Current state of, and future of, the smart glasses industry
This topic is a part conversation starter, part request for help in finding.
For those that are attempting to keep up with the many weird and sometimes interesting products both announced and teased recently in the field of AR/XR glasses- what are your thoughts?
Examples, off the top of my head, include a number of devices revealed at CES 2024. The Asus AirVision M1- a pair of full-HD display-in-glasses form, similar in many ways to the Xreal lineup. The new Xreal Air 2 Ultra and Xreal One line. Snapdragon's new XR2+ Gen 2 chip for high efficiency portable computing and a successor to the chip used in the Meta Quest 3 headset. The Halliday glasses, which forego any form of waveguide or combining optic and opt to project directly into the eye using a monocular microled projector. And older devices, such as the "open source" Brilliant Labs glasses which have been previous discussed on Tildes.
Personally, I'm disappointed in most (if not all) of these options, but that might largely be because the industry and I have very different ideas of what smart glasses should be. The industry is focusing heavily on social media features- cameras, filters, translation- and even more heavily on AI. Why anybody would want an LLM strapped to their face I do not know. I feel that the goal of full augmented reality (rendering tips and visuals over the real-world) is a noble one, but also not one I am particularly interested in. My ideal device would be purely a heads-up display with a long battery life. The ability to cast notifications and information to a reasonably pretty display, but the freedom to decide what. No cameras, no data collection, no overcomplications- does anyone know of any options that fulfill these criteria?
Discuss.
This sounds like the xreal devices. Especially the xreal air, which doesn't have any AR functionality to save cost and size. Is there a reason they don't satisfy your needs?
The Xreal Air certainly seem the closest I've seen to a good option, though I do wish they looked a little more like normal glasses and not novelty sunglasses! I'm largely checking to see if anything interesting has flown under my admittedly limited radar, and also just to get an idea of general sentiment towards this technology on Tildes.
Though society seems to be moving away from desktop computers and towards handheld devices, and smart watches are becoming more and more common, rings and glasses and other such wearable tech is still slow to be adopted by the masses. The Apple Vision Pro was a rather determined push in the right direction, though it looks like even Apple is struggling to sell the idea.
Linus from LTT took some xreal glasses on Jimmy Fallon and seemed to impress them (last section of the video). They don't even have a battery since USB-C can carry enough power for the display.
Looks-wise, they don't really stand out to me other than being darker than usual glasses. What're you looking for aesthetically?
I've tried a pair of Even G1 and am definitely buying one. They are much more what I imagine smart glasses to be, and are intentionally limited. Instead of putting a screen in front of you, it simply puts up a video game-style HUD when you look up, very much how Jensen's HUD worked in Mankind Divided, or how you have to consciously ping your HUD in Hyper Light Drifter. If you're not using it, it's just an everyday pair of prescription eyeglasses - but when you invoke the HUD, you get the time, weather, date, notes you put down, notifications and a few other goodies. The screen is low res, bright green monochrome, not at all motion-compensated and incredibly bright, and can't be seen from the outside.
That's to me what the idea should be about - a similar idea to smart watches, realising the promise of "ambient computing" that's there when you need it and gone when you don't. I don't need a portable 100 inch telly, and I don't want one either. I think that's the wrong approach for the tech of "AR glasses". I want them to work as normal glasses when I don't need them, and have the added smarts if I want.
Oh! They look curious- very much like typical glasses, heads-up display, no nonsense. There are a couple of showrooms in London and I'm nearby for another few days with naught else so do, so I guess I'll pop down this week and see if I can try a pair!
I've often dreamed of a smart glasses device that would do two things, and two things only:
ad blocking, just replacing every billboard with black is fine IMO but eventually it would be great to replace it with a convincing continuation of the world
captions, especially in crowded or loud places like bars and parties
Translation would be nice as well, but is much less of a daily driver use case.
I couldn't care less about any other functionality. In fact, if it has even a basic impact on battery life, I don't want it. I would prefer battery life, or a lighter design. No internet connection, no bluetooth, and no wifi would be fine.
I recently picked up a Vufine+ for $100 on ebay. It has an HDMI port. That's it. It displays whatever you give it over HDMI. Mostly I want to try it with my soldering microscope, but I've seen people attach small SBCs to them for use as wearable computers.
I want to see more devices like that. I don't want an app. I don't want An Ecosystem. I want my display to be a thing that displays whatever arbitrary video feed I give it. I'm hoping something shows up in the future that's the same idea and price point but transparent. I'd wear that regularly.
Edit: I guess the Xreal Air is also like this? I was under the impression it wasn't.
I would like a pair, but they all still seem too clunky right now. If you watch some YouTube reviews pay attention to the profile view, they're not much thinner than a decent pair of drone goggles...sorta.
Either way they look kinda silly.
Smart glasses seem like a solution looking for a problem. People already have a smart phone, they don't feel the need to stick one on their face.
Smart glasses have the same future as VR headsets. Very exciting for a small group of tech enthusiasts who read way too much science fiction and keep trying to convince everyone that's totally the future. While in reality the average person keeps clearly rejecting it when they vote with their wallet.
I have never understood why I would or should want them.
Personally, I like the idea of a pair of a glasses I can throw on to get a ton of screen real estate. Especially when travelling or commuting, I could see the benefit in a larger screen in glasses form.
I assume my problem with smart glasses would be the eye strain from the dramatic shifting in focal plane that is forced on your eyes. Want to see the HUD? Focus your eyes to 1" from your face. Want to see where you're going? Focus back to the distance.
It's like those camera-based rear-view mirrors in cars: I hate them because it forces you to shift your focal plane when you look at them and look back to the road. With an actual mirror, that doesn't happen because the distance to the thing your looking at (focused on) doesn't change so dramatically. (you're not focusing on the mirror itself, you're focusing on what it's showing you, unlike a camera display)
The majority of optics for head-mounted display solutions aim to shift the focus point so that you're not trying to focus on something "an inch from your face", but at something that is perceptibly further away. Otherwise- augmented or mixed reality devices would never work! The world would be entirely out of focus and, as you say, you'd end up with hella eyestrain. It's the same thing that pancake lenses in VR headsets do!
I actually watched this video from Mr. Mobile recently where he went over a bunch of smart glasses he saw at CES. I've linked in below. He actually goes over a device that does sound a bit like your ideal device, the Even Realities G1. It's basically built to be a heads up display that materializes when you tilt your head up. It shows you the time, date, calendar appointments, and notifications. It's also got more features like turn-by-turn navigation, though I've heard that feature doesn't work that great.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8sYp-AcwKk
Thanks, that's a good shout! Another user mentioned them, and they must have slipped my radar. I just found the LTT video (admittedly a sponsored video, so I'll take it with a grain of salt) that I must have also missed! I'll be checking them out on Monday sometime, as I'm heading through London :)
On an entirely unrelated aside- does Tildes automatically reformat titles to comply with a standard, or did somebody with powers take objection to the use of title case?
Tildes uses sentence case for titles.
Is.. there a particular reason for this- anywhere where this was decided or dictated? It feels somewhat arbitrary, but I'll quiet down if you think I'm making a fuss.
Source: Deimos
I feel almost as strongly about sentence case's superiority over title case as I do about the necessity of the Oxford comma, title case is one of the stupidest grammatical conventions in existence and it has virtually no upside given titles are always additionally distinguished via italics, underline, or (for short stories, song titles, etc) quotation marks. There is no context in which you are writing correctly and also the capital letters are the only signifier of where the title starts and ends.
And the problems with title case include:
I've been using title case on my blog for five years now (!) and I will never, ever, ever be in favor of title case in any situation.*
* (ok although I will admit if you're doing very very fancy calligraphy it can look pretty in some artistic cases, for example on the title screen of a movie, or on the cover of a beautiful hardcover edition of a book. But you are allowed to ignore most grammar rules when it comes to art (consider poetry))
Okay, thanks! I had a quick look through the docs but must have glanced over it or missed it. Given a lot of news articles opt for title case, it seems strange to fall down on one side or the other, but oh well! I can see the argument for it.
Title case is like the imperial measuring system: an arbitrary, incoherent and outdated system that 7+ billion people look at and say "Why would one make their life harder?". Even the UK uses sentence case.
Somebody manually did it -- if you're viewing things through a web browser, you can see a history of edits to the title and tags of the post in the sidebar under "topic log" (I think it's collapsed by default).