Thad Starner had been wearing a computer for a few years—an LED readout over his left eye, wired to a processor in a shoulder bag and a one-handed keyboard—when he came to Silicon Valley[1] for a conference in 1998. His kludgy, cyberpunk rig was fascinating; two young techies walked up to ask him about it.
“I said, ‘It’s a wearable computer,’ ” Starner recalls. “I gave them a demo.” He asked them for their business cards so he could demonstrate how he could enter their information into his computer’s address book. They handed them over. Guy Number One: Larry Page[2]. Phone number at Stanford. Guy Number Two: Sergey Brin[3]. They were working on some kind of web search project, they said.
A decade later, Starner—by then a researcher at Georgia Tech—looked into his head-up display and realized he still had Brin’s email address. He clicked out a note: You haven’t seen wearable stuff in a few years. Come have a look. “Next thing I knew, I was in Mountain View giving demos, not realizing it was actually a job interview,” Starner says. Page and Brin were working on something related, they said. And they had a job for him.
Starner called what he saw through his lens “augmented reality[4]”—a term he coined to describe the superimposition of the digital world onto the real. After agreeing to work with Page and Brin at Google[5], he was put in charge of designing the first full-on commercial augmented reality system: Google Glass[6]. It would burn ultrabright for a few months in 2012 and 2013, ascending to the acme of cultural hotness only to plummet, Wile E. Coyote–like, to...