In a support page detailing the final update, Google says users will need to manually download, unzip and install the file. Doing so will allow them to pair Glass with their phone — MyGlass will no longer work, but Bluetooth pairing will stay — as well as take photos and videos, as usual. Those who don’t update the device can continue using it, but mirror apps like Gmail, YouTube and Hangouts will no longer work.

After February 25th, 2020, though, they need install the update or they’ll no longer be able to use Glass if they’re not logged in or get logged out. They can wait until they get kicked out of the system to install the file, but they’ll have to keep in mind that the update will only be available until February 25th, 2022.

Microsoft and NASA’s partnership began on June 28th, 2015 as part of Project Sidekick when a SpaceX supply rocket docked with the ISS and delivered the headsets to the waiting astronauts. “HoloLens and other virtual and mixed reality devices are cutting edge technologies that could help drive future exploration and provide new capabilities to the men and women conducting critical science on the International Space Station,” Sam Scimemi, director of the ISS program at NASA said in a 2015 press release. “This new technology could also empower future explorers requiring greater autonomy on the journey to Mars.”

Aboard the ISS, crews utilized the HoLolens’ “Remote Expert Mode” in many of their tasks. Remote Expert connects the wearer with an Earth-based technician from the flight control team via Skype, allowing them to see what the astronaut is seeing and advise accordingly. The headsets could also be deployed in Procedure Mode, which played locally-stored animated holographic illustrations for times when an expert wasn’t available.

Project Sidekick was short lived, only running until the following March. However, a few months later in the summer of 2016, NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida launched “Destination: Mars,” a mixed reality guided tour of the Red Planet narrated by none other than Buzz Aldrin. Visitors were taken on a walking tour of several Martian sites using images captured by the Curiosity Mars Rover.

“This experience lets the public explore Mars in an entirely new way. To walk through the exact landscape that Curiosity is roving across puts its achievements and discoveries into beautiful context,” said Doug Ellison, visualization producer at JPL, said in a press release at the time. The OnSight application, which actually stitched those captured images together, went on to win NASA’s 2018 Software of the Year award.

Augmented reality has also found its way into spacecraft design and production with incredible results. Take the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, for example. It’s currently being developed by NASA and the ESA and built by Lockheed Martin. The 4-person crew capsule is designed to ride atop the Space Launch System during the Artemis lunar exploration missions as well as to Mars.

It’s also a fantastically complex piece of engineering. The Orion’s assembly manual alone is a 1,500 page behemoth, requiring technicians to constantly flip back and forth between the instructions and the task at hand. But that’s where the HoloLens comes in.

“Manufacturing was a good place to start because it’s easier to quantify what we’re seeing in terms of a comparison between traditional methods and what AR helping would take,” Shelley Peterson, the principal engineer for Augmented & Mixed Reality at Lockheed Martin Space, told Engadget.

Using the same Procedure Mode as aboard the ISS, Lockheed’s teams were able to drastically reduce the amount of time needed to assemble the spacecraft’s various systems. The team was able to cut down the time spent joining components and torquing bolts to precise specifications by 30 to 50 percent. Rather than having to thumb through the instructions to know how many pounds of pressure a specific bolt requires, that information is displayed directly atop the bolt by the HoloLens, Peterson explained.

“More recently, we’ve been working with position alignment of objects,” she continued. It really just changes things when you can see within your environment where you’re needing to place an object, instead of having to measure or use other methods. It’s a fantastic way to represent the data.”

What used to take a technician a full 8-hour shift to complete can now be done in 15 minutes, Peterson said. What would take a pair of technicians three days to do can now be done by a single technician in two and a half hours. “At Kennedy Space Center, we had an activity that normally takes eight shifts,” Peterson said. “They completed it in six hours.”

The HoloLens doesn’t just reduce the amount of time (and money) spent putting the Orion together, it also helps to mitigate uncertainty in the manufacturing process and prevent costly mistakes. “If [the technicians are] trying to interpret a 2D drawing or 3D model on a 2D screen, and make that mental translation to what it means to the object in the room, there’s still some questions,” Peterson explained, “and they’d like to be absolutely certain when they’re working on the spacecraft.”

Peterson also points to the headsets’ ease of use. A technician typically needs less than a half hour to get orient themselves with the system before jumping into their tasks. “They’re able to put it on and just start working,’ she continued. The current iteration of the HoloLens is still a bit heavy to be worn all day, though technicians can wear them for up to three hours before tiring, or simply pop the headset on and off as needed throughout the day.

The only major sticking point that Peterson notes is the difficulty in entering data. “We need a better way to type or to take the place of typing — voice doesn’t quite do it just yet,” Peterson said. “There’s times where we need to enter data, or capture data as we’re working and they have to move across to a Bluetooth keyboard.” That takes the technician out of their workflow, which is what the HoloLens was designed to minimize in the first place.

Lockheed isn’t the only organization leveraging AR technology in its manufacturing process. Rival aerospace company BAE has also paired with Microsoft, using HoloLens to eliminate the need for paper assembly manuals in its electric bus division, while a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) have used the tech to design their Dragonfly rotorcraft lander.

The Dragonfly will be heading deep into our solar system when it launches towards Saturn’s moon, Titan, in 2025. It’ll take a whopping nine years to get to the moon’s surface but once there, the Dragonfly’s exploration will help unlock the mysteries of our home system and maybe even — fingers crossed — give us our first glimpse at extraterrestrial life.

Aesthetics aside, though, Epson’s latest offering comes with features that could help give smart glasses the nudge they need to take hold in the consumer market — at the moment such devices are largely the sole domain of business. The Moverio BT-30C connect with an Android smartphone of Windows PC over USB-C, a plug and play function that mitigates some of the hassle seen in previous iterations with custom controller boxes.

The glasses project up to three apps on three different screens against a transparent background and come with an OLED display for sharp, bright imagery. The glasses also come with a dark lens shade, for a movie-theater experience when streaming videos. Of course, none of these features alone will have consumers lining up for a pair, but their reasonable price tag of $499 will certainly make them a little more enticing, given previous models hit the market at $699. It’s not small change, but making smart glasses more affordable will certainly be a guiding principle in the way tech giants approach getting this tech into the mainstream.

As 9to5Google reported in November, the new Glass contains Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 710 and runs Android Oreo. The new generation will be be 5G-capable, in addition to using LTE and Bluetooth 5.0 for connectivity — this should make it the first version with a cellular chip on board The camera on the new generation of Glass Enterprise Edition will have a 32-megapixel sensor, with support for 4K video at 30 fps and 1080 video at 120 fps.

You can be forgiven if you’ve forgotten all about Google Glass. While the widely-hyped consumer version of the eyeglass wearable was discontinued in early 2015, the enterprise model that helps everyone from factory workers to medical professionals do their jobs, still exists. X, a branch of Google parent company Alphabet, supplies the Glass Enterprise Edition to companies like GE, DHL, Volkswagen, and more.

A faster, easier-to-charge model of the Glass Enterprise Edition makes sense for a product that you’re now more likely to see on warehouse floors than on the faces of Silicon Valley yuppies and Brooklyn hipsters. As we mentioned in summer of 2017 following the launch of Glass Enterprise, the doomed wearable’s makeover as an enterprise product to help workers get tricky jobs done gave it new life. Glass project lead Jay Kothar wrote that DHL, a Glass client, has increased supply chain efficiency by 15 percent following their use of the wearables. Physicians at California-based Sutter Health use Glass to record patient visits into their medical record, which doctors say give them more face time with their patients.

Engadget reached out to Alphabet for confirmation of the photos’ legitimacy, but has yet to hear back — we’ll update this post if we learn anything else.

Image: Tecnoblog