All posts tagged: smart glasses

Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end

Qualcomm wants to be the chip inside whatever replaces your smartphone, and it just announced two products toward that end

Published by skeptic

Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon said Tuesday that the company is working on over 40 different AI wearable devices — including jewelry, earbuds with cameras, pins, and watches — a sign of how aggressively the chipmaker is betting that the next major computing platform won’t be a phone. To power that vision, Qualcomm is announcing two new offerings: a platform called Snapdragon Reality Elite for mixed-reality glasses, designed to run more powerful on-device AI, and the Scalable Turnkey AI-Ready Toolkit (START), a combination of hardware modules and a software stack for AI devices, starting with smart glasses. Compared to its previous XR platform, the new Snapdragon Reality Elite delivers improvements of up to 60% in GPU performance, up to 30% in CPU performance, and up to 160% in NPU performance, according to the company. Percentage gains in chip specs can be hard to contextualize, but Qualcomm offers one concrete data point, saying the platform can run a 3-billion-parameter language model at 45 tokens per second — fast enough for quick, responsive AI interactions. Qualcomm says the …

You Can Finally Buy Snap’s New AR Specs—for ,195

You Can Finally Buy Snap’s New AR Specs—for $2,195

Published by skeptic

Snap—maker of the popular social app Snapchat—has a new pair of augmented-reality smart glasses called Specs. For real this time. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed the new glasses at an event during the Augmented World Expo (AWE) tech conference in Long Beach, California. As Snap frames it, this isn’t a prototype or developer device—it’s the first actual consumer version of the Specs AR glasses, unlike the previous generation exclusively sold to developers and creators. The Specs cost $2,195. You can preorder them now with a refundable $220 deposit. Snap says it expects the devices to ship this fall in the US, UK, and France. Snap has not yet said which apps or features will be available on the new Specs. The company’s focus for these glasses is less on content capture and more on the AR experiences displayed on the screen, placed with the right depth and low latency to feel like a moving part of the environment. Snap has shown off lots of experiential features in its previous demo units, like fingerpainting in the …

Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report

Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App After WIRED Report

Published by skeptic

One day after WIRED revealed that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased face-recognition system into an app installed on more than 50 million phones, the company removed it, according to a WIRED analysis of the latest version’s code. The most recent version of Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, strips out the unactivated software components that powered the system Meta internally called NameTag. The version published the day of WIRED’s report included several code libraries explicitly named for face recognition. Friday’s release includes none of them. On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing. NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York …

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Meta Silently Added Face-Recognition Code for Its Smart Glasses to Millions of Phones

Published by skeptic

Meta has quietly embedded face-recognition technology for its smart glasses into an app downloaded to millions of phones, according to a WIRED analysis of the company’s software. Code discreetly added to Meta’s AI app over multiple updates this year shows that the feature, internally called “NameTag,” identifies people captured by the glasses’ camera and, when activated, alerts the wearer when it recognizes someone. The discovery of NameTag in the live Meta AI app shows that Meta had begun shipping face-recognition code to users’ phones while publicly describing it as something the company was still “thinking through.” In April, Meta said if it were to utilize face recognition, it wouldn’t be rolled out without first taking “a very thoughtful approach.” But WIRED found that as early as January, core components of the system had been integrated into software distributed to millions of people. Though not yet enabled, NameTag sits inside a Meta AI companion app that’s been downloaded over 50 million times and is necessary for use of key features of its smart glasses, including Ray-Ban …

Xreal’s New 9 ‘xbx’ Smart Glasses Channel Xbox Vibes

Xreal’s New $299 ‘xbx’ Smart Glasses Channel Xbox Vibes

Published by skeptic

Xreal, known for its high-end display-centric smart glasses, is making its gear more accessible. On Wednesday, the company revealed a new sub-brand—X By Xreal—focused on lightweight display glasses that start at $299. Xreal is the Chinese tech company that makes screen-forward smart glasses. Its devices connect to a phone, desktop, or console and provide a display that beams large, high-quality video directly into the wearer’s eyeballs. The glasses are meant to provide a sharp, reasonably comfortable way to play games or watch movies on a big screen, without having to crane your neck down at a phone, laptop, or gaming handheld. X By Xreal, or xbx for short, sounds a little like Microsoft’s popular gaming console, but Xreal thinks it’s different enough that the naming convention won’t draw Redmond’s ire. The first pair of glasses—the a01—look like they feature Xbox branding, with the xbx logo rendered along the frames in a bright yellow-green font that invites comparison. Courtesy of Xreal The a01 are extra lightweight, weighing around 62 grams (0.14 pounds). Xreal says the displays …

Xreal, Google’s smartglasses partner, thinks it has finally mastered this notoriously tricky industry

Xreal, Google’s smartglasses partner, thinks it has finally mastered this notoriously tricky industry

Published by skeptic

The smart glasses industry has long been a tortured dream of Silicon Valley. The premise is appealing enough: What if, to enjoy the benefits of mobile computing, people didn’t have to stare at their phones all day long and could, instead, simply wear a lightweight computing device on their face? Science fiction fans (a demographic that is strong in the tech industry) can see this vision perfectly. However, the industry has — for much of the last decade — resembled a financial black hole into which gargantuan investments have been sunk and from which little to no profit has ever emerged. “Everybody’s losing money,” said Chi Xu, the founder and CEO of the smart glasses company Xreal, which is a longtime partner of Google. I met Xu at Google’s I/O conference in Mountain View last week, where he was promoting Xreal’s Project Aura. That’s its latest effort to create a set of functional XR glasses that people actually want to use. “That’s because it’s very hard, what we’re doing,” he said. For much of the …

Hands-On With All of Google’s New Upcoming Android XR Smart Glasses

Hands-On With All of Google’s New Upcoming Android XR Smart Glasses

Published by skeptic

Google has been teasing its Android XR-powered smart glasses for the past year and a half—ever since it first announced the new mixed reality platform in December of 2024. Now, we’re finally starting to see more polished versions of the hardware, several of which will actually go on sale this fall. At Google I/O, the company gave us a first look at the designs of smart glasses coming from established eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. These smart glasses are codeveloped by Samsung and Google, while the eyeglass companies handle the design of the frames. Xreal also took the stage at I/O to showcase its upcoming Project Aura, which is essentially a miniaturized glasses version of bulky headsets like the Apple Vision Pro and Samsung’s Galaxy XR—powering a full Android app interface with hand gestures for interaction. Audio-only smart glasses from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster will launch later this year. More complex versions with displays built into the lenses will arrive soon after. Xreal’s Project Aura will also come this fall. I got …

South Korea’s LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

South Korea’s LetinAR is building optics behind AI glasses

Published by skeptic

Imagine you’re riding a motorcycle at 160 kilometers per hour when an arrow appears, floating on the road ahead, telling you exactly where to turn. No phone, no dashboard. Just your helmet, and a lens the size of a thumbnail. This is not a concept video. It’s heading to European roads as early as this year. And it’s one early glimpse of where smart glasses are heading. Over the past few years, Big Tech has been quietly (and not so quietly) placing its bets. Meta has been selling AI-enabled Ray-Ban glasses since 2023, Google is building Android XR, and Apple is expected to enter the market. Last week, Samsung was reportedly set to unveil its first AI-capable smart glasses, co-designed with Gentle Monster, at a Galaxy Unpacked event in London this July. China’s Huawei, Alibaba, Xiaomi and others are all moving too. The numbers reflect the momentum. Global AI glasses shipments surged to 8.7 million units in 2025, up more than 300% from the prior year, and analysts project that figure will cross 15 million …

How to Watch Google I/O

How to Watch Google I/O

Published by skeptic

Google I/O is imminent. This is the annual developer event and product showcase where Google shows off all the shiny new updates to its Android operating system and other platforms, as well as new features and improvements to its artificial intelligence models. The big announcements at Google I/O usually come in the form of a livestreamed keynote event at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, California, hosted by Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai. That starts on Tuesday, May 19, at 10 am Pacific time (1 pm Eastern). You can watch the livestream on Google’s website or on YouTube. It will also be streaming right here on this page. What to Expect On the announcement front, Google actually tipped its hand last week, unveiling a bunch of new features coming to the upcoming Android 17 operating system and its ongoing Gemini AI efforts, which it now calls Gemini Intelligence for the most advanced Android devices. Many of the new Android features highlighted are AI-infused tricks that aim to make your life a little easier by offloading onerous …

Best Live-Captioning Smart Glasses (2026), WIRED tested

Best Live-Captioning Smart Glasses (2026), WIRED tested

Published by skeptic

Unlike the other glasses I tested, Even doesn’t sell a subscription plan; everything’s included out of the box. The only downside I could find with the G2 is that it is largely devoid of offline features, so the glasses have to be connected to the internet to do much of anything. Considering the G2’s capabilities, it’s a trade-off I am more than happy to make. Other Captioning Glasses I Tested There are plenty of capable captioning eyeglasses on the market, but they are surprisingly similar in both looks and features. While many are quite capable, none had the combination of power and affordability that I got with Even’s G2. Here’s a rundown of everything else I tested. Photograph: Christopher Null Photograph: Christopher Null Photograph: Christopher Null Leion’s Hey 2 is the price leader in this market, and even its prescription lenses ($90 to $299) are pretty affordable. The hardware, however, is heavy: 50 grams without lenses, 60 grams with them. A full charge gets you six to eight hours of operation; the case adds juice …