Sergey Brin, the most responsible man of Google Glass, is out of retirement and back to the company he co -founded, helping him to happen. It is also promoting a new type of “glass” or, with greater precision, the intelligent Android XR glasses, while admitting some great false steps of Google Glass.
Brin unexpectedly took the stage in Google I/O 2025 for a situation with Alex Kantrowitz by Big Technology Podcast and the Deepmind CEO, Demis Hassabis, Tuesday. While the discussion turned mainly around Gemini, the generative Google platform, Kantrowitz asked Brin what he learned from Google Glass’s experience and how he could apply that to the modern Android XR glasses project.
With reinforced frankness, Brin told Kantrowitz: “I definitely feel that I made many mistakes with Google Glass, I will be honest.”
It is a great admission of Brin, who more than a decade ago was the biggest Google Glass champion and, memorably, organized a launch with a paratroopers of the wing suit jumping from a plane while using Google Glass. It was a spectacular moment, but even there, Brin now sees a defect and how he could avoid a similar false step.
Speaking of how much that great launching moment was lost, Brin directed his attention to the launch of the new XR glasses. “Maybe … we should probably polish the product this time, when it is ready and available, and then we will make a really great demonstration. So, it is probably an intelligent movement.”
Brin can see the imperfections and the last Google Glass failure, the first portable intelligent glasses that allow him to use gestures, head inclinations and even flickers to take a photo, but there was a moment between 2012 and 2014, when Google Glass was everywhere.
I took my pair in a fashion and ces parade, and in numerous network television programs. Brin was seen in the subway with his. They were, for a while, a cultural phenomenon, but also ridiculous, almost so quickly that generated the meme “glass holes”.
It would be great if this guy appeared again in #googleio. This is a decade ago (in a different event) when Sergey showed me how to take a selfie with Google Glass pic.twitter.com/y0ZLRMYR5CMay 14, 2024
Even so, I appreciated Brin’s enthusiasm, and when I met him more than a decade ago, while using Google Glass, naturally, he took the time to show me how you could take a selfie with Google Glass (yes, it meant removing them from your face).
Glass suffered from the beginning of the problems of availability and prices ($ 1,500 / £ 1,000, or around au $ 2,000) and Brin points to his naivety as the cause: “I simply did not know anything about the chains of electronic supply of consumption really, and how difficult it would be to build that and have a reasonable price … this time, we have great partners that help us build this.”
The point here is that instead of Google that tries to solve all this, it now has companies such as Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, all experts in the construction of consumer products, supply chains and retail prices, building the Android XR glasses for them.
AI will make the clear difference
Google Glass vanished in ignominy, but Brin sees Google’s return to smart glasses with a new light, and is mainly due to his new pet project in Google: AI and Gemini.
In addition to the form factor, which did not look like normal glasses, Google Glass could have advanced to its time. They were “intelligent” without really having their own true intelligence.
“Now, in the world of AI,” said Brin, “the things that these glasses can do to help you without constantly distracting it, that capacity is much higher.” And potentially makes interaction with Android XR glasses much more natural. That is why Google and its partners are putting Gemini at the center of these Android XR wearables.
Finally, Hassabis, who had been seeing all the exchange, intervened: “I feel that the universal assistant is the murderous application for smart glasses, and I think that is what will make it work.”
All this makes sense; A powerful resident of the sitting on his face in a familiar factor that asks nothing more than voice commands to make his offer, but can also see and act in his name. That is the future of smart glasses, and one that Google Glass aspired but never achieved.
Android XR glasses will be Brin’s second smart glasses law and, perhaps, for which he will finally be remembered.
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