1st: Google Glass Redesign by Isabelle Olsson. 2nd: partnership with Luxottica

25/03/2014. [VIDEOS] by Google
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA

Luxottica Group, a leader in the design, manufacture, distribution and sales of premium, luxury and sports eyewear and Google Inc., announce today they have agreed they will join forces to design, develop and distribute a new breed of eyewear for Glass.

Design sketches.

Google Glass, now in Classic Shades.

"It's extremely hard to design a few styles that work for a lot of people," Olsson explained. Yet, the four available shapes--Curve, Thin, Split, Bold (shown here)--aim to do just that. So far, so good--at least on these models.

The frames--Curve is shown here--are an extra attachment that screws into the main hardware, and come in titanium, all of them a shade of black lead designer Isabelle Olsson calls anthracite.

Contrary to rumors, Warby Parker had nothing to do with the design process, at least not for this round. This design is called Split.

The latest Google Glass designs--this one is called Thin--look less like something out of a sci-fi movie and more like timeless, fashionable frames.

Isabelle Olsson. "There's so many things that are overwhelming about our lives, especially technology," Olsson, pictured here wearing Curve, explains. "I think it’s our duty to simplify things, not to overwhelm people, not to add things, not to complicate things."

Today’s announcement offers a far reaching strategic partnership between Luxottica and Google to work together across multiple efforts on the creation of innovative iconic wearable devices. Through this relationship, Luxottica and Google, who are setting the pace in their respective industries, will match up high-tech developers with fashion designers and eyewear professionals. In particular, the two Corporations will establish a team of experts devoted to working on the design, development, tooling and engineering of Glass products that straddle the line between high-fashion, lifestyle and innovative technology.

Luxottica added that the two major proprietary brands of the Group, Ray-Ban and Oakley who has a 10-year heritage in wearable technology that has evolved from MP3 to HUD devices, will be a part of the collaboration with Glass; however details about these new products will be disclosed at a later stage.

“We are thrilled to announce our partnership with Google, and are proud to be once again setting the pace in the eyewear industry, as we have been, with more than 50 years of excellence.” Said Andrea Guerra, Chief Executive Officer of Luxottica Group.

FIRST WAS... Isabelle Olsson is dressed in head to toe black, her Titian hair and gold heels shiny bookends on an otherwise monochromatic column. The color palette seems like a conscious decision by Google Glass's lead industrial designer, who has opted for one of the new Google Glass designs in black as her facial accessory. Olsson has swapped her usual custom rose gold and cotton-colored Glass for a charcoal headset that has a pair of matching titanium frames attached, and somehow the computer aspect of her faceware becomes almost invisible.

"When I first joined I had no idea what I was going to work on," she said, speaking via a Google Hangout video link from New York. "Then I walked into a room full of engineers wearing a prototype of the glasses. These were very crude 3D-printed frames with a cellphone battery strapped to the legs. They weighed about 200 grams."

She was given her first brief, which was "to make this beautiful and comfortable.

"My initial goal was: how do we make this incredibly light? I set up three design principles; if you have something that is very complex you need to stick to some principles. The first was lightness, the second was simplicity and the third scalability".