It looks like Glide really is going to launch

With the first manufactured units now coming off the line, I am giving Glidance their flowers for hitting their revised Spring 2026 target. For an AI-powered primary mobility device, the first new primary mobility device in close to a century — that is a remarkable achievement. Still, as I have said all along: it has not worked until ordinary blind people are using it on ordinary journeys on a Tuesday afternoon.

As a Pioneer Glider from the UK, I am relieved Glide is launching here at all, but sad that it is delayed for us. I have had no word, but I am not expecting mine this year. I hope I am wrong.

I was reminded recently of the first Glide video I ever watched. I think it was the first one Amos made. In it, he said something that turned me into a believer. It is what made me trust him enough to give him my money almost two years ago.
He said:
“I think blind people need something that touches the ground.”
Simple as that.
That told me he knew what he was talking about.
Not because he had imagined blindness from the outside. Not because he had invented a clever gadget in search of a user. But because he is blind, and because he understands what it actually means to rely on a mobility aid to leave the house.
That is what almost every inventor in this category seems to miss.
Blind mobility is not just object detection. It is not “AI describes what is in front of you.” It is not strapping a camera to someone and asking them to process yet another stream of information while already navigating the world.
A primary mobility aid has to take part in movement.
It has to be physical. It has to be trusted through the hand, the body, the ground, the rhythm of walking.
That is why Glide has always felt different to me.

I am not happy when other devices struggle. I want every serious attempt at blind mobility to succeed. But like a lot of blind people, I knew very quickly that a wearable, descriptive, sensor-laden harness costing five grand was not going to become a useful mobility accessory. It might help with information. It might do some valuable things.
But it was not the thing itself.
And yes, I hear the Magic Torch folk have gone back to the drawing board. Someone may finally have told them that cosplaying Iron Man while juggling a £3,500 “spinner” and a cane or dog is not ideal.
I probably should have known where we were as a sector when seven people tried to buy my spoof device, The Crown of Thorns.
That is the uncomfortable truth here.
You can sell desperate people who have been let down by dodgy devices for decades almost anything if it looks enough like hope.
That is why Glide matters.

Not because it is guaranteed to work. Not because we should switch off our scepticism. Not because a good origin story replaces Tuesday-afternoon reality.
But because, for once, the core insight was right.
And the core insight was not only that blind people need something that touches the ground.
It was this:

Do not build something for us without us.
When I spoke to the founder of Biped, his response was:
“We asked professionals.”
And that, for me, is the whole problem in one sentence.
Professionals matter. O&M specialists matter. Rehabilitation workers matter. Researchers matter. Engineers matter.
But professional knowledge is not the same as embodied blind knowledge.
It is not the same as leaving your house in the rain. It is not the same as crossing a bad road with traffic in your ears. It is not the same as deciding whether to trust a device with your body, your safety, your confidence, your independence, and your ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

If you build blind mobility without blind people at the centre, you get devices that look clever in demos and ridiculous in real life.
You get the toilet seat and the magic torch. You get the ChatGPT cane that does not work in the wet. You get smart glasses with half the useful features of Meta glasses for twice the price. You get yet another “award-winning” GPS app that solves the problem everyone already knows how to describe, and no one has solved in the messy, bodily, boring reality of getting somewhere.
That is why I am expecting Glide with hope.
Careful hope. Sceptical hope. Tuesday-afternoon-or-it-didn’t-happen hope.
But hope, nonetheless.
Because this time, at least, the starting point was not:
“What clever thing can we build for blind people?”
It was:
“What do blind people actually need when they move through the world and how can we build it with them?”