Blink and you missed it: Google has a new pair of prototype AR glasses

But we may have written off Google’s Glasses too soon — because Google just revealed a new prototype pair in a blink-and-you-missed-it moment at Google I/O.

In the heat of the moment, I thought the Googler simply donned a pair of normal glasses before pulling out their smartphone at 1:30 in the Project Astra demo video below. But no, those frames are thick.

There’s even a little picture-in-picture moment where you can see them wearing the glasses. Here it is zoomed in:

Once the glasses are on, the Googler is using them, not their Pixel phone, to ask questions and get answers hands-free.

Are these just repurposed Project Iris prototypes? They seem similar enough, but the ones that Google prominently showed off in its 2022 video had flat nose bridges. The new nose bridge is curved.

Google didn’t tell my colleague David anything about these glasses in our Project Astra interview, but the company doesn’t exactly seem to be hiding them, either. In the YouTube description for the Project Astra video, Google says the second chunk of the demo is running on “a prototype glasses device.”