Last month Google announced that the Google Glass Explorer programme was to close and the project graduate from their development labs to another division for further development into a finished product. But lengthy article in the New York Times says that Glass as we know it is "dead" and the project will be subject to a complete rethink.
The Glass project is now being overseen by Apple gadget designer Tony Fadell, who joined Google last year after it purchased his home automation company Nest.
At Apple, Fadell worked on the iPod from its first generation and played an important part in bringing that and other Apple products to market. After serving as Senior Vice President of the iPod Division from March 2006 to November 2008 he left the company and in May 2010 co-founded Nest Labs, which was bought by Google for $3.2 billion in January 2014.
Fadell has reportedly decided the Google Glass project needs to be "reset" and wants to "redesign the product from scratch." Work on the previous prototype is believed to have ceased and all future development will now be done entirely in private and new versions will only be shown in public "when they're ready."
Many of those who worked on the original Google Glass were said to be unhappy with Google's decision to release the product as a "public beta", which resulted in the project receiving much criticism and negative publicity while still in development. A former Google employee said, “The team within Google X knew the product wasn’t even close to ready for prime time.”
Technology news site Ars Technica has speculated that the decision to "reboot" the project was made because of the poor performance of the earlier versions. It said, "there is very little that Glass does well, so with a reboot, there isn't much to currently work from."
It had been expected that a new version of the original Google Glass would be released sometime in 2015, based on an Intel SoC (system on a chip). But a fundamental redesign is likely to take several years.
