Google kills Iris smartglasses project

It's all just a little bit of history repeating

Google has been doing Google things this week, as reports suggest that it’s killed its Iris smartglasses project.

Former Wareable US editor Hugh Langley has reported that the company has shuttered Iris, after waves of resignations and the departure of key execs – driven by repeated changes in strategy for the smartglasses project.

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Iris was a new project formed out of the ashes of Google Glass. The company held pole position having released a pair of consumer smartglasses in 2013. For all its faults, Google Glass was way ahead of its time.

Google followed up the closure of the Glass project by buying North – a promising startup, which aimed to put technology into a pair of normal-looking Focals AR glasses.

Google itself revealed details of the Iris smartglasses project in 2022 with a teaser video that showed off a real-time translation feature.

But according to Business Insider, the company now plans to pivot to building an AR smartglasses OS, a la Android, on a new platform called "micro XR" for glasses.

It’s curious how Google seems to go through the same cycle for each product.

It has hallmarks of the Pixel Watch, which was shuttered in 2016 before being resurrected in 2020.

Nest has also been passed around the company, and at one point spun off to Alphabet, before now being at the heart of the company’s smart home strategy.

So having built the first ever consumer smartglasses, killed the project, bought and killed the brightest AR startup, and started and killed the Iris project – the company has finally settled on what it always does: building its own OS.