Not as much of a sick burn as first appears
To be honest, we thought there’d be more wearables. The Museum of Failure is opening in Helsingborg, Sweden this June and Google Glass has made the cut.
The first pair of ‘mainstream’ smartglasses will be exhibited next to such well received inventions as the Bic for Her pen, Colgate Beef Lasagna, Apple Newton and Sony Betamax.
The museum was thought up by Samuel West, an organisational psychologist/innovation researcher and his intentions aren’t as mean as you might think. West told Quartz that “true innovation requires learning from the complexities of each failure” and that failure is interesting because each one is different, success is boring in its sameness.
Read this: The race to mixed reality – Apple, Facebook & light field upstarts
That’s especially interesting in the case of Google Glass, which is still namechecked as being ahead of its time in many ways. Yes, it tried to do too much and there were privacy and etiquette issues. But the statements coming out of Facebook and Apple recently show that the dream of an advanced augmented reality – now trendily known as mixed reality – pair of glasses is still very much on the agenda.
By “failing” with Google Glass, even though it was never meant as a consumer product, Google has not only helped its own Project Aura R&D team figure out what we want from smartglasses but also the rest of the industry. So, yeah, failing FTW.
