Google Glass just got its first update in three years

You remember Google Glass, right? Ambitious, a bit silly looking and really, really expensive? Google’s experiment in face-based wearables didn’t end happily, with the company ending sales and closing down the site in 2015. Turns out that people aren’t quite ready to look like the Borg, outside of particularly nerdy Halloween parties.

But like a message eerily sketched out in a ouija board, our departed friend just made contact for the first time in three years in the form of an app and firmware update. The MyGlass companion app now supports Bluetooth, meaning you can hook up mice and keyboards to your Google Glass, just in case you thought you weren’t quite ostentatious enough with a defunct computer strapped to your face. It also gets a bunch of bug fixes, but presumably nothing so pressing that they needed doing at any time in the last 33 months.

So is Google Glass alive, or is it just pranking us from beyond the grave? Well, technically it never died: Google just stopped talking about it after it “graduated” from Google X labs. It’s just that it hasn’t been seen since, so we assumed that it had gone the same way as Google Wave and Google Buzz, given most traditional graduation ceremonies don’t involve the graduate never being heard from again.

Someone is working on the consumer version of Google Glass – it could just be someone noodling on it in their spare time, or it could be indicative of something more, given augmented reality is more of a thing than it was back in 2013. We’ll see. But the bad news for anyone wanting to tinker is that it’s still ludicrously expensive to get hold of. Ebay listings start at around £300, and one optimistic Amazon seller thinks they can get nearly £3,000.

Whether this is the return of Glass or just some kind of cadaveric spasm, I personally wouldn’t recommend dropping that kind of money on one in 2017…

Images: Giuseppe Costantino and Ted Eytan used under Creative Commons