Microsoft has its own Project Glass - augmented reality glasses/wearable computer combo
Microsoft has it's own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs. — It's an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game.
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's rumored heads-up glasses land eight months after the company patented projector eyewear aimed at Xbox and beyond, so the leak reads less like a stray experiment and more like a second step in a tracked program. The timing also follows Google's Project Glass reveal, which augmented-reality experts warned faces serious hurdles around battery life, social acceptance, and everyday usefulness.
The pickup was unusually broad for a rumor: TechCrunch, Business Insider, GeekWire, Phone Arena, Neowin, Geek.com, BuzzFeed, and SlashGear all ran the story within a day, signaling that any large-company answer to Glass is treated as a platform story, not a gadget story. The report itself remains unconfirmed — a live-event trivia use case (baseball games) sourced from R&D rather than an announced product.
First-order effects
- Google no longer owns the eyewear-computing narrative: with Microsoft reportedly prototyping its own AR glasses, the category becomes a two-horse race between the two best-funded consumer platforms.
- Microsoft's Xbox division gains a plausible anchor use case — the patent's gaming angle plus the reported live-event overlay suggests sports and console scenarios are the internal justification.
Second-order effects
- Display-optics and miniaturized-projector suppliers become contested ground, since both Google and Microsoft now need the same head-mounted components that barely existed as a volume market before Glass.
- If Microsoft ships anything, it forces Google to defend Glass against a rival that can bundle the experience with Windows, Xbox Live's decade-old online ecosystem, and Kinect-style input research rather than selling a standalone device.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward wearables being fought as platform extensions — each incumbent grafting glasses onto an existing OS and content library — rather than as independent products, which would concentrate the category among companies that already own screens in users' lives.
- Expert skepticism about Glass's hurdles (power, optics, social norms) sets up a structural test: whichever vendor solves those constraints first defines whether head-worn computing becomes mainstream or stays a developer curiosity.
The trend: Head-worn augmented reality is consolidating into a contest between platform incumbents — Google first, Microsoft reportedly following — who treat glasses as extensions of existing ecosystems rather than standalone products.