Stephen Lake was never much of a fan of Google Glass.

Shortly after his startup Thalmic Labs announced Myo, a gesture-control armband, in 2013, Lake and his co-founders, Matt Bailey and Aaron Grant, began to mess around with an early version of Google Glass. They tried pairing the smart glasses with the armband, seeing if there was a way to make the two work in concert. Instead of reaching up to swipe at the touchpad on the side of the glasses, you could gesture with your arm to respond to a notification that appeared before your right eye on Google Glass.

Lake and his team tinkered with other early prototypes of smart glasses, too, hoping to come up with some kind of interaction that flicked at the future of computing. The problem, they found, wasn’t in the communication method between human and lenses. The problem was that smart glasses freaked people out. They had overtly angular designs, obvious optical displays, or worse, built-in cameras.

“We tried to wear them in public,” Lake told me over the phone, in the months leading up to the launch of his newest product. “Matt and I actually tried to force ourselves to wear them out for a whole day, and we felt self-conscious. People were staring, and we didn’t really want to wear them.”

“So if we felt that way as early tech adopters,” Lake continued, “Then what did that mean for consumers?”

The following year, Lake, the company's CEO, decided to wipe the slate clean. Thalmic's next big product would be smart glasses that people would actually want to wear. They would be designed first as glasses, and secondarily as a tech product. Thalmic completely shifted its strategy, laying off some employees who had been working on the Myo armband in the process.

Four years and $140 million in funding later, the company is launching its answer to Google Glass. They’re called Focals, and they work with Alexa, Amazon’s popular voice assistant. The Focals are part of an insanely ambitious plan to launch a custom-made, smart eyewear product that’s only sold through the company’s own boutiques. The armband-startup-turned-smart-glasses-company is trying to be a brick-and-mortar retailer, as well.

Thalmic has also rebranded itself. It’s now called North—named so partly because the Waterloo, Ontario-based company is situated well north of Silicon Valley, which the founders believe give them a different perspective than other companies with face-computer aspirations. The other reason for going with the name North is equally as optimistic: Lake considers the human experience, and not technology, to be the company’s “north star.”

The first time Lake walked into WIRED’s office, back in June, he was wearing an early version of the Focals. I identified them right away as something other than fashion eyewear, maybe because I was especially attuned to his glasses—or maybe because the arms of the glasses are thick. When the light hit the right lens just right, I could see a blue orb glowing in the lens. This, it turns out, is the holographic element of the Focals.

'We wanted to take inspiration from silhouettes that are in some ways nostalgic.' Marie Stipancik, North’s head of eyewear design

I tried on a stock pair of the Focals myself that day, and walked away feeling slightly disappointed. They were wide-framed and heavy, with unfinished software. Everytime I blinked, my eyelashes cut across the projector embedded on the right side of the frames, which interrupted the holographic image in front of me.

This kind of experience is typical with prototypes. But my first Focals try-on underscored how challenging it is to make tech that you wear on your face, as opposed to something you hold in you hand, browse from the couch, or stick on your kitchen counter. If the company planned to make smart glasses that worked for everyone—or at least for more people than a small group of engineers—they still had a ways to go.