Random people hate being watched, or at least they hate knowing they are being watched by another person.

That being said, like someone else mentioned, Glass and AR-type products are very successful as productivity boosters in people who assemble products. We use Pupil Labs' glasses at our business to do gaze tracking. There's a lot of good use cases for this technology, but it's not cheap and it's pretty specific at this time.

I think it would have been a better product without camera.

Having some of the smartphone info in a HUD is a killer feature in itself, much better than a smartwatch.

It's not entirely clear what you're saying here. Does your business use these solutions as a way to enrich the information needed used by someone assembling your products, or do you use them to ensure everyone's eyes are looking in the correct direction while on the assembly line?

I don't run an assembly line myself - we use them for gaze tracking in sport science.

Mostly in industrial use they are used to identify parts quickly with AR overlays.

What I specifically remember about Google Glass is endless reports of people getting assaulted for wearing them because people were thought they were being recorded.

Google Glass is actively produced and successful in the enterprise space. The consumer market wasn't the ideal demographic, but it pivoted and continued development.

Wearing another pair of glasses is pretty intrusive. The value added (if any) by Google Glass clearly wasn't enough over the phone for how much more intrusive it was.

Have you seen Focals? They seem to be a spiritual successor to glass, though focused more on the form factor (looking like a normal pair of glasses) than matching all the features glass had (as part of the Google ecosystem). North only has a few stores so not many people have actually tried them out.

I think down the line we'll see wireless Google Lens, as in contact lense(s), that provide all kinds of information to the wearer, unbeknownst to all others. Maybe power will be generated by harnessing eyeball movement. Maybe a see-through camera. Maybe...

> I can never understand why google couldn't make it popular

Nobody could make it popular after that infamous shower photo. Products need certain coolness to gain traction and Scoble made it go the other way (I live in non-English speaking country and I use that shot to explain the word "nerd").

Basic problem with Google Glass:

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2013/06/14

I think the combination of the actually-not-that-discreet camcorder and the fact it didn't really have a reputation for being able to do much else interesting at launch was the perfect storm

I'm not really that bothered by people holding phones in a way that might be surreptitiously recording me, because I expect they're actually using them for something else.