A few months after Google publicly teased its plans to develop Google Glass, Ian Shakil convinced some friends who worked at the company to let him try on an early prototype of the smart glasses. It proved to be an eye-opening experience.

"It was sort of a lightning strike eureka moment trying it on," Shakil told Mashable in a recent interview. "This was not vaporware. This was real."

At the time, during the summer of 2012, Shakil had just graduated from Stanford's business school and was working at MC10, a startup building stretchable electronics that could adapt to body movements and be used to track health information. After seeing Glass firsthand, he realized it could serve as a powerful tool to improve the medical industry. "I left my job and dropped everything to found the company," he says.

That company is Augmedix, which develops software for doctors to quickly pull up electronic health records on Google Glass. The goal is to save physicians valuable time and allow them to focus more attention on the patient. It's a novel idea with the potential to make doctors more productive at work, but when Shakil and his cofounder first went out to talk with investors, they had to spend much of their time just explaining what Glass is and why it's not a gimmick.

"Everywhere we went, we were those guys with Google Glass. We would show up to meet with an investor and their whole staff was lined up around the corner," Shakil says. "It created a huge commotion in the early days. which was a blessing and a curse." He tried to take advantage of that curiosity by photographing investors wearing Google Glass and then attaching those pictures to his followup emails about funding.

Augmedix eventually closed a $7.3 million seed funding round in May, making it one of the first Google Glass startups — if not the first — to announce significant venture funding. Now, two years after Shakil had that initial epiphany about Glass's potential for doctors, he finds himself in good company. A growing number of startups are working to find use cases for Glass, and smart glasses more broadly, in the enterprise space. Some, like Augmedix and Pristine Eyesight, are focusing on healthcare; others like Wearable Intelligence are building out applications for the energy and manufacturing sectors.

Remote workers on oil rigs can now get detailed visual instructions broadcast on Glass, or a comparable product, from an expert 1,000 miles away. Manufacturing workers can pull up relevant information on their smart glasses about the products they're building without ever having to use their hands. Doctors can get instant access to your medical records without cutting into the amount of doctor-patient face time.

These efforts are unlocking new potential for Glass and proving that the product is anything but a gimmick. But it's not exactly the kind of success that Google was originally going after.

Image: Augmedix

Consumers may not need Glass, but businesses do

The general public got its first glimpse of Google Glass on April 4, 2012, when Google posted a two-minute video showing a day in the life with the product.

In the video, a man stretches his arms to the ceiling, looks back down at his sandals and then turns on Glass as he rises from the couch to start his day. He uses Glass to arrange a meeting with a friend, pull up directions to a bookstore and then directions inside that bookstore, check in at a food truck, snap pictures of graffiti and record himself playing ukelele.

If that doesn't sound like a pitch to businesses, that's because it wasn't. Multiple sources who have worked at Google and with Google on Glass say the company initially thought of the smart glasses as more of a consumer tool than a business tool, and marketed it accordingly.

"The initial focus was on end users. That's more aligned with the 'consumer' than with the enterprise," says Eric Johnsen, a former Google Enterprise employee who now works at APX Labs, which builds software for smart glasses.

About a year after Glass was first unveiled, the Project Glass team asked Johnsen to come onboard to lead a new effort called Glass At Work with the mandate to help Glass break into the enterprise space. "They brought me on to investigate the enterprise side just because of the demand," he said.

When reached for comment, a Google spokesperson stressed that Glass has "seen demand across a wide variety of consumer applications" as well as from businesses. "Glass is first and foremost a consumer device and the broader demand we've seen from the market reflects that," the rep said. "Still, we want to give businesses the opportunity to work with Glass and find new use cases that could benefit their employees and customers."

By the time the Glass At Work program was made public in June of this year, the perception of Google Glass as a consumer tool had soured. Multiple people had been assaulted for wearing Glass in public. "Glasshole" had become part of the lexicon. The Daily Show had just trolled Glass in a video that quickly went viral. And the initial fawning coverage of Google's concept had been replaced by more critical reviews of the product. As one publication put it in a headline, "The Verdict Is In: Nobody Likes Google Glass."

"The focus of their search product is for everybody, so it made sense that they would be looking for products that would appeal to everybody, not just to people using them in business settings," says Angela McIntyre, research director at Gartner. The problem, as McIntyre and other industry watchers pointed out, is that Google Glass doesn't make sense for the average consumer — at least not yet.

There are privacy concerns about Glass recording random people in public and fashion concerns about a product that sits on your face. Glass doesn't yet have enough killer apps or obvious use cases to make it something consumers feel they need in addition to — or instead of — their smartphones, and it's too expensive ($1,500) for many beyond devoted early adopters to justify buying it.

The issues that limit the appeal of Glass among consumers are less of a constraint for businesses. Price is less of a concern for a big company, there are plenty of use cases that make it an essential tool and fashion isn't such an important consideration.

"For people who already wear hardhats to work or safety goggles and utility belts, wearing Google Glass or some new smart type of display, that makes them a badass. That's a badge of honor," says Tom Rikert, a former Google employee and now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which invested in Wearable Intelligence and is part of the Glass Collective that offers seed funding to Glass-related startups. "That is in such stark contrast to the consumer who is accused of being a dork or socially it violates these norms of privacy or eye contact."

"That's why I’m really bullish on enterprise," he added. "People want to stand out of the crowd."

The next BlackBerry

Just because Google Glass is gaining traction in the enterprise space now doesn't necessarily mean it won't also earn more widespread acceptance among consumers later. If anything, most founders, investors and analysts we spoke with believe that the former will pave the way for the latter.

"If you are using them at work, I think eventually people will start tweaking it and bringing it home," Rikert says. Shakil, the CEO of Augmedix, echoes that point, noting that doctors who use his Glass software have already started saying they'd like to get phone calls from their significant others and look up non-medical information.

Several people in the industry compared Glass at this stage to BlackBerry in the mid-2000s: BlackBerry smartphones started out as a business tool before they took off among average consumers.

"A lot of the most compelling applications [for Glass] are in the enterprise space today. You can draw a parallel with what happened with smartphones in the early days, BlackBerry being enterprise first," says Stephen Lake, CEO and cofounder of Thalmic Labs, a startup developing gesture control tools for Glass and other smart glasses. (As it so happens, Thalmic Labs is based in BlackBerry's backyard, Waterloo, and has hired quite a few former BlackBerry employees.)

If Google Glass does follow that trajectory, it would differ from BlackBerry in at least one notable way: BlackBerry smartphones were typically handed out to top execs and became a kind of status symbol as a result. Glass, on the other hand, is turning into more of a tool for the rank and file, the field workers and manufacturers and other laborers who work with their hands far from the executive board rooms. Whether that helps or hurts the Google Glass cool factor remains to be seen.

For now, analysts say the success of Glass in the workplace depends on perfecting its design to be durable and comfortable during long shifts, sorting through potential bandwidth issues and working to integrate it with data from surrounding equipment. On a more basic level, it may also depend on the mindset of employees.

"It will help increase efficiency, but the other side of it is that the workers will have less autonomy to make these simple decisions about how they do their jobs," says MacIntyre from Gartner. "That has implications for workforce management and acceptance of these devices by workers who may feel that it's taking away the expertise that they bring."

Rather than make workers feel more productive, she says it might make them feel like they serve as little more than "a pair of arms and legs."