Tag Archives: AR / VR

Even Realities’ new Tortoise Shell frame is so gorgeous, I’d buy the smart glasses just for the design

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Meta needed Ray-Ban. Google needed Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. Even Realities, a Shenzhen startup barely three years old, apparently just needed a great frame designer and a tumbling barrel. Its new Even G2 Brown 2 puts a genuine tortoiseshell pattern on display smart glasses, something none of the big players have managed yet. Meta’s own $799 Ray-Ban Display comes in exactly two colors, black and sand, which feels a lot like Henry Ford’s paint policy with a waveguide attached.

Brown 2 is a new colorway for the camera-free G2, sitting next to the existing flat brown with a layered shell finish that runs all the way through the frame. Even says it developed a new material for this, most likely a proprietary acetate blend, since regular acetate gets fussy around heat and humidity. Each frame is shaped, pressed, and tumbled for 20 hours, so your pattern belongs to you alone. Even says it’s also the lightest G2 yet, and you still get live translation, notifications, and a teleprompter floating in your view. It’s available now for $649 in both the round and square frame styles.

Designer: Even Realities

A Shell Pattern That Goes All the Way Through

Brown 2’s pattern swirls through honey, chestnut, and deep espresso, the same palette that has lived on optician walls ever since real tortoiseshell was banned from international trade in 1973. Brown 1, by comparison, is a flat, opaque brown that reads more like a nicely finished gadget. The difference comes down to depth. Because the layers run through the material, light sinks into the frame and catches those darker flecks, giving it that warm, almost three-dimensional glow you normally only get from good layered acetate. A printed or painted pattern would sit on the surface and eventually start wearing thin at the bridge, right where you push your glasses up fifty times a day.

Standard acetate softens and shifts with heat and humidity, which is fine for reading glasses and a real headache for a frame that has to keep a waveguide display precisely lined up with your eyes. Even’s answer is the new material, finished the old-school way. Every frame gets pressed, shaped, and tumbled for 20 hours, the same basic polishing ritual acetate frame makers have relied on for decades, which is why no two pairs come out identical. The frames themselves come from Nikolaj Schnoor of Danish eyewear house Lindberg, and the round Panto and square shapes were picked for surviving decades of fashion cycles. Even claims all that still lands under the standard G2’s already featherweight 36 grams (1.27 ounces).

How Even Beat Meta and Google to Fashionable Display Glasses

Meta’s fashion play runs through EssilorLuxottica, which owns Ray-Ban and Oakley and co-launched the $299 Meta Glasses line in June, including a Classic Tortoise option on the Kylie Jenner frame. Those are camera-and-speaker glasses with no display, and the moment Meta added a screen with the Ray-Ban Display, the palette shrank to black and sand. Google’s Warby Parker and Gentle Monster models are also arriving display-free this fall. That makes Even, as far as I can tell, the only company putting a heads-up display inside a frame you’d pick for its looks alone. Even has been building this case since the G1, and Brown 2 is where the color finally catches up.

A $149 polarized clip and a $79 chain round out the launch, and both lean hard into the eyewear identity. The clip adds Silver Gray polarized lenses with 100% UVA/UVB protection to either frame style, turning the G2 into sunglasses for the drive home. The chain is sandblasted gunmetal stainless steel, a librarian-approved accessory now cradling a $649 computer around your neck. Brown 2, the clip, and the chain are all available worldwide today on Even Realities’ site. Meta and Google spent heavily borrowing fashion credibility from eyewear brands, and Even just built its own, one tumbled frame at a time.

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This VR System Gets Bigger So It Doesn’t Have to Touch Your Face

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Virtual reality often asks you to strap a screen to your face before you can go anywhere. That can get uncomfortable when a short demonstration turns into a long session. Researchers at Kyushu University tried moving the display off your head and onto a chair instead, surrounding the seated user with an optical pod that offers a three-dimensional view without a headset.

The prototype looks more like a piece of oversized furniture than goggles and controllers. A high-backed seat supports your body, while a large white enclosure projects forward around your field of view. Its bulk might seem surprising for a system intended to reduce discomfort, but that weight belongs to the structure, not your forehead, cheeks, or neck during a session.

Designer: Shogo Fukushima (Kyushu University)

Inside, a micromirror array directs slightly different images to each eye, creating depth without placing lenses against your face. Aerial imaging makes the scene appear to float beyond the chair rather than sit on a screen inches away. That gives you something closer to looking into a space than staring at a monitor, even though the machinery stays right where you’re seated.

The chair itself becomes part of the controls. A gyroscope follows its rotation, so turning your body changes what you see in the virtual scene. You don’t have to wear a tracker on your head or adjust a headset each time someone else takes a turn. Sit down, face the optics, and the system can respond to a swivel as you look around.

Imagine a museum where visitors take turns exploring a reconstruction without sharing something that rests against their faces. A seat could offer a brief journey, then welcome the next person without the ritual of fitting and removing goggles. The same approach might suit a stationary operator examining a remote workspace, although neither setting has been demonstrated as a finished installation.

Putting the optics in furniture also changes what designers can do with their size. Bigger components don’t have to balance on someone’s nose, leaving room to experiment with a broader view or different moving mechanisms. The researchers suggest that this freedom might eventually help address VR sickness, but it hasn’t been shown to prevent nausea. Less head pressure and less motion sickness are two different promises.

There are obvious trade-offs. You can’t walk around while using a chair-bound system, and the current prototype occupies far more room than a headset you can put in a drawer. It’s designed around seated rotation, not every little turn of your head, so it shouldn’t be mistaken for an equivalent replacement for mobile VR.

Still, the chair asks a question about who should carry the weight of immersion. Instead of shrinking everything until it fits on your face, it lets the room hold the hardware and leaves your head alone. For someone spending an afternoon inside a simulated environment, that shift could matter more than another reduction in headset weight, provided the chair itself proves comfortable.

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Samsung’s 85-Inch Screen Made Convention Visitors Think It Was Real

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A convention booth usually announces itself with a flat screen bolted to a wall, competing for attention against a hundred identical setups doing the same thing. Samsung’s Spatial Signage skips that entirely, using glasses-free 3D technology to make a single 85-inch panel look less like a display and more like a window into somewhere else. At Tokyo Game Show 2026, that window happened to open straight into the world of an upcoming fantasy RPG.

The trick behind it is Samsung’s patented 3D Plate technology, engineered to create genuine visual depth without asking anyone to put on glasses or a headset first. Characters from Astrae Oratio appeared to occupy real physical space rather than sit flat behind glass, convincing enough that some visitors reportedly assumed there was something solid mounted behind the screen itself, only to realize afterward it was a single flat panel doing all the work.

Designer: Samsung

That illusion matters most in the exact moment a convention booth usually wastes: the wait in line. Fans standing outside an exhibit rarely have anything worth their attention beyond a poster or a looping trailer, dead time that adds up across a four-day show. Placing a lifelike character directly in that queue turns idle waiting into part of the experience itself, giving people a reason to record it, share it, and stay curious before ever stepping inside.

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Slim physical dimensions make that placement possible in booths that were never designed around bulky hardware. Traditional volumetric or holographic displays tend to demand deep enclosures, dark rooms, or dedicated staging, none of which convention floors have room to spare. A flat panel thin enough to mount like ordinary signage sidesteps that constraint entirely, letting a booth designer drop genuine spatial depth into a footprint no larger than a normal screen would need.

That thinness also changes how quickly a booth can actually go up and come down. A four-day convention leaves little room for elaborate rigging or custom enclosures built just for one display technology. Something that mounts and behaves like a standard panel means setup crews can treat it the same way they’d treat any other screen, without scheduling extra time for specialized installation.

None of this stays confined to gaming conventions either. Samsung has signaled plans to bring Spatial Signage into retail spaces and pop-up shops, environments that share the exact same problem convention booths do: limited square footage and a need to grab attention fast. A flagship store window or a pop-up activation could use the same glasses-free depth to make a product or character feel present without demanding a renovation to fit it in.

A retail window built this way wouldn’t need mannequins or physical props stacked behind glass to suggest presence. The screen itself would carry that weight, switching between campaigns or characters as easily as updating a video file, something a physical display window can never do without tearing everything down and starting over.

Resolution numbers and brightness specs rarely explain why a display actually gets noticed on a crowded show floor. What Spatial Signage changes is simpler than any of that: a flat panel now does a job that used to require carving out actual volume from a room. Getting someone to briefly believe a character is standing there changes what people expect the next screen they walk past to do.

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SPECS standalone AR glasses could undercut VR headsets sans all the bulk

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Smart glasses and VR headsets have a big, gaping rift that a keen manufacturer could fill. Evan Spiegel has been working to bring the best of both worlds to consumers with a pair of glasses that combine the Ray-Ban AI glasses with popular VR headsets like the Meta Quest 3. Evan’s brand, Snap, has been working under the covers on AR glasses ever since the early 2020s, and now they have revealed something that looks practical and cuts the competition in half.

These are SPECS, a pair of fancy frames that are more than just Snapchat-worthy. The glasses employ the SPECS Intelligence AI service to understand the user’s priorities and routines to show only the most relevant information that makes sense at that point in time. Most importantly, the inherent software works well with iOS, and already the preview is available in the US, with the early-access Mac experience soon to follow via an invitation-only model.

Designer: Snap

As I said, the flames are much more than just smart glasses, as they hold their own computational power, letting the developers create unique AR experiences with the Lens Studio. Enterprise partners like NVIDIA, AWS, and Salesforce are already exploring the possibilities for hands-free applications in workspaces and field operations. The AR and the preemptive AI work in conjunction to bring the next level of smart capabilities to the SPECS, much beyond the ability to click hands-free selfies. According to Evan Spiegel, co-founder and CEO of Snap, “Computers should fit into our lives, not the other way around. SPECS Intelligence is designed to help you spend less time managing your life and more time living it.”

Unlike other smart glasses on the market that have 2D notifications and navigation cues, SPECS brings the whole Augmented Reality gamut in front of your eyes. For instance, the Soccer Skills app trains you while dribbling the ball in real-time with directional arrows. But there are limitations as to how real things seem when wearing these glasses, even with the improved 51 degrees FOV. The virtual 115-inch display (supporting 16 million colors) is placed around 10 feet away from the eye to enable non-intrusive translations in 60 languages, a Shopify Catalog of 3D products to shop using just voice commands and hand gestures, as well as stream content from popular services like HBO Max or YouTube. In fact, Snap has struck a partnership to bring the HBO Original Series Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, premiering on Christmas, to these smart glasses.

Staying a step ahead in terms of real-world usage, two SPECS can be connected together to share digital experiences in a common physical space. In light of the recent controversies surrounding the smart glasses being used for public recording, Snap says these glasses don’t record the world around you or constantly capture videos. The standalone glasses made from high-performance Swiss TR90 polymer come in two sizes – a 47mm version weighing 132 grams and a 52 mm model weighing 136 grams. For people with a prescription, the glasses support removable inserts. The electrochromic lenses on the glasses boast tinting technology adapted from the Boeing 787 Dreamliner windows to gently shift from clear to tinted in just 10 seconds.

For now, SPECS can be pre-ordered for $2,195 ($200 refundable deposit), and shipping to the US, UK, and France is expected to begin later this year, most likely in time for the holiday season. The augmented reality glasses will also be on display at Westfield Century City on October 1.

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RayNeo Just Split Smart Glasses Into Two, and Neither One Compromises

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The smart glasses category has long struggled with identity. Most devices try to do too much and end up doing nothing all that well. RayNeo’s answer to that is two entirely separate glasses for opposite ends of the spectrum: the iO as a discreet all-day AI companion and the GT Series as a portable personal theater. It’s a straightforward bet that specialization beats compromise.

The iO is the one you’d wear to a meeting and forget you have on. At 33 grams, with an aerospace-grade titanium frame and magnesium-aluminum alloy construction, it distributes weight evenly enough to disappear on your face. The display is invisible to anyone looking at you, a 97% transparent waveguide that delivers text at 1,300 nits of brightness while looking like ordinary eyewear to everyone else in the room.

Designer: RayNeo

What the iO actually does with that display is where things get interesting. Sit through a meeting, and it’s quietly logging the conversation, capturing context, and flagging action items that you can approve with a nod. Step up to give a presentation and its Auto-Teleprompter scrolls your script in sync with your speaking pace. For frequent travelers, it translates across 55 languages and 109 accents in near real time.

The iO doesn’t have speakers or a camera, which is a deliberate call. A four-mic array paired with a bone conduction sensor picks up your voice clearly even in noisy environments, and the 240mAh battery stretches to two days of regular use. Bluetooth 5.4 with MFi certification, IP54 water resistance, and a tactile Smart Crown rotary dial on the right temple complete the hardware.

The GT Series is a completely different proposition. Where the iO blends in, the GT and GT Max make no apologies for what they are: personal cinemas you wear on your face. The standard GT projects a 231-inch virtual screen at a 46° field of view, and the GT Max scales that up to a maximum of 307 inches at 59°, adjustable across three selectable sizes.

Paired with the RayNeo Pocket TV Pro, a Google TV-powered streaming device with a 6,500mAh battery, the GT Series is also the world’s first AR glasses system to support native Dolby Vision playback. That companion device powers both itself and the glasses for about 5.5 hours of streaming, which means actual Dolby Vision on a screen that fills more of your visual field than most living room televisions.

Audio in the GT Series comes from a quad-speaker system co-tuned by Bang & Olufsen, using a six-magnetic circuit design that delivers a 5dB boost in low-frequency sensitivity. Head-tracked spatial audio keeps the soundstage anchored as you move, and a dedicated Steady Mode in the 3DoF chip filters out turbulence and vehicle vibration, making it a natural companion for long flights or train journeys.

Both products go on sale September 4, 2026, via RayNeo’s website and Amazon. The GT starts at $299 and the GT Max at $399, with pricing for the iO still to be confirmed. Custom prescription lens inserts are supported across both GT models, and the GT Max comes in three IPD sizes to accommodate different face shapes. It’s a two-pronged launch that doesn’t hedge its bets on either end.

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Nvidia-powered Viture Helix AI safety glasses give workers real-time guidance and security warnings

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Smart glasses are having their time in the sun. Besides the fashion industry, there is a swing in the air to make things easier and interesting for the workforce with the use of AI. Primary evidence was the Innovative Eyewear’s Lucyd Armor, a smart safety eyewear designed to meet all prerequisite standards for workplace safety. Now, at the ongoing Augmented World Expo (AWE) 2026, Viture has introduced Helix, the first pair of AI safety glasses built on Nvidia’s XR AI solution.

The safety eyewear powered by AI is engineered in accordance with industrial safety standards. After its certification, which is in progress at the time of writing, the eyewear will be safe to use in labs, factories, and other regulated workflows. With the use of Nvidia’s XR AI, Helix will stream a first-person perspective of the wearer – what they see or hear – and feed it to a multimodal AI in real time, enabling “AI-assisted coaching, compliance, and full-provenance capture of every shift worn.”

Designer: Viture

In industrial, scientific, and clinical use cases – that Viture is targeting with its Nvidia collaboration – the workforce has to ensure a lot more than their regular tasks. For instance, it’s imperative to note that the machine is locked before maintenance or the correct setting of the pressure gauge in the oxygen tank. Using the Helix smart glasses, the extras could be taken care of. The AI-powered glasses can watch what a worker sees and, in real time, provide live guidance and safety warnings. It can automatically record everything that happens during the job and provide AI-assisted input to help the wearer manage the workflow better.

Helix is Viture’s entry into AI. It is a pair of fully transparent industrial-grade glasses without a display. Only input in live recording and voice. The glasses arrive with a 12MP first-person camera and an array of four microphones. Alongside the prerequisites for seeing and listening, the eyewear also features stereo speakers for sound, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 5.3 for connectivity. The glasses rely on a small battery that runs for slightly above 60 minutes on a full charge.

Viture ensures that Helix is completely independent of connectivity points and cables. It runs standalone without pairing to a companion phone to get the job done, furthering its useful capabilities for workers. Its field lenses are swappable without tools. According to press information, Viture and Nvidia worked closely over the past year, improving AI-assisted workflows to offer purposeful assistance in real-life applications.

Helix will be unveiled via a live demonstration held at the NVIDIA/Dell meeting room at AWE 2026, but the eyewear is likely to debut earliest at the beginning of next year. Viture is confident of meeting the timeline and is therefore taking early reservations for the device on its website for a $599 reservation price.

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An Ex-Alibaba Exec Spent 12 Years Building the Smart Glasses that Google Couldn’t

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The story of Google Glass is a well-worn legend in Silicon Valley. It was a product so far ahead of its time that it became a cultural phenomenon and then a punchline, a symbol of technological overreach and social awkwardness. The project was ultimately shelved, a high-profile monument to a future that arrived too early. It was a public retreat, an admission that the world was not ready for a computer on its face, or perhaps that the computer was not ready for the world.

As that chapter closed, another one was just beginning, thousands of miles away. An executive from Alibaba, inspired by the initial audacity of Google’s idea, decided to take a different approach. Instead of chasing hype, he would chase utility. Instead of prioritizing features, he would prioritize weight and comfort. For twelve years, his company, Rokid, worked to solve the very human problems that Google had overlooked, and in 2026 that long bet looks less like a moonshot and more like a roadmap.

Designer: Rokid

That roadmap now has a new center of gravity. Following Google’s latest Gemini updates at I/O, Rokid says it is bringing Gemini Flash 3.5 to its smart glasses, pushing the company deeper into what it calls agentic AI. The phrase matters because it signals a shift away from voice assistants that answer one question at a time and toward systems that can hold context, respond faster, and handle more layered tasks through simple voice commands. Rokid is framing the glasses as a place where conversational AI can stay present, useful, and continuous rather than trapped inside a phone screen.

That ambition sits on top of an unusually broad AI strategy. Rokid has spent the last year positioning its glasses as an open ecosystem rather than a single-model device, supporting ChatGPT, Qwen, DeepSeek, and Gemini across different products and regions. In Asia, the company has already built an AI Agent Store and says it has received more than 3,000 submissions for agentic workflows, with over 400 approved and published. The international push comes next, and that is where the latest Gemini integration becomes more than a feature update. It becomes a bridge between Rokid’s regional momentum and its global pitch.

The hardware story still matters because smart glasses live or die by whether people will actually wear them. Rokid’s 2025 display-equipped glasses carried one of the most memorable specs in the category: 49 grams for a full-function AI and AR device with display. That number gave the company a clean answer to the oldest question in wearable tech, which is how much computation can disappear into something that still feels like eyewear. According to Rokid’s own materials, that product also helped it raise more than $6 million and move into global mass production by December, giving the company proof that its ideas could leave the demo stage.

This year’s bigger mainstream play is Rokid AI Glasses Style, a different kind of product aimed at lowering the barriers that have kept smart eyewear niche for so long. Style is display-free, voice-centric, and starts at $299. At 38.5 grams, it is even lighter than the 49-gram model, and Rokid presents that reduction as part of a larger balancing act between comfort, battery life, and functionality. The frame is designed like premium eyewear, with titanium alloy hinges, liquid-silicone nose pads, and a classic D-shaped silhouette. Underneath that familiar form is a dual-chip architecture, with one chip handling low-power always-on tasks and another managing AI and imaging workloads.

Rokid clearly wants to win on openness, but it also wants to win on practicality. One of the strongest parts of the press material is its prescription-first approach, which treats vision correction as core infrastructure rather than a niche add-on. Style supports prescriptions up to ±15.00D, covering myopia, astigmatism, presbyopia, progressives, and functional lens options like photochromic and blue-light filtering. Users can upload prescriptions online and receive custom lenses in about 7 to 10 days. That sounds mundane compared to AI buzzwords, but it may be one of the most important adoption levers in the entire category. Smart glasses cannot become everyday objects if they still behave like specialty gadgets.

The other major throughline is accessibility. Rokid has been consistent here, both in the visit materials and in the press kit. The company is working with Google on accessibility-focused solutions for users with vision and hearing impairments, and its broader messaging keeps returning to a principle it phrases simply: leave nobody behind. For blind and low-vision users, Rokid positions audio-based AI glasses as digital eyes, and it has attached a small subsidy to purchases made for visually impaired users. That choice gives the company a more grounded social purpose than most wearable launches, which often stop at lifestyle language and creator features.

Those creator features are still part of the package. Style includes a 12MP Sony sensor, 4K capture, open-ear audio, and a triple-format imaging system designed for 3:4, 4:3, and 9:16 shooting. Rokid’s pitch is obvious and smart: content should be ready for Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube the moment it is captured, without cropping or post-editing. The glasses also support voice interaction in 12 languages and translation in 89, while adding head gestures and AI shortcuts for hands-free control. Nod to answer a call, shake your head to end it, ask for help in your own language, and keep moving.

All of this adds up to a company trying to define smart glasses less as a futuristic accessory and more as the next natural interface for AI. That is the real continuation of the Google Glass story. Google proved the cultural shock of putting a computer on your face. Rokid is trying to prove the quieter part, that wearability, prescription support, open AI access, and contextual software are what turn a provocative idea into a daily habit. The original dream never disappeared. It just needed lighter frames, better timing, and a company patient enough to spend twelve years building the version people might finally keep on.

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XREAL Just Partnered With Google to Build the Smart Glasses Apple Can’t

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BEYOND Expo 2026 had no shortage of AI talk, but one of its most compelling hardware stories came in the shape of a pair of glasses. On stage in Macau, XREAL CEO Xu Chi laid out a vision for AI glasses as the next major personal computing device and revealed that XREAL is working with Google on a new product built around Android XR and Gemini, with a global launch expected later this year.

That announcement landed at a moment when BEYOND Expo was already showing how crowded and competitive the smart glasses field has become. XREAL shared the wider conversation with companies like iFlyTek, METLEN, and Even Realities, all pointing to a fast-moving shift in wearable tech. The thread running through all of it is industrial design, platform strategy, and the race to make AI hardware people might actually want to wear every day.

Designer: XREAL

Apple Vision Pro generated enormous attention when it launched, but the market’s response to its weight, price, and the physical effort of wearing it for extended periods made clear that the premium immersive headset route has a real ceiling. Xu Chi acknowledged this directly at BEYOND Expo, framing it as a hard lesson the entire industry absorbed. The opportunity XREAL and Google are now chasing is the one Vision Pro left open: a wearable that feels closer to a regular pair of glasses than a piece of lab equipment.

Called Project Aura, the product is being developed on Google’s Android XR platform with Gemini AI integrated at the core. It is a pair of lightweight extended-reality glasses featuring a 70-degree field of view and an optical see-through display. Processing is split between an X1S chip in the glasses frame and a Snapdragon XR2+ Gen 2 processor in a separate external compute puck, keeping weight off the face while retaining the muscle needed for 6DoF tracking, hand tracking, eye tracking, and continuous Gemini AI assistance.

Splitting compute between the frame and a pocketable external puck is the kind of constraint-led industrial design thinking that tends to produce genuinely useful hardware. Every previous attempt to pack full AR processing into a glasses frame has produced something that looks ungainly, runs hot, or drains its battery in under two hours. Project Aura sidesteps that compromise, and the fact that it took a Chinese hardware company partnering with Google to land on this solution says something interesting about where design ambition in this category currently lives.

Smart glasses have struggled for years to answer a simple question: what are they actually for? At BEYOND Expo, Xu Chi’s answer was the clearest the category has produced in some time. The true killer app, in his view, is a continuous all-day AI assistant that sees the world from the wearer’s perspective; navigation and translation are table stakes, not destinations. What he is describing is closer to ambient intelligence that understands context and responds usefully across the full span of a person’s day, and Gemini’s multimodal capabilities give that vision real technical grounding.

Global smart glasses shipments hit nearly 14.8 million units in 2025, a 44.2% year-on-year increase. Chinese hardware vendors held 23.3% of global shipments overall and an 87.4% share of the AR and extended reality segment specifically. These are the companies that have been quietly iterating on form factor and optics while the Western tech press kept its attention on headsets. BEYOND Expo’s smart glasses floor this year was, in a sense, the moment that iteration became difficult to overlook.

Even Realities, which picked up a BEYOND Best of Innovation award at the expo, represents the sharpest design-philosophy contrast to XREAL’s approach. Their glasses carry no camera and no microphone, a deliberate choice built around privacy concerns that have slowed wearable AI adoption in several markets. METLEN and iFlyTek each showed their own AI smart glasses interpretations on the same floor. Four distinct companies arriving at one event with serious smart glasses products, each solving the form factor problem from a different angle, signals something well beyond a routine product cycle.

Xu Chi used the phrase “iPhone moment” during his BEYOND Expo address, and it is a comparison that usually ages badly. But the conditions that made the iPhone’s arrival feel defining were a convergence of hardware maturity, software readiness, and a platform worth building for. Android XR with Gemini is a credible attempt at the third element. Project Aura handles the first two more convincingly than anything the category has previously produced. Whether 2026 turns out to be the year that proved Xu Chi right is a question the market will answer, but BEYOND Expo made clear that the companies trying to get there are no longer on the fringes of the industry.

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$450 Smart Glasses, 78 Languages, Zero Smartphone Required

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Smart glasses companies love to talk about a grand future, but the strongest case for INMO GO3 arrived in a very ordinary setting: a live presentation. During its appearance at Global Connect in China, an INMO presenter used the glasses’ teleprompter feature while addressing the room, letting the script move with her speaking pace. It was a simple demonstration, slightly funny once the audience noticed the note cards she held as a backup option, and far more memorable than a spec sheet.

That kind of practicality is central to INMO’s broader strategy. The company describes its mission as building glasses people can wear daily, and GO3 reflects that approach with features aimed at frequent, low-friction use. Real-time translation, live transcription, meeting summaries, HERE Maps navigation, and photo translation all point toward the same goal: putting AI and information in front of the eye in a form people might actually keep on their face all day.

Designer: INMO

What makes the GO3 feel more meaningful than many smart glasses pitches right now is the kind of display it chooses to be. The category is increasingly pulled toward a model where glasses become another surface for platforms to mediate your attention, observe your behavior, and layer commerce or data collection into the act of seeing. That vision promises convenience, but it also raises the prospect of a device that quietly turns everyday life into a stream of signals for someone else to measure, sort, and monetize.

INMO’s framing, at least from this demo and conversation, points in another direction. The GO3 display feels useful because it serves the wearer in immediate, legible ways. It helps you follow a script. It helps you catch a conversation through live transcription. It helps you understand another language, navigate a route, or pull information from the world through photo translation. The point is not to create a new theater for algorithmic persuasion. The point is to reduce friction between a person and the task in front of them.

That’s a fairly important distinction because smart glasses will live or die on trust as much as technical ability. People may tolerate a phone screen as a chaotic marketplace of prompts, ads, feeds, and nudges because phones already carry that baggage. Glasses sit closer to the body and closer to perception. They ask for a different kind of acceptance. A product in that position has to prove it deserves to be there, and the most convincing way to do that is by helping with something clear, fast, and human scale.

The GO3 seems to understand that. On paper, its features are varied enough to sound ambitious: standalone real-time translation in 78 languages, AI teleprompting with auto-scroll, meeting summaries, action items, hands-free navigation through HERE Maps, photo translation, prescription support up to 2000 degrees, and a swappable battery system that can be changed in about five seconds. In practice, though, the appeal comes from how these features collapse into ordinary moments. A work presentation. A multilingual conversation. A commute. A quick glance for context instead of a full stop to unlock and consult a phone.

That is why the live teleprompter demo landed so well. It showed the GO3 handling one of the simplest possible tasks, and in doing so, it made a broader case for the category. Smart glasses do not need to begin with spectacle to feel transformative. They can begin with assistance. They can begin with a line of text, quietly placed where you need it, moving at your pace, leaving your hands and attention freer than they were a moment before. Once that works, bigger use cases start to feel plausible.

Some details remain fuzzy, especially around video recording, which was less clearly explained in conversation than photo capture. Any smart glasses company also has to prove that software quality can hold up outside the demo environment, particularly for translation, transcription, and AI-generated summaries. Those are high-value features, but they are also the ones most likely to disappoint if latency, accuracy, or interface design slips. INMO’s been in the business long enough to know that, and to also have a fairly strong grip on a fix.

Even with those caveats, INMO’s pitch feels unusually coherent. Founded in 2020, the company says its goal from day one has been to make glasses people will wear every day, and GO3 is the strongest expression of that idea so far. At 58 grams, with prescription support and a battery system designed for long use, it is clearly being shaped around wearability rather than occasional novelty. That design logic gives the product a sense of discipline that many competitors still lack.

The larger vision behind GO3 is that smart glasses will become the next mobile computing platform, eventually taking over as the primary interface for AI. That is a huge claim, and one the industry repeats often. What gives INMO a better argument than most is that it starts from the simple setting rather than the maximal one. If smart glasses are going to matter, they have to prove themselves in the small moments first. GO3 makes that case persuasively. It suggests the future of wearable computing may arrive not through spectacle, but through usefulness that quietly earns its place.

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ROG Just Gave the Ally Its First OLED and a 171-Inch AR Screen

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Handheld gaming PCs have become serious pieces of hardware over the past few years, and the display has quietly become the most contested spec on the spec sheet. Early handhelds shipped with IPS panels as a matter of course, but expectations have shifted. Owners of these devices spend long hours staring at a relatively small screen, and the quality of that screen now shapes how the whole experience is judged.

ROG is marking 20 years as a brand with an anniversary bundle that puts its most significant Ally upgrade to date front and center. The ROG XBOX Ally X20 is a special-edition take on the Ally X, built around a translucent black chassis with a gold internal structure and a 7.4-inch OLED display, the first of its kind on an Ally, paired in the box with a set of AR gaming glasses.

Designer: ASUS

The jump from IPS to OLED on the Ally is hard to overstate for anyone who’s spent time with both panel types. The Nebula HDR Display delivers 1,400 nits of peak brightness, a 0.2ms response time, a 120Hz refresh rate with FreeSync Premium Pro, and support for Dolby Vision. VESA DisplayHDR 1000 certification rounds it out, and Corning DXC glass with an anti-reflective coating cuts glare by 65%.

Under the hood, the AMD Ryzen AI Z2 Extreme processor carries the same horsepower as the Ally X, backed by 24GB of RAM and an 80Wh battery. New TMR joysticks deliver better precision and tracking. Auto SR upscaling handles frame-quality boosts at lower power costs, and Xbox Mode offers a clean, console-like interface for navigating a library that spans Xbox, PC Game Pass, and Steam.

The design is the most conspicuous part of the X20’s identity. The translucent black body lets the gold-accented internal frame show through, making the engineering itself part of the aesthetic. It’s a specific kind of flex that ROG’s anniversary context earns credibility for. Rubberized coating on the rear handgrips keeps the feel practical rather than purely decorative, which matters for a device meant to hold through long gaming sessions.

The bundle’s second piece is the ROG XREAL R1 Edition 20 Gaming AR Glasses, and they’re the part that makes this package genuinely different from simply selling a revised Ally X. These aren’t the kind of smart glasses that surface notifications or track fitness. They’re designed specifically for gaming, using dual Sony Micro-OLED displays to generate a virtual screen sized for long sessions away from a TV or monitor.

That virtual screen projects to 171 inches when viewed from 4 meters, covering 95% of the focused field of view. A 240Hz refresh rate and a 0.01ms response time keep fast-paced gameplay clean without smearing or lag. Native 3DoF head tracking anchors the display to your gaze, while Anchor Mode locks it in a fixed position for those who prefer to play without the screen following their movements.

The ROG XBOX Ally X20 isn’t the kind of hardware upgrade that quietly adds a spec or two. OLED on the Ally for the first time, combined with AR glasses that project a room-filling virtual display and wrapped in a translucent anniversary design, makes for a more complete idea than a typical limited-edition product usually delivers. A holiday 2026 release means the wait still has some time left.

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