In June 2012, skydivers jumped from a blimp over San Francisco and streamed their descent live to the Moscone Center through the glasses on their faces. Google Glass had arrived. Born in the Google X lab, the 2011 prototype weighed eight pounds. A year later it was a 36 gram titanium frame with a prism that floated a display in the wearer’s view, a bone conduction speaker, and a voice command woken by tilting the head 30 degrees and saying OK Glass.

This episode follows what happened when that hardware met the public. Google sold it through a contest, charging 8,000 winners $1,500 each for the Explorer Edition and fitting them in person at pop-up shops. The exclusivity bred resentment, and the always-ready camera bred fear. Bars, casinos, and movie theaters banned it, and wearers earned a new insult. Consumer sales ended in January 2015, yet the device quietly found work in hospitals and factories.

• In February 2014 a woman wearing Glass in a San Francisco bar said she was attacked and had the device ripped from her face by patrons who assumed she was recording.
• University of Massachusetts researchers showed Glass could steal passcodes by tracking the shadows of fingers typing on a phone.
• A driving simulator study found Glass users were cognitively impaired even when not actively using the display.
• Augmedix used Glass to stream doctor visits to remote scribes, saving physicians up to 15 hours a week of record keeping.
• An Australian trial let lactation consultants see a new mother’s point of view from as far as 3,500 kilometers away. Google ended enterprise sales in March 2023.