Google working on AR headset for 2024 called ‘Project Iris’

According to The Verge, the prototypes look similar to ski goggles and the company aims to launch them in 2024

Meta, Apple, and Microsoft have a new competitor in the field of devices to access other worlds that will be in this one. Google is preparing a new foray into the field of augmented and mixed reality with glasses that will use both technologies and is known internally as “ Project Iris ”. According to The Verge, the company dedicates a team of three hundred people in San Francisco to the development of the new device, which looks similar to ski goggles according to current prototypes, which it hopes to launch in 2024.

The medium has had access to two sources within the company that has revealed that “Project Iris” will use its own processor like the latest generation of Google Pixel “smartphones”, will use Android as an operating system, and will not need any source of external power.

The device will have external cameras that will retransmit a video signal from the environment that will be mixed with virtual elements generated by “ software ”. That is, the user will be able to see the environment around him but not directly. Google’s approach is for Iris to work supported by the cloud so that the graphics are processed in its data centers and transmitted to the device via the Internet in order to keep it within lower consumption limits than if the entire execution of the “software ” will be performed in Iris. In this way, it aims to create a more immersive mixed reality experience than that achieved with augmented reality, in which virtual elements are superimposed on the user’s real vision.

This device is the second attempt by Google to place glasses with augmented reality capabilities on the market. The previous one, Google Glasses, was launched in 2013 to great anticipation, but the company discontinued it in 2015 after not finding the expected reception to relaunch it in 2017 and 2019 as an enterprise product.