Smart Glasses

Meta's been adding tech to glasses for the last few years now, in partnership with Ray-Ban and Oakley. It's now launched a new range of smart glasses with AI smarts on board, sans those brand names.

The market for smart glasses is becoming increasingly crowded, but the benefit for consumers is that makers also produce technology that caters to specific audiences. And the BleeqUp Ranger does exactly that, in unashamedly action-capturing style.

Despite using low-res, B&W still images, VueBuds use available consumer tech to produce translations that users prefer to Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. The benefits for visually impaired users, and anyone needing real-time explanations, are endless.

The new Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses look like a regular ol' pair of shades, but they show you a floating screen with useful content. That's already pretty neat, but I'm honestly more excited about the companion wristband they ship with.

Combining style and functionality, the Looktech smart glasses – with ChatGPT-4o, Gemini and Claude built in – take the emerging tech to a new personalized (and very useful) level. You can even equip them with prescription lenses at no extra cost.

Vuzix has been augmenting our reality with headsets and glasses for years, and has now launched an Extreme variant of its already widely adopted M400 wearable that's destined for use in "the harshest workplace environments."

Eyewear company Chamelo has delivered a world first, with sunglasses that can change colour and transparency with a single finger tap. While this may feel like style over substance, this tech has the potential to stretch far beyond fashion.

Two new technologies allow a single pair of glasses to track eye movements and read the wearer's facial expressions, respectively. The systems use sonar instead of cameras, for better battery life and increased user privacy.

Imagine having a real-time translation service, nutrition guru, knowledge base and more on your face. That's the promise of an open-source wearable from Brilliant Labs, which taps into multiple AI models to put what you need in front of your eyes.

Inspired by bats’ use of echolocation, researchers have developed smart glasses that transform visual information into unique sound representations that enhance the ability of blind and vision-impaired people to navigate their surroundings.

Some cyclists (or other outdoorsy types) like having access to a lot of information, which is often spread out between different devices. The Lawk One AR Glasses, however, put everything together in one place.

Smart shades have not had the best run (sorry, not sorry, Google Glass), but there have been aspects of the tech that have shown potential when the focus has been on functionality over fad. It's what the creators of Minimis Glass have made a priority.