
“Smart glasses. XR/AR/VR/MR. Interfaces. Cameras on faces. Dinosaurs on kitchen tables. Tony Stark’s EDITH. Glassholes. The starship enterprise. What is going on?”
In this article, I will lay out the current state of the art in smart glasses, based on products that are available now.
This article will very much focus on technology. We assume that you’re on board with the huge potential of smart glasses to enhance our lives in a fundamental way. It’s worth noting that this article is worthless without use cases – all of the headworn tech in the world will never be valuable without use cases, features, apps that run on them and that the user interacts with in some way. If you want to understand the potential of smart glasses, checkout my massive list of the best smart glasses use cases:
The Big List of Smart Glasses Use Cases
We’re also going to focus on products that you can buy today. There are a plethora of announcements, rumours, and prototypes in production, but it’s easy to make a cool (and fake) demo video, and very hard to get a device to production. Our discussion and examples are focused on what exists now.
Smart phones don’t require a lot of categorisation. There’s iPhone and Android, and not much else. Other than the software, all iPhones are and Androids are relatively the same thing – a 6inch thin rectangle with nearly identical suites of functionalities and human-computer interfaces. For smart glasses, though, this space is young enough that we are seeing a wide range of functionalities from different glasses.
This ambiguity in the term “smart glasses” leads to a host of problems – consumers think new products can do things they can’t, business executives get mad when engineers can’t make tiny HD AR displays because “Facebook did it” (they didn’t), and generally confusion ensues. Many arguments have been started with a claim “but those aren’t *real* smart glasses!”. In an effort to help you, ourselves, and the field come together, we have formed categories of smart glasses based on their technology, capabilities, and intended use cases. *We use the term “smart glasses” broadly to mean any pair of glasses with a computer in them.* Yes, this is obvious to some and heresy to others, but this is how the term has come to be used, and it can serve as a catchall term for any computational glasses form factor device.
Note that this categorization is for what exists now, in late 2022/early 2023. As with a lot of general purpose computing hardware, we expect the device types of converge in the future into the “ideal” suite of form factor and capabilities.
For a device to be considered smart glasses, two things must be true:
- These *must* be a glasses form factor. Head bands, hats, anything with a band over the top of the head, etc. are not HUD smart glasses. The inclusion in this category of headsets with back bands like the MagicLeap 1/2 is debatable, but anything that requires a back strap probably won’t make it in the weight category.
- They must have an embedded computer within the glasses.
- Vuzix Blade
- Inmo Air
- Vuzix Shield
- Google Glass
- Huawei Gentle Monster
- Bose Frames
- Amazon Echo Frames
- Snap Spectables (1.0, 2.0, and 3.0).
- Ray Ban Stories
- Thousands of “spy glasses” and “recording glasses” from electronics markets (e.g. Alibaba/express)
- Nreal Light
- ProEyes 3e
- Magic Leap 1
- Not Hololens – Hololens does not follow a glasses form factor
- BlueberryX fNIRS Glasses
- Smith + InterAxon LowDown Focus EEG Glasses
- programmatic prescription
- active light therapy
- magnification
- automatic tinting
- Audio-speech to text glasses for the deaf
- Optical-text to speech glasses for the blind
- Extreme HD magnification to restore sight to blind
- TCL AR Glasses
- Vuzix Shield
- Top Smart Glasses Devices: Vuzix Blade, Inmo Air, NuEyes Pro3e, Nreal Light
- Top Software Companies: Google, Emex Labs, Teamviewer, Gemvision
- Top Current OEM Companies: Vuzix, Dispilex, Lumus, Kopin, JadeBird
- Top Current Device Companies: Vuzix, Nreal, Google, Snap, Emex
- Top Future Device Companies: Meta, Apple, Inmo, Xiaomi