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Smart glasses have seen their ups and downs – from the early excitement around Google Glass, to the device’s famous flameout. The before-its-time and identity-confused device has since become a cautionary tale and the butt of jokes throughout the AR land.
But that cautionary tale ended up serving the market well, leading to the evolutionary point where we now sit. Though there’s still miles to go, the past year has seen an inflection in excitement, investment, and market reception for smart glasses. It’s the XR sector’s new hope.
This emergence of smartglasses was born from a practical reset in the AR world, combined with the emergence of AI. The former is all about a reality check around XR’s prevailing design principles of the past decade. The focus was on graphical richness rather than practicality.
That approach birthed devices like Magic Leap 2 – boasting a rich UX but a form factor that no one will wear in public… prompting a pivot to the enterprise. It also drove the move towards toned-down UX, whose selling point is situational intelligence rather than visuals, a la Ray-Ban Metas.
This is the topic of a recent report from our research arm, ARtillery Intelligence. As such, it joins our weekly excerpt series to highlight the best bits and bites from long-form works. This week, we dive into sections of the report that break down the macro factors driving smart glasses today.
Smart Glasses: A New Hope for Augmented Reality
Getting Real
When examining recent inflections in smart glasses, they’ve been primarily sparked by a few factors. The first is that the broader XR world has begun to get more realistic. It finally internalized the fact that you can’t achieve graphical richness and style/wearability in the same package.
This gave way to a trend around more narrow, focused, and purpose-built use cases. These contrast previous standards in AR hardware like Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Magic Leap 2 – venerable devices in their own right, but lugging do-everything bulk that only works for enterprises.
Examples of the newer focused approach include Xreal Air 2 and One. These are built for the single purpose of private massive virtual screens for gaming and entertainment. This is not only focused, but it targets a use case that’s relatable and resonant with a large consumer market.
This virtual private-screen mirroring has meanwhile gained exposure and interest from Apple’s Halo effect. Marketing around Vision Pro’s entertainment functions has stimulated demand for this use case, and propelled players like Xreal that offer a much cheaper version.
Perhaps a better example is Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses. Meta was able to build an experientially-meaningful device without having a display system at all. It nails the fundamentals with quality audio, hands-free media capture, smart assistant functions, and multimodal AI.
Is the AR Industry Getting More Realistic?
Art of the Possible
That brings us to the second factor propelling smart glasses. AI’s ability to infuse intelligent and personalized assistant functions takes the burden off visuals as a central smart-glasses selling point. They don’t need a display, which in turn sheds device bulk and makes them stylish.
The result is experiences whose value lies not in graphical intensity but in the personalization and relevance of the information being delivered. This includes personal alerts, social signals, and identifying people & things via text or audio output. It’s more about information than optics.
As noted, the device that best applies these principles is Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses. Besides upgraded and well-integrated audio quality and video capture, multimodal AI is a central selling point. It can identify and contextualize real-world objects using visual input and voice output.
All the above boils down to the art of the possible. Ray-Ban Metas and others in this device class do their best with today’s available tech while offering a bridge to the fully-evolved smart glasses that we really want. That end goal includes immersive optics and style in the same package.
But until we get there, today’s smart glasses are starting to be honest with themselves about what they can and can’t do. And that honesty is baked into their design – leaning into the best of what’s possible today. And the results speak for themselves, with 2 million+ Ray-Ban Metas sold to date.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next excerpt. In the meantime, check out the full report…
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