Google buys North, Focal smart glasses maker

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Focals by north

Google confirmed yesterday via blog post that it has acquired Canadian smart glasses company North, which began life in 2012. The company didn’t reveal any details about the acquisition, which was first reported to be happening by The Globe and Mail, last week. Google’s SVP of Devices & Services Rick Osterloh, in the post cites North’s “strong technology foundation” as a key driver behind the deal.


He also emphasizes Google’s existing work in building “ambient computing,” which is to say computing that fades into the background of a user’s life, as the strategic reasoning behind the acquisition. North will join Google’s existing team in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, where North is already based, and it will aid with the company’s “hardware efforts and ambient computing future,” according to Osterloh.


North’s co- founders Stephen Lake, Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant said it would now be "winding down" support for its first-generation Focals 1.0. And it would not ship Focals 2.0 the second-generation version that the company had been teasing and preparing to release over the last several months.


Focals received significant media attention following their release, and provided the most consumer-friendly wearable-glasses-computing-interface ever launched. They closely resembled regular optical glasses, albeit with larger arms to house the active computing components, and projected a transparent display overlay onto one frame which showed things like messages and navigation directions.


Focals had some major limitations, however, including initially requiring that anyone wanting to purchase them go into a physical location for fitting, and then return for adjustments once they were ready. They were also quite expensive a pair costing $599, with prescription lenses an extra $200, and didn’t support the full range of prescriptions needed by many existing glasses-wearers. Software limitations, including limited access to Apple’s iMessage platform, also hampered the experience for Apple mobile device users.


Apple and Samsung are also rumored to be launching glasses, while Facebook's Oculus division is looking to turn virtual reality mass market.

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