history. Glass very first dropped into public consciousness five years ago as the featured product of Google’s big I/O conference in 2012. Literally dropped, as thousands of attendees observed a free fall from the point of view of a team of Glass-equipped skydivers hurtling toward the roof of San Francisco’s Moscone Center. The elaborately planned stunt set the tone for the launch of a product that was nowhere near ready for reliable use when it was released a year later. Google acknowledged that by calling early buyers “Explorers”—virtual Shackletons who knew they were venturing into a treacherous field. Still, very first impressions were rhapsodic: Time proclaimed Glass one of the best products of the year, and everybody from Prince Charles to Beyoncé clamored to attempt it out.
But soon Glass's failings became apparent. It was buggy, it felt awkward, and it indeed didn’t have a clear function. Then came a backlash from people interacting with Glass users, who worried that their private moments would be captured by stealthily recorded movie. Establishments began banning Glass. The project simply wasn’t working.
“When we originally built Glass, the work we did on the technology front was very strong, and commencing the Explorer program was the right thing to do to learn about how people used the product,” says Astro Teller, who runs the X division. “Where we got a little off track was attempting to leap all the way to the consumer applications.” He pauses. “We got more than a little off track.”
In time, Glass hopped the track entirely, going dark in January 2015. Its website read, “Thanks for exploring with us”—and that seemed to be the finale, even as the company also promised, “The journey doesn’t end here.”
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In fact, a different journey had already begun. Even as the sound of cracking Glass was reverberating in the tech press, some early adopters were discovering that Glass was a powerful solution to a problem vexing the workplace. Workers who need real-time information—and both palms free—were natural beneficiaries of what Glass had to suggest, even if Google hadn’t figured that out yet.
It’s a choice inbetween an immersive form of augmented reality, which overlays digital information on top of the real world, and an alternative that lets workers shift inbetween the virtual and the actual. Some companies in the enterprise sector have been singing the praises of “mixed reality” helmets that overlay graphics and information onto a camera-captured display of the real world. But these are costly, bulky, and not well suited for routine tasks on a factory floor. In cases when all a worker needs is real-time access to information, a big helmet that takes over your entire field of vision is overkill. Wise glasses are a lightweight version of augmented reality—some people call this “assisted reality”—offering a computer display that one could view simply by shifting one’s stare and taking in the rest of the world as it is. It’s cheaper and more convenient than going utter immersive.
Without direction from Google, these companies began to purchase Explorer Edition units of Glass and use them with custom-made software to tackle specific tasks for their corporate customers. And Google noticed.
“We talked to all of our explorers and we realized that the enterprise space had a lot of gams,” says Jay Kothari, who now is project lead on the Glass enterprise team. Also noticing was Brin himself, who, according to Teller, reported the interest from corporations and suggested that a dedicated team might work on a specialized version of Glass to serve them. In April 2014, Google began a “Glass at Work” program that highlighted some of the early developers. And that year when a few people from X visited Boeing, which was testing Glass, they reported that their minds were throated by a side-by-side comparison of workers doing intricate wire-framing work with Glass’s help. It was like the difference inbetween putting together Ikea furniture with those cryptic instructions somewhere across the room and doing it with real-time guidance from someone who’d constructed a million Billys and Poängs.
The company determined to work on a version of Glass that would be totally separate from the consumer version. Then came the tricky part of where that team might live. Glass had supposedly “graduated” from X, but Alphabet put the Enterprise team back there. One reason was that an ace engineer named Ivo Stivoric was now a senior director at X. Stivoric had been steeped in wearables for almost two decades, co-heading a lab at Carnegie Mellon and cofounding a company called BodyMedia that was bought by Jawbone. “He literally was doing this twenty years ago,” says Teller. Also, the head of X’s rapid evaluation team, Rich DeVaul, had a background in wearables.
The eventual customers for this fresh version—from puny businesses to giant corporations—had already been dealing with independent startups that adapted Glass for specific workplaces. The Glass team at X formalized that structure, creating an ecosystem that would support “solution partners” who would work with the Glass Enterprise team directly, including buying the actual devices from Alphabet. The fucking partners would then sell the accomplish hardware and software package to corporate customers. The main task of the Enterprise team in X was creating a fresh model of Glass itself, improved for the rigors of the workplace and optimized with fresh features that the customers were clamoring for. In January 2015, they began shipping the resulting Enterprise Edition to the solution playmates. Perhaps because of the unhealed wounds of the consumer fiasco, Google asked customers not to expose the existence of EE. (Any pictures of their use of Glass had to demonstrate them using the Explorer Edition.)
Those still using the original Explorer Edition will explode with envy when they see the Enterprise Edition. For starters, it makes the technology totally accessible for those who wear prescription lenses. The camera button, which sits at the hinge of the framework, does dual duty as a release switch to liquidate the electronics part of unit (called the Glass Pod) from the framework. You can then connect it to safety glasses for the factory floor—EE now offers OSHA-certified safety shields—or frames that look like regular eyewear. (A former division of 3M has been manufacturing these specially for Enterprise Edition; if EE catches on, one might expect other framework vendors, from Warby Parker to Ray-Ban, to develop their own versions.) “We did a lot of work to lighten the weight of the frames to compensate for the extra weight [of the Pod],” says Kothari. “So the overall package with Glass and the frames itself actually comes out to be the average weight of regular glasses.”
Other improvements include beefed-up networking—not only swifter and more reliable wifi, but also adherence to more rigorous security standards—and a quicker processor as well. The battery life has been extended—essential for those who want to work through a finish eight-hour shift without recharging. (More intense usage, like constant streaming, still calls for an outer battery.) The camera was upgraded from five megapixels to eight. And for the very first time, a green light goes on when movie is being recorded. (Inoculation against Glasshole-dom!)
“It looks very similar to original Glass but improves on every aspect of it,” says Brian Ballard, CEO of Upskill, one of the most prolific of the so-called solution providers. “They had seen how we were using it, and rethought everything—how you charge it, fold it up, prevent sweating, wifi coverage.” Ballard says that the fresh version was essential for the pilot programs his big customers were running to become fully integrated into the workflow. “For our market we despairingly needed a product with a brand like Google behind it. Our customers don’t buy things from Kickstarter.”
Today’s announcement, which frees corporate users from keeping silent about the EE edition and opens it up to uncountable more businesses, is a milestone in the resurrection of a technology left for dead. “This isn't an experiment,” says Kothari. “It was an experiment three years ago. Now we are in full-on production with our customers and with our playmates.”
Yep. Glass is back.
I witnessed Glass in activity myself when I visited the AGCO factory in Jackson this month. AGCO is a $7 billion company that makes big farm equipment like tractors and sprayers under brand names like Challenger and Massey Ferguson. Its Jackson facility, which added the tractor assembly line in 2012, is a fairly high-tech operation, with a few autonomous robot carts wandering the aisles. Eight hundred fifty people work there. The expensive equipment that AGCO manufactures is most often custom-ordered by the user, so almost every unit constructed is a “snowflake” with a virtually unique set of features. In order to keep track of the specifications of each vehicle, AGCO originally had its workers consult laptops—which required a walk of about fifty feet and disrupted the work flow. “Sometimes someone was already using the computer, and then you’d have to find another,” says Heather Erickson. The company experimented with tablets, but even the heavy-duty industrial ones it bought typically lasted only a week in the penalizing environment.
Then someone suggested to Peggy Gulick, the director of business process improvement in Jackson, that AGCO attempt out this fresh thing called Google Glass. Gulick persuaded her boss to buy a single Explorer unit. They got it in two thousand thirteen and were encouraged by its potential. It also seemed sturdier than a competitor in the marketplace, Vuzix’s Brainy Glasses. But to adapt this consumer device to their workplace, they’d need a solutions provider. After weeks of attempting to find one, and wasting a few months with one that didn’t work out, she eventually connected with a Belgium-based company called Proceedix.
Working with Proceedix, AGCO began to tackle all the potential issues, from security—the Explorer couldn’t connect to an enterprise network—to device tracking and safety. “We weren't going to risk our employees' having headaches and other issues,” she says. (Indeed, some workers reported headaches before they got used to it.) All of that took months, but AGCO believed it would be worth it. “We knew the value of wearable technology when we very first put it on the floor,” Gulick says. “In our very first test in quality, our numbers were so high in the value it was adding that we actually retested and retested and retested. Some of the numbers we couldn't even publish because the leadership said they looked way too high.”
Watching workers on the floor, you can’t always tell how much Glass is integrated into the process. You simply see people getting parts, bolting, ratcheting, and attaching—every so often swiping and tapping the side of their glasses. Once you see examples of what those workers are watching, however, Glass’s advantages become more clear. A typical task at AGCO takes seventy minutes, violated into steps of three to five minutes. When a worker starts a step, it’s spelled out on the lil’ screen. Menu items suggest the options to go to the next step, take a picture, ask for help, and more. When a step is done, the worker says, “OK, Glass, proceed,” and the process repeats.
For tasks they have mastered, workers don’t need to look at the screen. But they can wake it at any time to see where a part must go, and even zoom into an object on the display for more detail. Glass tells them what kind of bolt is needed—a wrong-sized bolt could earnestly harm a motor—and specifies which wrench to use and how much torque is required. If a part looks bruised, they can take a picture. Some workers choose to swipe along the side of the framework to go to the next step; others work mainly via voice instructions.
Gulick says that not everyone has heated identically to the process—some older, very experienced workers originally didn’t see how it would help them. “There was initial skepticism, but we got over it,” says Scott Benson, who assembles transmissions. And however a factory is not a cocktail lounge, privacy issues still come up. Gulick says there’s been discussion of installing a “bathroom bar” where people can string up their headsets to make sure that no one is snapping photos. But generally the workers simply accept Glass as part of their toolkit.
In fact, they have to. “It’s like a torque implement,” says AGCO’s Rick Reuter, who is the Continuous Improvement Manager in Jackson. “It’s required to use a torque contraption to torque down the lug bolts on a tire—if you don't do it, you're not following the process. Now, it's required to go through these electronic work instructions as part of your job. So the acceptance is a entire lot more different here than it would be for the public.”
Some workers are outright enthusiasts, like Heather Erickson. When she was moved to a different station where the Glass process wasn’t implemented yet, after a few hours she went to Peggy Gulick’s office and asked to speed up the deployment.
AGCO now has just over a hundred Glass units (it pays inbetween $1300 and $1500 for each one), and Gulick says that it plans to order inbetween five hundred and one thousand more in the next eighteen months as it moves the product into all its functions and in other locations. The company is particularly excited about how Glass helps with training—cutting the time from ten days to only Three.
When a company like AGCO embraces fresh technology, one naturally wonders how far it might take automation—and what that means for jobs. AGCO’s executives think Glass helps tamp down such suspicions. “We’re not using this to substitute workers with a robot that does their job better—we’re helping them do their job better,” says Gulick.
That’s a theme that other early customers of Glass EE are promoting. Upskill’s executive chairman and the chief economist of one of its customers, GE, co-authored a paper last month in Harvard Business Review entitled “Augmented Reality Is Already Improving Working Spectacle.” “There’s been concern about machines substituting human workers…” they wrote. “But the practice at General Electrified and other industrial firms shows that for many jobs, combinations of humans and machine outperform either working alone. Wearable augmented reality devices are especially powerful.”
GE in particular has been enthusiastic in its Glass tests, claiming a forty six percent decrease in the time it takes a warehouse picker using the product. (Using Glass in this environment is as transformative as in factories—after a successful test, DHL says it plans to roll out Glass in its two thousand warehouses across the globe, where adequate.) Another pilot project, in GE’s Aviation Division, used EE with a wifi-enabled torque wrench: Glass tells workers whether they are using the decent amount of torque. Eighty-five percent of the workers said that the system would reduce errors. “By the end of this year, we’ll have several sites deploying this,” says Ted Robertson, an engineering manager at GE Aviation.
It’s not just blue-collar labor getting results with Enterprise Glass. When engineer and self-described “medical device guy” Ian Shakil very first eyed a prototype of Glass from some Google friends in 2012, he abandon his job and embarked a company called Augmedix to use the technology to make medical examinations more productive—and more satisfying for patients and doctors alike. When observing patients, the doctor using this system wears Enterprise Edition glasses and livestreams the entire examination to a “scribe” who may be a pre-med student taking a year off before medical school or, more commonly, a medical transcriptionist in India, Bangladesh, or the Dominican Republic. The scribe takes notes during the exam and, when adequate, accesses the patient’s case history to provide relevant past readings, freeing the doctor to concentrate on the patient.
“The total time coming in data has gone from thirty three percent of our day to less than ten percent,” says Davin Lundquist, the chief medical information officer for Dignity Health, who uses Augmedrix and Glass himself in clinical work. “And direct patient interaction has risen from thirty five percent to seventy percent.”
Lundquist’s enthusiasm for Glass underlines an irony: The very features that triggered criticism of the consumer version of Glass—the stealthy introduction of outward information into real-life settings; the capability to record movies of bystanders unobtrusively—become the most valued features in the Enterprise Edition. “When you hear the word Glass, you think dehumanization, social disruption,” says Shakil. “We’re the opposite—being close to the patient; being able to put your forearm on his or her shoulder to convenience them.”
An Augmedix scribe at work.
Why does Glass work so well in those private settings when it so totally flopped in public? Perhaps because in the enterprise world, Glass is not an outgrowth of the intrusive and distracting clever phone, but a contraption for getting work done and nothing else. The Enterprise Edition runs only the single application necessary to do the job. There’s no Facebooking, Tweeting, Snapping, notifications, or rage-generating headlines. “Glass in an enterprise setting is not a fucktoy,” says Lundquist. “It’s a implement that enhances our capability to perform as professionals.”
Has the doctor ever had patients who associate his eye equipment with the consumer product that earned users a certain distasteful rectal sobriquet? “I haven’t had anyone who brought that up,” he says. “My junior patients ask, Is that Glass ? I let them attempt it out. In most cases my patients feel that it sets me apart as a cutting-edge doctor.”
Of course, cutting-edge was what the original Glass was supposed to be—before Glass itself got cut. Will success in the workplace lead to a revival of the consumer edition? So far, the Enterprise effort is being run totally separate from what’s left of the consumer project. However I attempted hard to press Alphabet for a straight reaction on the status of the latter effort, if indeed there is a status, all I got was an indication that inbetween X, the Google Cloud division, and Google’s hardware division, there is an intent to keep the vision alive.
“None of us have given up on the idea that over time Glass will become less and less intrusive, and that more and more people will use it,” says Teller. “But we're not going to prejudge exactly what that path is—that's where we went wrong last time. We’ll concentrate on the places that are actually getting value out of that and go through the journey with them, being open-minded about where it's going to go.”
Maybe Google should consult Ken Veen, a quality checker in the AGCO factory in Jackson. He’s been using Glass EE for two years there as he tests tractors just off the assembly line. “Before, when I witnessed a problem, I’d have to write stuff on paper, then go to the computer and type it up,” he says. “Now I hit NOT OK and describe my problem, and it goes right to [the quality team].”
Would he be interested in using Glass in his daily life? “I might be,” he says, after some consideration. “I could wash dishes and check my email. That could come in handy.” And then he goes back to testing tractors.
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