One of Android Auto’s interesting new features has disappeared again

There’s been a flurry of activity around Android Auto recently, but very little has actually resulted in new features. One of the recent elements spotted in Android Auto was the mention of “Glasses”. However, with the latest update, this has now been removed.

That has dashed hopes that we were about to get some sort of Terminator-esque enhanced vision for driving.

The references to smart glasses were found in a couple of versions of the app, not connected to any front-facing feature, but loitering in the code. While bringing you the news of this finding, I speculated that there aren’t really any smart glasses available that would safely do the job, but that it might instead be a link to the car’s own AR systems instead.

Some cars are using augmented reality via a heads-up display system to provide the driver with more information in their eyeline. For some, this is on a separate screen within the car, but it’s now becoming more common to project this information into the interior of the windscreen.

While things like speed restrictions are useful, it’s the ability to overlay directions onto the view of the road ahead that are most beneficial. I’ve done a lot of test driving on European roads and having a big floating arrow in your eyeline that shows which turning to come off a roundabout is really useful.

With the latest version of Android Auto 14.2, all mention of glasses have been removed, according to 9to5Google, so that might be the end of the matter.

Was this a simple mistake from Google?

The mention of “glasses” in Android Auto was discovered in two versions of the app, the English and the Hindi. Those strings didn’t match either, suggesting something was off, but the question is why there was a reference to glasses in the first place.

There’s the suggestion that this is a mistranslation of some sort, but it’s hard to fathom how the word “glasses” found its way into the code.

This isn’t the first time details have been found lurking in Android Auto that don’t relate to a feature you can actually use. References to temperature control and media control have been found in the past, suggesting that Google is working to have Android Auto offer wider control over a car’s systems.

That would allow Android Auto to potentially rival some of the ambitious plans of Apple CarPlay 2, where that becomes the user interface for the car, rather than flipping back and forth between Google’s system and the manufacturer’s system, which is currently the case.

So "Glasses" might have been removed, but this might not be the end of the story. In the future, perhaps Android Auto will aim to work with a wider range of car visual systems, like heads-up display and AR capabilities.

As Arnie says in Terminator 2: “I see everything!”