Reality-bending flops are a reason to be cheerful

The moral of this embarrassing spygear incident is that sometimes the development of a technology can be too clever for its own good

In February 2014, a social media consultant walked into a San Francisco bar and was assaulted. The story became national news and at first it seemed like a textbook case of unprovoked aggression. Sarah Slocum says she was hit with wet bar towels as drinkers grabbed and stole her glasses. She called it a hate crime. But there’s more to the story than those bare facts suggest.

These were no ordinary spectacles, but a futuristic cyborg accessory made by Google, called Glass, which allowed her to film everything around her surreptitiously.

Footage showed Slocum describing the patrons of Molotov’s – a cheerful and friendly dive bar that is resistant to gentrification – as “white trash”. It subsequently emerged that she had a collection of restraining orders against her, including one from her mother, and had once filmed her neighbours through their kitchen window.

Boundaries are important and Slocum had crashed right through them. But how much of the fracas was down to her behaviour, and how much was the fault of the spectacles? Bars and restaurants up and down the West Coast didn’t wait to find out, and banned the technology. The people who wore them were “Glassholes”.

Even Google adopted the term in some belated advice to owners of the £1,000 spectacles, advising, “Don’t be creepy or rude”.

Google Glass was the brainchild of co-founder Sergey Brin, who boasted how the technology would release men from the “emasculating” habit of checking their smartphones – which is a problem we never knew we had.

The inventors reasoned that since we had already become screen zombies, and experts at shutting the world out around us, it seemed logical to take the next step and strap that tech to our faces. The royalty of Silicon Valley agreed and placed big bets on the success of Glass.

“In 10 years, these things will be unbelievable experiences,” predicted Marc Andreessen, of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, as he launched a $500m (£415m) fund with archrival John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins, to stimulate applications for Glass.

“These things always start out looking whacky – the idea someone takes their laptop out at a café starts out whacky,” Andreessen insisted.

“These are now commonplace things. Once you put them on, and have the internet there, it’s a kind of magical thing.”

Today, a Silicon Valley that is short of hits desperately wants “augmented” or “mixed reality” to be a success. It’s hoping that the public finally embraces the idea of a digital overlay that blends in with your view of the world.

This is in contrast to virtual reality, or VR, which immerses you completely. That isn’t going too well, as the imperial hubris of Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse project suggests. Facebook’s parent has spent more than $30bn on Zuckerberg’s insistence that we will want 3D cartoon figures to represent us in work meetings – yet the results look worse than a game of Fifa from the 1990s.

In less than a year, it has become a running joke and investors have punished the company. Enthusiasts for AR have instead pinned their hopes on Apple – the only company in Silicon Valley with a consistent track record of success in consumer hardware.

Excitement built as Apple’s phones and tablets began to include Lidar depth sensors, which are ideal for building a 3D map that helps with many augmented reality application.

One example is an Ikea app that allows you to preview furniture in your own home before you buy it. It’s very well done, but really compelling apps, ones that you can’t live without, remain elusive. Apple’s site hints at applications in “health and wellness”. Of course, you can improve both without an extra, cumbersome piece of technology getting in the way.

Last month, Bloomberg reported that Apple has again revised its AR plans and postponed the launch of its own Glass project to 2025.

It is difficult to tick all three boxes of useful, light and affordable.

Things are not going much better in the enterprise AR market, which has deeper pockets.

Microsoft launched its “mixed reality” headset, Hololens, eight years ago to great praise and in 2018 won a huge $22bn contract with the US Army to equip soldiers with a custom unit.

But the Pentagon audit office has warned that the money may be wasted, after 80pc of soldiers reportedly felt nauseous or suffered headaches. The headset’s glow also gave away the soldier’s position in the dark. Last month’s layoffs at Microsoft reportedly hit the mixed reality unit particularly hard.

Our politicians often express an envy of Silicon Valley, and hope we can imitate it. The AR story suggests the opposite.

In the bar, Slocum raged that the drinkers who objected to her spygear were “ugly, nasty, angry, jealous, confused and threatened”. Ugly and jealous? That’s how Silicon Valley views anyone who insists on boundaries, or who dares mock it. It’s never their fault – it’s ours, they insist.

Today, boundaries are supposed to be fluid and porous, whether it’s gender, or the blurring of work and the office, we are told. But far from being something to mourn, I find the failure of AR to be a refreshing reassertion of very human boundaries.

May the drinkers continue to assert them – and win.

‘The failure of AR is a refreshing reassertion of very human boundaries’