It’s a weird time to launch a new pair of smart glasses.
These last few years, Meta has been the dominant player in pushing a fragile smart glasses resurgence. Unfortunately, its privacy reputation led to the “pervert glasses” moniker. Smart glasses have never been more unpopular.
But in the past week, I’ve been demoing some new smart glasses from Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster. Some are retro chic frames. Others have the same Y2K vibe as the Matrix films. All were made by Samsung and have Google’s Gemini built in via Android XR, Google’s platform for smart glasses and mixed-reality headsets.
The AI demos are better than I expected. In one, I’m sitting in an avant-garde art installation as creepy heads float above my head. On the loudspeaker, words blare in French, Spanish, Korean, and German. Pressing two fingers to my temple, Gemini starts translating each language seamlessly in real time. In another demo, a TV chef cooks a “monster pasta” recipe in Korean while people have a conversation behind me. Music in another language is playing overhead. This exact scenario tripped up the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s translation capabilities when I was on vacation. Here it’s no big deal. I don’t even have to specify the languages I need translated or, as with Meta’s glasses, download a specific language pair to translate. I sit at another table with an English speaker, a Thai speaker, and the glasses translate everything they say to me — correctly — into Japanese.
But I was most surprised that the glasses automatically redact faces from any photo or video to protect bystander privacy. I asked Gemini to identify my video director, Owen Grove. Gemini told me it knew I was looking at a person, but it can’t identify him because of privacy protections. We pull up a picture of our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel. There, too, Gemini said that for privacy reasons, it can’t identify a person from a photo either.
Meta’s glasses also can’t do this. But what’s striking here is that Google is making an active choice to take facial recognition completely off the table.
The Warby Parker and Gentle Monster glasses have the customary privacy LED light that lights up whenever there’s an intent to save visual data. Like Meta’s glasses, there’ll be protections in place to disable the glasses if tampering is detected. However, when I sit down to chat with Juston Payne, Google’s senior director of product management for XR, he says Google intends to go much further than the LED light.
“Somebody might come up with some solution [to tamper with privacy LEDs] that our algorithms can’t detect, so then the question becomes: So what can we do?” says Payne.
“We’re not going to target ads on it. We’re not going to train Gemini on it. Humans aren’t going to be able to use it to improve the models. We’re also redacting faces before they actually go to the server in the first place, which then gets ahead of certain things that can obviously go sideways if you don’t take those steps proactively.”
It’s not just faces that’ll get redacted either. Payne tells me that ambient noise — like bystander conversations — will also get scrubbed. The glasses will only process audio from the glasses-wearer using beam-forming mics. Camera and mic access will also require opt-in permissions.
Alone, these are a bold departure from Meta’s approach to smart glasses. Locally redacting faces and ambient audio, for example, is a conscious choice to give up a valuable source of training data. Google could leave it at that, and Android XR would already have a leg up in the privacy discussion. But Payne says Google plans on using its entire platform to disincentivize glassholes.
For example, YouTube will crack down on any creepy videos featuring harassment or unwanted sexualization, regardless of how they’re captured. Google Shopping and Google Ads won’t allow sales or ads for accessories like lens covers for privacy LED lights. Google Play policies will prohibit third-party apps from enabling social livestreaming, real-time facial identification, or changing anything about how the LED light functions. Payne also says third-party apps requiring camera or mic API access will need further review to prove they’re being used responsibly. This is less of a concern right now, but it’s a future-focused stance for other Android XR devices or even with devices like Xreal’s Aura glasses.
It’s hard to gauge how effective this privacy policy will be with the public. We’ll have to see how it’s received. It’s much more expansive than Meta’s more reactive approach so far. Granted, Meta doesn’t have its own app store or a computing platform quite like Android. This still underscores how much more Meta could’ve been doing all along.
The one area Meta truly nailed with smart glasses has been style. The company, through its partnership with EssilorLuxottica, has over 100 combinations of frames and lenses. Samsung’s partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster aren’t too shabby to look at. Warby Parker has three designs and three colors: green, brown, and black. Gentle Monster has six frames — including two that are very Y2K — with bolder designs, colors, and tinted lens options. The Warby Parker collection starts at $395, while Gentle Monster starts at $449.
Style-wise, I found both collections were fetching. Warby Parker was a bit more everyday, whereas Gentle Monster felt a bit more editorial and runway-ready. Most people should be able to find a look that fits their needs.
The glasses are fairly lightweight (for smart glasses) at 41g. Battery life is estimated at around nine hours, while the cases support up to seven extra charges. Sound quality is pretty good, and the 12MP ultrawide camera takes decent photos and video with image stabilization. So, head tilters rejoice! Your accidental Dutch-angle photos will be straightened.
Where Android XR excels is that Gemini on the glasses is, so far, more capable than Meta AI on the Ray-Bans. I was able to look at an event flyer for a concert in Mumbai, have Gemini add the details to Google Calendar, and then look up flight details to India. It gave me turn-by-turn walking directions while also telling me the event schedule for the Whitney Museum. Beginning a live translation doesn’t require me to download a specific language pair onto my phone like with the Ray-Bans. I was also surprised to see Gemini occasionally correct itself in real-time when it made a mistake, or ask me to get a different view of an object I was trying to identify so it could deliver a more accurate answer.
Low-vision and blind users aren’t left out either. The glasses feature Google’s Guided Vision, which offers conversational audio descriptions of environments and surroundings. Android XR is also collaborating with Aira, which allows users to stream what they’re seeing using the camera to a real-time human interpreter. At launch, this particular feature will be for Android users only, but otherwise the glasses will work regardless of your phone.
Leaving my hands-on, it’s never been clearer that technology isn’t currently the issue with smart glasses. Whether or not this form factor takes off will boil down to culture, privacy, and usefulness. And on that front, this space has been stagnating a bit because Meta has been the sole big player setting the tone and pushing the conversation. The Android XR approach is notably different, and serious competition for Meta is excellent for consumers. All that’s left is to see whose approach wins.
You can preorder Gentle Monster and Warby Parker smart glasses starting today, and the devices are expected to ship starting December 10th.
