Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Rory Cellan-Jones: "There will be a lot of disgruntlement from people who invested in Google Glass smart glasses" 
 
 Google is ending sales of its Google Glass eyewear. 
 
 The company insists it is still committed to launching the smart glasses as a consumer product, but will stop producing Glass in its present form. 
 
 Instead it will focus on "future versions of Glass" with work carried out by a different division to before. 
 
 The Explorer programme, which gave software developers the chance to buy Glass for $1,500 (£990) will close. 
 
 The programme was launched in the United States in 2013. It was then opened up to anyone and was launched in the UK last summer. 
 
 It had been expected that it would be followed reasonably quickly by a full consumer launch. 
 
 From next week, the search firm will stop taking orders for the product but it says it will continue to support companies that are using Glass. 
 
 New home 
 
 The Glass team will also move out of the Google X division which engages in "blue sky" research, and become a separate undertaking, under its current manager Ivy Ross. 
 
 She and the Glass team will report to Tony Fadell, the chief executive of the home automation business Nest, acquired by Google a year ago. 
 
 Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption WATCH: Rory spent a week with Glass in April 2014 
 
 He said the project had "broken ground and allowed us to learn what's important to consumers and enterprises alike" and he was excited to be working with the team "to integrate those learnings into future products". 
 
 Google says it is committed to working on the future of the product, but gave no timescale for the launch of any new version. 
 
 Restaurant ban 
 
 The Glass project received the enthusiastic backing of Google's co-founder Sergey Brin. He presided over a spectacular unveiling which saw skydivers jump out of an aircraft wearing Glass and beam what they were seeing to a conference in San Francisco. 
 
 Early users of Glass were very excited about the product, which enabled them get information in a small screen above their right eye, take photos and videos, and get directions. The technology blogger Robert Scoble said he could not now imagine living a day without the product, and was even photographed wearing it in the shower. 
 
 But he and others soon tired of Glass, complaining that it was not evolving in the ways that had been promised. There were also concerns about privacy and safety, with some bars and restaurants banning the use of the smart glasses on their premises. 
 
 Other companies have launched smart glasses and various other forms of wearable technology. But no single product has yet proved the major hit that technology companies are looking for as they seek out the next big thing. 
 
 Image caption Rory was one of the first in the UK to try out Glass 
 
 Analysis: Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC technology correspondent 
 
 Google has tried to present this announcement as just another step in the evolution of an amazing innovation. But make no mistake - Google Glass is dead, at least in its present form. 
 
 As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects - in particular the camera. There is however one huge disadvantage - it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience. 
 
 But Google will now have to deal with a disgruntled community of Explorers who paid a large sum for a device which they must have believed would eventually evolve into something more useful. 
 
 The Glass team can at least continue its work out of the spotlight without the pressure of deadlines. Tony Fadell, the former Apple designer Google acquired with his smart thermostat firm Nest, will oversee the future of the product. 
 
 Both he and the Glass team leader Ivy Ross, who has come from the fashion world, will know that form as well as function will have to be at the centre of any successful piece of wearable technology. ||||| Google is developing a wearable smartphone screen as part of its 'Project Glass' initiative. 
 
 NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Siri is about to get one-upped by Google. 
 
 The company on Wednesday unveiled a long-rumored concept called "Project Glass," which takes all the functionality of a smartphone and places it into a wearable device that resembles eyeglasses. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 The see-through lens could display everything from text messages to maps to reminders. They may be capable of showing video chats, providing turn-by-turn directions, taking photos and recording notes -- all through simple voice commands, according to a concept video produced by the company and released on YouTube. 
 
 Project Glass is nowhere near complete, and Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) says it only went public with its effort to gather outside feedback. The stealth project has been in development for two years by a small team of engineers. 
 
 The "heads-up display" glasses were born in Google's Google X lab, which is the same future-thinking research facility that developed a driverless car and is working on a space elevator. 
 
 Google has no timeline for when the device will go on sale, but Google X engineers are beginning to use prototypes outside of the lab's walls. 
 
 One thing they're working on in field tests: The researchers haven't yet decided whether the glasses should be stand-alone or be wirelessly powered by a smartphone. 
 
 The precise look and feel of the hardware and software is still in the early design phase, but Google produced a concept design that looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. They're not quite what you'd see on RoboCop or Geordi LaForge, but they'll never be mistaken for normal eyeglasses either. 
 
 The Google concept shows a video camera and a small piece of glass over the right eye, with no lens on the left. That half-and-half design was an intentional choice. 
 
 "We think technology should work for you -- to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don't," the company said on its Google+ page. 
 
 The software design appears a lot cleaner than the hardware, with friendly icons and unobtrusive notifications. But Google's concept video portrays perhaps the loneliest vision of the future ever. 
 
 A man starts his morning by putting his glasses on, then goes through most of his day talking to himself, without actually interacting with anyone face-to-face, save one friendly pat of a bulldog and a super-quick visit to a coffee truck with a buddy. 
 
 A notification delivered in the morning to "See Jess tonight at 6:30 p.m." turns out not to be an actual date, but a video chat. As the sun sets, Google's protagonist remotely serenades his friend's avatar with a ukulele. 
 
 What Google's final version will look like -- and whether it will actually end up on store shelves -- is anyone's guess. 
 
 But Google X's futuristic sketch proves that those little plastic rectangles we've been accustomed to communicating through could soon be outdated technology.
– Google is calling time on the first phase of its Glass experiment, but it promises that it will be back with an improved version of the smart eyewear. The company says sales of the $1,500 Google Glass through its Explorer program will end on Monday for a "transition" that will involve moving the project from the Google X experimental division to a stand-alone division, reports TechCrunch. Google says the new version that will be revealed later this year will be cheaper and have an improved battery life and display—and this time around, it will release a final version instead of providing prototypes to early testers, reports the Wall Street Journal. After initial excitement, the Glass project suffered low sales and bad publicity, with users being dubbed "Glassholes" and the technology getting banned from cinemas. Although Google will still sell the old version to companies, Glass "is dead, at least in its present form," according to BBC tech analyst Rory Cellan-Jones. "As I found when I spent a couple of months wearing Glass, it has a number of really useful aspects—in particular the camera," he writes. "There is, however, one huge disadvantage—it makes its users look daft, and that meant that it was never going to appeal to a wide audience." A Google exec tells the WSJ that the company plans to remove the Glass "stigma" by pairing it with more familiar kinds of eyewear.