Google Glass is dead...

It's demised. It's passed on. It's no more. It has ceased to be. But whilst the product you know is gone, the tech may still be alive...

Google is ending the Glass program. That doesn't mean an end to the tech necessarily, but certainly Google Glass as we curently know it is dead as of today.

The Glass Explorer program that gave developers the opportunity to buy Glass for $1,500 will also close, leaving Google with a substantial community of 'Explorers' who now have $1,500 of dead money on their books.

Why? Well, Google Glass - for all it's initial optimism and excitement - has struggled to make an impact. We looked at Glass back in June 2013, and found that for all it's clever tech, it wasn't particularly comfortable, and it made you look rather peculiar.

After it's launch in 2013, it was largely expected that Glass would make a consumer release soon after. But so fat that day has not materialised, and support for the project both inside and outside Google does appear to have faded.

With this news in tow, Google insists it will "focus on what's coming next". This should mean future commercial versions of Glass - presumably versions that don't get you attacked in or banned from bars - but Google is adamant that we will see Glass 2.0 only "when it's ready".

That phrase is the crux of it, really. Google has a history of dumping initially promising ideas, and whether Tony Fadell of Nest, who's been tasked with making Glass 2.0 will ever consider it "ready" is moot. Still, Google Buzz was swiftly replaced by the much better Google+ in fairly short order, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility that a newer, more socially acceptable and feature-packed Glass will be on show by Google IO 2015.

Reaction to the announcement varied from the BBC, which used the word "dead" and talked of "disgruntlement" amongst early adopters of the now-defunct Explorer edition of Glass, to our sister site TechRadar, which just looked forward to the next iteration, quoting a bunch of Glass "Explorers" who seemed anything but disgruntled, and were full of suggestions for what Glass 2.0 should contain.

Our take is that the most useful feature of Glass for users - the camera - is also what makes it a hard sell to non-users. People just for some reason get creeped out by "surveillance" by a pair of specs in a way they don't with smartphones and CCTV. That's what Google will have to overcome if it's to eventually make its wearable a hit with consumers as well as early-adopting techies.