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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. But the pendulum has more recently swung towards a 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 driving factors for smart glasses today.
Design Dilemma
In July 2020, we wrote an article entitled Is Wearability the Next Mobility? It asserted that, just like mobility was the value driver in the smartphone era by putting advanced computing in everyone’s pockets, wearability will be the core value driver in AR.
Put another way, smart glasses that bring elevated features to regular eyewear will be the first realistic step toward AR’s more ambitious endpoints, which are still years away. It’s all about the art of the possible, as we examined in the previous part of this series.
Stepping back, there’s a design dilemma inherent in AR’s endgame, otherwise known as “dimensional AR” in our spatial-spectrum construct. Given the state of today’s underlying technology, you can achieve style & comfort or graphically-robust UX. You can’t have both.
For example, devices like Magic Leap 2 have robust display systems to achieve dimensional holography and SLAM-based rendering. But that necessitates device bulk, power, and heat. On the other end of the spectrum is style and comfort with flat graphics or audio-only.
Back to our 2020 article, it argued that if these are the two choices, the starting point should be “lite AR” that gains functionality and UX richness over time. The inverse approach – starting with graphically robust but bulky hardware that slims down over time – is less realistic.
One reason we say that is that any device is dead on arrival if it commits style crimes… if no one will wear it in public. One exception so far is enterprise use, where style crimes are less of an issue. This is why devices like Magic Leap 2 pivoted entirely to enterprise markets.
Self Awareness
With that background, where are we today, five years after our wearability article published? There’s been meaningful progress in smart glasses, led by Ray-Ban Metas and their 2 million+ lifetime unit sales. Their success has marked a key shift in AR device design and positioning.
That shift is all about favoring wearability over UX richness – the inverse of headworn AR to date. Eschewing the do-everything requirements and bulk of the Magic Leaps of the world, we’re seeing more focused “lite AR” approaches that attempt to do one thing and do it well.
This approach is driven by self-awareness of AR’s design challenges and limitations. Device makers have internalized these shortcomings and designed accordingly. The result is the best version of what’s possible today, rather than trying – and failing – to reach unrealistic ends.
One example of these principles is Xreal One. It’s built for the single purpose of private massive screen viewing for games or entertainment. This is not only focused, but it intelligently targets a use case that is relatable and resonant with a large addressable market of consumers.
In other words, large virtual screens for entertainment or gaming is a tangible proposition. Our survey data supports that: most consumers don’t want deeply-immersive gaming but rather 2D content (what they know best) in an immersive and private viewing environment.
We’ll pause there and pick things up in the next part of this series to examine smart glasses’ other driving factor: AI. Meanwhile, check out the full report...
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