To understand what went wrong, we need to travel back a few years to Mountain View, Calif., deep inside the sleek offices of Google. There, amid the colorful campus logos and swaying sycamore trees, the company’s founders and a handful of trusted executives came up with a list of 100 futuristic ideas.

These included indoor GPS and a project called the Google Brain. But the excitement was reserved for a new genre of wearable computers that could be attached to skin or, possibly, worn like glasses.

By late 2009, Eric Schmidt, then Google’s chief executive, approached Sebastian Thrun, a genius jack-of-many-trades researcher at Stanford University, and recruited him to build out these ideas. Mr. Thrun, instructed to come up with a cool name, temporarily called the lab “Google X,” hoping to choose something better later.

According to several Google staff members who worked on the early stages of the X project (all of whom would discuss the project only with the promise of anonymity, either because they continued to work for the company or because they still had business relationships with it), the lab soon found a covert home on the Google Campus, taking over the second floor of a nondescript building at 1489 Charleston Avenue. There, the lab’s first project was born: a sort of virtual-reality-type thing that would later become known as Google Glass.

Mr. Thrun recruited a slew of rock-star scientists and researchers to work on Glass, including Astro Teller and Babak Parviz, both at the forefront of wearable computing, and Ms. Olsson, the designer. Before long, Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, joined to help run X.

It’s important to note two things about Mr. Brin here. At the time, he was married to Anne Wojcicki, a genetic-testing entrepreneur and the mother of their two children. Second, he had a reputation at Google for having what has been widely quoted as “project attention deficit disorder,” becoming obsessed with one project and then sauntering off to the next. (Mr. Brin declined to comment for this article.)