Google Glass Was Framed! Do You Like It?

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This week Google announced that they were going to make glass look less Cyborg-esque  and less squinty by launching four titanium frames that can accommodate both the Glass hardware and your prescription!

For an extra $225, current Glass explorers can purchase one of four frames styles (Bold, Curve, Thin and Split) and two brandy-new tinted shade styles (Classic and Edge). The frames ship with non prescription lenses, and then customers can take the glasses to their optometrist to get their prescription lenses fit. The cool bit is that VSP is not only training eye doctors to properly fit Glass, they’re also going to be able to reimburse some customers for their frame purchase, so the price on that $225 will come down a bit. That’s of course assuming that you’ve got the spare $1500 to enter the Glass Explorer program in the first place. But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is how these things look. Yes, the point of the frames was to open up access to people who need prescriptions and were unwilling or unable to wear contacts. I mean, you could jam Glass over existing glasses, but that’s bulky and weird. But the rest of the internet is also talking about what an improvement they are.

The Verge thinks they look better:

And CNET agrees:

Am I the only person on the planet that thinks the original explorer frame is way, way better than any of these? Like for real, I prefer the futuristic galaxy walker look to any of this hipster nonsense and the original aesthetic, as weird as it is, wouldn’t have prevented me from wanting to post to WordPress with my eye, legit translate printed words right in front of my eye, even get my breaking news to my eye. So I became really interested in what We think of it. If you magically had $1500 dollars and a good reason to sign up as an explorer, which would you choose?


This has been the sixty-fifth installment of  Queer Your Tech with Fun, Autostraddle’s nerdy tech column. Not everything we cover is queer per se, but we talk about customizing this awesome technology you’ve got. Having it our way, expressing our appy selves just like we do with our identities. Here we can talk about anything from app recommendations to choosing a wireless printer to web sites you have to favorite to any other fun shit we can do with technology.

Feature image via Wired.

Header by Rory Midhani

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A.E. Osworth

A.E. Osworth is part-time Faculty at The New School, where they teach undergraduates the art of digital storytelling. Their novel, We Are Watching Eliza Bright, about a game developer dealing with harassment (and narrated collectively by a fictional subreddit), is forthcoming from Grand Central Publishing (April 2021) and is available for pre-order now. They have an eight-year freelancing career and you can find their work on Autostraddle (where they used to be the Geekery Editor), Guernica, Quartz, Electric Lit, Paper Darts, Mashable, and drDoctor, among others.

A.E. has written 542 articles for us.

10 Comments

  1. I loved the cyborg look! If you’re gonna wear a computer on your face you might as well look scary/awesome/futuristic doing it.

  2. I think the only way to determine this is with side-by-side comparisons.

    Original flavour?

    Hmm, there’s a hint of cyborg, but mainly looks like a repurposed wire coat-hanger.

    Frames?

    Not channeling enough librarian for my liking.

    Shades must be a goer?

    I don’t think that’d fly in the Matrix.

    No, I think there’s only one way to redeem Google Glass…

  3. I would love the new frames, especially at work. But college tuition means it will be a long, long time before I have an extra $1725 laying around. (I have to wear prescription lenses, and those original google glasses are ugly as hell anyhow.)

  4. Wow im actually torn by this. Lol. Idk i think id still go full on cyborg and stick with my contacts..

  5. I’d probably only get something like this if Apple made it. I don’t entirely trust Google after what they’ve done to Youtube!

  6. Nope nope nope. Google glass looks ridiculous on yr face and will continue to look ridiculous on yr face no matter what they do to it.

  7. Is there an option for “I’m totally pumped for us all to become cyborgs, but I still think Glass is fugly, no matter the incarnation”?

    • So glad you feel this way. When my friends and I would talk about my sexual orientation in college (token lgbtq!) the ‘joke’ was that I was in to glasses, didn’t matter the gender identity. It wasn’t a joke. Totally true.

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