2025 will be smart lenses all the way

2024 was one big year for space computing, highlighted by the release of two great virtual reality headsets: the powerful but expensive Apple Vision Pro and the most affordable Meta Quest 3S. While these devices transport their users widely, strange digital realms, they can also feel limiting, because they reduce, or even severe, the user’s connection with the real world.

That’s where their lighter, more (um) wearable cousins ​​come in: smart glasses. It turns out, many people like a device that you can take out of the house and on the road. There’s an incredible convenience for digitally interacting with the real world at the same time you’re actually looking at it, all without obscuring your view with a bulky headset or distracting yourself with a phone screen.

These computers make it more accessible have come a long way since the days of the Glasshole. Smart glasses – which I’ll loosely define here as internet-connected glasses with apps built into them – have crossed the divide from an era of goofy and unsightly wearables, like Google Glass, into really useful devices you can’t even be ashamed to wear. in public

Meta-Ban Ray is the big dog in the smart glasses pack. Metaa company whose reputation has been tainted by its own often problematic uncoolness, has managed to harness the long-established cool factor of the Ray-Ban brand to make a range of smart glasses that people really like. They look good and have real functionality that many people can easily understand and that the proponents find it incredibly useful. They can take photos and videos, act as headphones for music and calls, and use voice features powered by Meta AI to send texts or ask for anything in the world. New functions added this month it gives glasses the ability to do things like remember where you parked your car and use Shazam to figure out what song is playing near you. All this happens without a built-in display, which means you can keep your eyes on real life.

The success of the Ray-Ban Meta frames has shown that there is a market for display-less smart glasses that don’t just work as VR-light. Smaller companies and startups have come forward with every kind of smart lens imaginable. This year alone, we have seen new smart glasses, or technology to power them, from companies like Oppo glasses, Suaveand Emteq. Some were a bit silly and disappointing, like Frames by Brilliant Labs released in May. Others have not yet materialized, such as glasses from the company Looktech which work with a variety of different chatbots and have been billed as potential Ray-Ban Meta killers after the project barely exceeded its funding goal (by far) on Kickstarter.

Display-driven AR glasses are still in the running, though. After all, a device that gives the user an active heads-up display or offers a window into the mirrorworld it has long been considered the bronze ring of space computing. Meta pursues this goal with his Orion glasses– a pair of ambitious AR technologies that, while still deep in the development process, aim to do almost everything your smartphone can do, but in your face. snap is in a player here too, with cyberpunky Shows with apps that focus on social interaction for their younger and more playful users.

Through the glass

Another leviathan of augmented reality has recently been awakened. At the beginning of December, Google announced the launch of his Android XR software platform, which includes the next pair of smart glasses with a lens display. Google’s efforts are still a work in progress, but the company has an advantage because of the size of its developer partners who are already building on the many Android platforms. Google’s glasses run Android apps, essentially taking a lot of the stuff that currently lives on a smartphone — maps, texting, news — and putting it right in front of your eyes.

“They are probably the closest of the big tier one competitors that can ship anything to compete with Meta,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “Meta doesn’t have a display yet. So they might as well beat Meta to ship one with a display.”