By KIM BELLARD

If I were a smarter person, I’d write something insightful about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. If I were a better person, I’d write about the dire new UN report on climate change. But, nope, I’m too intrigued about Google announcing it was (again) killing off Glass. 

It’s not that I’ve ever used them, or any AR (augmented reality) device for that matter. It’s just that I’m really interested in what comes after smartphones, and these seemed like a potential path. We all love our smartphones, but 16 years after Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone we should realize that we’re closer to the end of the smartphone era than we are to the beginning. 

It’s time to be getting ready for the next big thing.  

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Google Glass was introduced ten years ago, but after some harsh feedback soon pivoted from a would-be consumer product to an Enterprise product, including for healthcare. It was followed by Apple, Meta, and Snap, among others, but none have quite made the concept work. Google is still putting on a brave face, vowing: “We’ll continue to look at ways to bring new, innovative AR experiences across our product portfolio.”  Sure, whatever.

It may be that none of the companies have found the right use case, hit the right price point, adequately addressed privacy concerns, or made something that didn’t still seem…dorky. Or it may simply be that, with tech layoffs hitting everywhere, resources devoted to smart glasses were early on the chopping block. They may be a product whose time has not quite come…or may never.   

That’s not to say that we aren’t going to use headsets (like Microsoft’s Hololens) to access the metaverse (whatever that turns our to be) or other deeply immersive experiences, but my question is what’s going to replace the smartphone as our go-to, all-the-time way to access information and interact with others? 

We’ve gotten used to lugging around our smartphones – in our hands, our purses, our pants, even in our watches – and it is a marvel the computing power that has been packed into them and the uses we’ve found for them. But, at the end of the day, we’re still carrying around this device, whose presence we have to be mindful of, whose battery level we have to worry about, and whose screen we have to periodically use. 

Transistor radios – for any of you old enough to remember them – brought about a similar sense of mobility, but the Walkman (and its descendants) made them obsolete, just as the smartphone rendered them superfluous.  Something will do that to smartphones too.

What we want is all the computing power, all that access to information and transactions, all that mobility, but without, you know, having to carry around the actual device. Google Glass seemed like a potential road, but right now that looks like a road less taken (unless Apple pulls another proverbial rabbit out of its product hat if and when it comes out with its AR glasses). 

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There are two fields I’m looking to when I think about what comes after the smartphone: virtual displays and ambient computing.