Why Google's AR Glasses Just Can't Compete With Apple's Vision Pro

Just weeks after seeing Vision Pro, Google has stopped developing its own augmented reality (AR) device. 

Google announced its Iris AR glasses just over a year ago, and things have been quiet ever since. Those specs promised real-time audio transcription, like subtitles for real life. But now, according to Business Insider, Google has ended the project. The timing seems a little coincidental. Could it be that Google saw Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headset and realized it was nowhere near that level? Or could it be that they have decided to make a full-on AR headset?

"I believe [Google] will probably follow Apple and come out with an XR device in the coming years, but that remains to be seen," Lorne Fade, co-founder and COO of virtual reality training company VR Vision told Lifewire via email. 

It's the iPhone All Over Again

Before the iPhone launched in 2007, smartphones were all over the place. From the Blackberry, with its physical keyboard, to oddities like the Sony Ericsson P800 and P900, which required a stylus or sharp fingernail to use. Then, in one move, Apple redefined how phones would look and work. Back then, it was far from obvious that a phone would be a slab of multitouch glass running a proper computer operating system. Since the iPhone, it's hard to find anything else. 

The same happened with the iPad in 2011. Prior to that, tablet computers were essentially laptops with the screens reversed to point outwards, used with a stylus, and running regular Windows. After the iPad, they were slim, multitouch slabs of glass with all-day battery life. 

Could it be that Google, having seen the massive conceptual leap made by Apple, has shelved its plans to start over? And maybe this time, it won't brag about the products before they are even near to being ready?

"Google is absolutely working on AR/VR, just not as publicly as before.  They have not ditched it," Chris Harrison, associate professor with the Human-Computer Interaction Institute and director of the Human Interfaces Group at Carnegie Mellon University, told Lifewire via email. 

Vision Pro Is... Visionary

Before the Vision Pro, we had two kinds of headsets. VR goggle headsets like the Meta Quest, which are essentially 3D displays for video games, and AR glasses like Google's other AR failure, Google Glass. These look like slightly dorkier versions of regular glasses and project simple text and graphics onto the lens and, therefore, over the real world. 

Vision Pro combined the two, using the virtual reality (VR) headset paradigm but using next-level displays and cameras to bring the real world inside, AR-style. Apple's end game is clearly to pack this all onto a pair of glasses, but it's not even the technology that matters here. The thing that makes Vision Pro revolutionary is the Spatial Computing part. 

Google's glasses have been little more than notifications projected into your eyes, and the Meta Quest is, as mentioned, a fancy head-mounted display. Vision Pro is an entirely new computing category, as different from phones and tablets as phones were from laptops. Perhaps even more so.

Google's fancy glasses were pretty neat, but it's also very obvious that its Google Iris tech cannot hope to handle something like spatial computing. The Vision Pro is already far ahead of everybody else, and even that is a relatively bulky and awkward headset. Google will have to start over. 

"In terms of competing with Apple's Vision Pro product, I do think Meta will likely be their biggest competitor—with the upcoming Quest 3 headset and future road-mapped Quest Pro v2 could be on par with Apple's device from a hardware perspective. Meta has the advantage of already having an ecosystem with a ton of adoption, something Apple doesn't have yet for XR," says Fade.

What Meta doesn't have is a general-purpose computer operating system, like visionOS. Even if it does catch up with the Vision Pro, Facebook would have to build an OS and then convince everybody that it totally wasn't going to use the cameras to scan users' homes, track their eye movements, and use the data to sell ads.