Google’s “Iris” augmented/virtual reality headset may never see the light of day.
A new report(opens in a new tab) by Business Insider, citing three people familiar with the matter, claims that Google gave up building the product earlier this year despite having worked on it for several years.
We first heard about Iris back in January last year, when The Verge reported that the company is building a battery-powered, Android-based AR headset that resembles ski goggles (sound familiar?). The headset would run on Google’s Tensor chip and have external cameras that could help place virtual objects in the user’s real field of view.
It’s all very similar to Apple’s Vision Pro, which was recently announced after (reported) internal delays, but it seems that Google has taken a different approach.
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According to Business Insider, Google was working internally on two different AR products, with the “ski goggles” forming the basis for a product that Google announced in February alongside Samsung and Qualcomm. It still has a chance of success.
Iris – the one that was reportedly canceled – looked like regular glasses.
Google is an AR pioneer, launching Google Glass in 2013, before canceling it as a consumer-facing product just two years later. The company brought it back as a business-oriented product in 2017, but that also died in March 2023. If this new report is accurate, Iris was a continuation of Google’s tradition of launching (or thinking about launching) AR glasses, and then give up.
Instead of building a hardware AR headset, Google will instead focus on building a software platform for AR, while other manufacturers build actual headsets for the platform.