Adding display capabilities will put the Ray-Ban Meta glasses on equal footing with Google’s unnamed Android XR glasses project, which sports an in-lens display (the corporate has not yet announced a definite release date). The prototype the corporate demoed to journalists in September featured a version of its AI chatbot Gemini, and far they way Google built its Android OS to run on smartphones made by third parties, its Android XR software will eventually run on smart glasses made by other firms in addition to its own.
These two major players are competing to bring face-mounted AI to the masses in a race that’s sure to accentuate, adds Rosenberg—especially provided that each Zuckerberg and Google cofounder Sergey Brin have called smart glasses the “perfect” hardware for AI. “Google and Meta are really the massive tech firms which can be furthest ahead within the AI space on their very own. They’re thoroughly positioned,” he says. “This isn’t just augmenting your world, it’s augmenting your brain.”
It’s getting easier to make smart glasses—however it’s still hard to get them right
When the AR gaming company Niantic’s Michael Miller walked around CES, the big consumer electronics exhibition that takes over Las Vegas each January, he says he was struck by the variety of smaller firms developing their very own glasses and systems to run on them, including Chinese brands DreamSmart, Thunderbird, and Rokid. While it’s still not an inexpensive endeavor—a business would probably need a few million dollars in investment to get a prototype off the bottom, he says—it demonstrates that the long run of the sector won’t rely upon Big Tech alone.
“On a hardware and software level, the barrier to entry has change into very low,” says Miller, the augmented reality hardware lead at Niantic, which has partnered with Meta, Snap, and Magic Leap, amongst others. “But turning it right into a viable consumer product remains to be tough. Meta caught the largest fish on this world, and in order that they profit from the Ray-Ban brand. It’s hard to sell glasses whenever you’re an unknown brand.”
That’s why it’s likely ambitious smart glasses makers in countries like Japan and China will increasingly partner with eyewear firms known locally for creating desirable frames, generating momentum of their home markets before expanding elsewhere, he suggests.
More developers will start constructing for these devices
These smaller players will even have a very important role in creating recent experiences for wearers of smart glasses. An enormous a part of smart glasses’ usefulness hinges on their ability to send and receive information from a wearer’s smartphone—and third-party developers’ interest in constructing apps that run on them. The more the general public can do with their glasses, the more likely they’re to purchase them.
