Focals by North

» see bynorth.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

You could not order a pair of Focals. You had to walk into a room in Toronto or Brooklyn, sit down, and have your head scanned so the frames could be built around your face and the projector aimed at your eye. That is a product with a physical catchment area of two cities, and no amount of interest from anywhere else changed it. North later mailed customers an iPhone with a depth camera in it so the scan could happen at home, which tells you how badly the showroom model was going.

The glasses shipped in January 2019 at $999 and they looked like glasses. That was the whole engineering problem. A holographic film in the right lens caught a laser projector hidden in the arm and placed a small display in your field of view, visible to you and invisible from the outside. There was no camera on board, a point North made constantly, and it was the correct answer to what had happened to Google Glass four years earlier.

Behind it was North of Waterloo, Ontario, which had spent its first years as Thalmic Labs building the Myo armband, a gesture band that read the electrical activity in your forearm. Stephen Lake ran the company, with Matthew Bailey and Aaron Grant as the other two founders. By 2020 they had raised close to two hundred million dollars and employed more than two hundred people, down from over four hundred before the layoffs of 2019.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how you bought a pair ~

The showrooms opened in Toronto and Brooklyn in late 2018 and an appointment ran about an hour. Cameras built a model of your head and a fitter took you through the sizing. A pair came back weeks later, made to those measurements and no others. If your face changed or the frames got bent, the display stopped landing where your eye was, and nobody else could wear them at all.

Control was a ring. The Loop went on your index finger with a tiny joystick on it, because there was no touchpad on the frames and no voice command worth using on a bus. You scrolled through notifications with your thumb while your hand hung at your side. It is a better interface idea than anything shipped on smart glasses since, and it existed because North had already spent years thinking about what hands do.

~ the warnings from inside ~

The Logic reported that staff had told Lake the glasses were priced too high and did not fit women well, and that those warnings went in before launch rather than after. The price answered part of itself. Within about a month of shipping, $999 became $599, with prescription lenses at two hundred more. A cut that fast is not a promotion. It is a company finding out what its product is actually worth.

Production of the first generation stopped in December 2019 so everything could go into Focals 2.0, announced as lighter and far sharper. Not one unit of it ever shipped.

~ what google actually bought ~

Alphabet confirmed the acquisition on 30 June 2020. Terms were not disclosed and the Globe and Mail put the figure near $180 million, against roughly two hundred million raised, which is the shape of an exit that is not one. Google said the team would stay in Kitchener-Waterloo and work on ambient computing, its term for computers that stop being objects you look at.

What Google wanted was the optics work and the people who had done it. What it did not want was a consumer product carrying a support burden and a showroom lease, and it took about twenty-four hours for that to become clear to everyone who owned a pair.

~ the day they stopped ~

On 31 July 2020, one month and one day after the acquisition was announced, Focals stopped connecting and the accounts behind them closed. North offered a full refund to every person who had ever bought a pair and it honored them, with support staying open to the end of the year. As bricking events go this was the polite version.

The object is the part worth keeping. A pair of Focals is a set of glasses built around one specific head, by a company that no longer exists, running a service switched off from a building in California a month after the switch changed hands. They still sit on faces in photographs from 2019 and they still fit nobody else. Whatever survived of the work went into Google's own glasses program, under a different name, with nobody's face on it.

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