Tag Archives: Wearables

These Xiaomi open earbuds have five drivers and look like tech-jewelry

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I own a lot of earbuds, and I can say with total confidence that none of them have ever made me feel fancy. Earbuds are the gym socks of consumer tech. You need them, you lose them, and you never show them off. Xiaomi’s OpenWear Stereo Pro argues the category deserves better, with open-ear buds that look like they came from a jewelry counter and a case straight out of a leather goods boutique. They launched last fall, and I still can’t stop staring at the press photos.

Mirror-polished pods sit on thin silicone ear hooks, and the whole set tucks into a case wrapped in vegan leather with a suede-style lining. Each 9.7-gram (0.34-ounce) bud packs four drivers for your ears, plus a fifth that fires anti-noise outward to help keep the stranger next to you on the train out of your true-crime podcast. You can pick from Sand Gold, Titan Gray, or Graphite Black, and the gold one is the obvious answer. Xiaomi sells them for €149.99 in Europe and £139 in the UK, with no official US release. Your friend in London suddenly looks very useful.

Designer: Xiaomi

A polished metallic finish wraps each pod, and Xiaomi pairs it with a soft cream-colored silicone hook, so the shiny bit gets all the attention while the hook practically disappears. Beneath that silicone runs a 0.6mm (0.024-inch) memory titanium wire designed to flex around your ear and spring back into shape. Xiaomi built the fit around three contact points to distribute pressure, with the pod tilted outward to avoid pressing against your tragus, that little flap at the front of your ear canal. The slim hook is also designed to leave room for glasses. On a model with her hair up, the whole thing reads like a boutique ear cuff that happens to play Spotify.

The case measures 2.68 inches square and just over an inch thick (68 x 68 x 26.3mm), with pebbled vegan leather outside and a tan faux suede lining that gives it the look of a watch box. A magnetic lid holds it shut, and a little “DESIGNED BY XIAOMI” tab inside tips its hat to Apple’s famous sign-off. The buds nest in a figure eight, hooks overlapping, so neatly that it feels rude to take them out. Most earbud cases are glossy plastic pebbles that collect scratches the moment they meet your keys. This one looks more at home on a nightstand beside your watch and wallet.

Each pod combines a 0.71 x 0.51-inch (18 x 13mm) dynamic driver for bass, two balanced armatures (the tiny precision drivers found in pricey in-ear monitors) for detail, and a piezoelectric ceramic tweeter for the high frequencies. Xiaomi says Harman helped with tuning, and the Xiaomi Earbuds app offers two dedicated EQ profiles on iPhone and Android. The fifth driver, a 10mm unit, plays reverse-phase sound outward in Balanced mode. Xiaomi claims 60% better sound-leakage reduction than the original OpenWear Stereo. The company rates battery life at 8.5 hours per charge and 45 hours with the case, enough for a week of commutes before you hunt down a USB-C cable. It also says a 10-minute top-up buys two hours, a useful fallback if you forget to charge before a flight.

Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds cost $299, Shokz wants $249.95 for its OpenFit Pro, and the OpenFit 2+ sits at $179.95. Xiaomi’s €149.99 European price looks appealing alongside those US prices, though importing a pair could change the calculation. Xiaomi followed up in May 2026 with the Ear Clip, a cuff-style design closer to Bose’s approach. A year on, the hook-style Pro is still the pair I’d point to when someone tells me audio gear has to look boring.

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XREAL AURA Glasses Put the Battery in Your Pocket, Not on Your Face

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The idea of having a giant screen floating in front of you sounds appealing, until you feel the headset attached to your face weighing down on your head. XREAL AURA takes a different approach, putting Android XR into a pair of glasses connected to a separate pocket computer. It still involves wearing technology on your nose, of course, but the battery and main processor get to live elsewhere.

At around 3.4 ounces, the glasses don’t exactly pass for ordinary eyewear. Their dark frame has thick arms and cameras around the front, although the outline is closer to sunglasses than a sealed visor. More importantly, you look directly through the lenses at your surroundings, rather than watching a camera’s version of the room.

Designer: XREAL, Google

That transparency isn’t fixed, thankfully. Five levels of electrochromic dimming let you darken the lenses for a movie or let more of the room back in afterward. Sony Micro-OLED displays provide 1,920 × 1,200 pixels per eye at up to 120Hz, with a 70° field of view. You’re adjusting how the room and virtual picture share your attention, rather than simply changing brightness.

The less glamorous half of the arrangement is the computing puck, which weighs about 9.3 ounces and contains the Snapdragon Reality Elite chip, battery, and cooling fan. Its touchpad gives your fingers somewhere to navigate when waving at windows feels unnecessary. Hand tracking and voice controls remain available, but you don’t have to conduct an invisible orchestra just to open an app.

A hotel desk doesn’t become larger, but its workspace can spread beyond the laptop screen. Android XR lets you arrange apps around you, with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse support for familiar controls. Plug a compatible laptop into the puck with a video-capable USB-C cable, and its screen becomes another window alongside the Android apps. That’s mirroring, however, not replacing the laptop’s operating system.

Work can give way to something a little more entertaining without changing the hardware. Google says AURA supports more than 150 experiences made for XR, alongside Google Play apps, including games that occupy your room rather than a flat window. Gemini can answer questions about what’s in view, so asking for help needn’t involve taking the glasses off to consult your phone.

Getting the fit right takes more than picking a frame. AURA comes in two sizes based on the distance between your pupils, with interchangeable nose pads and support for prescription inserts. Those adjustments help position your eyes in relation to the optics. They’re worth considering before imagining a working day behind floating screens, particularly without independently established battery endurance or long-term comfort.

US orders have started, with shipping expected to begin in mid-November. Launch pricing starts at $1,099 for 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage through December, against a $1,279 regular price. That buys the glasses and their companion computer, not freedom from cables. AURA moves much of the hardware away from your face, but there’s still a wire following it.

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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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NUS Researchers Turn Electronic Threads Into a Touchscreen Sleeve

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Checking your sleeve usually means looking for a stain, not opening a calculator. Researchers at the National University of Singapore have given that familiar piece of clothing a rather different purpose, threading a working touchscreen into its fabric. The research prototype displays images, responds to presses, and bends around the forearm without relying on a rigid panel strapped on top of it.

The interesting part is how the screen becomes part of the garment. Each electronic fiber carries a row of LEDs and a touch-sensitive layer beneath them, all within a thread about 0.04 inches thick. Pressing the fiber closes a circuit, allowing the system to locate your finger. You aren’t poking through fabric at a hidden glass screen; the thread itself detects the press.

Designers: Heng Fu, Ziang Li, Swetika Chaturvedi, Xiaoyu Zhang, Xiaolong Li, Qianyi Li & Tural Khudiyev (National University of Singapore)

The sleeve combines 54 of those fibers, each carrying 96 LEDs, into a display roughly 6.6 inches by 4.1 inches. Its 96-by-54-pixel resolution isn’t going to replace your phone’s display, although the prototype can show pictures and play video. Large icons make more sense here than tiny menus, giving the interface a chunky character that suits a screen wrapped around a moving arm.

That placement puts simple tools within reach without fishing through a pocket. The team demonstrated a calculator, compass, photo viewer, and voice commands, along with Bluetooth image transfers. Video runs at 30 frames per second, dropping to 25 with synchronized audio. Those aren’t smartphone specifications to brag about, of course, but checking a direction doesn’t demand a miniature movie theater on your sleeve.

Other fibers carry a microphone, speaker, and sensors for movement, light, direction, and temperature. That lets the interface rotate with the arm and adjust its brightness automatically. A temperature-sensing fiber positioned under the arm can send a reading to the sleeve, suggesting how clothing might eventually make personal measurements easier to check. That doesn’t mean it’s ready to replace your thermometer, though.

Of course, clothing has to survive more than a few demonstrations. NUS reports that light output and touch response barely changed after 50 detergent washes and 1,000 bends. The washing procedure used a laundry bag and a gentle cycle, rather than treating the electronics like gym socks. That’s encouraging, though a laundry test isn’t a promise of surviving years of careless washing.

There’s also a difference between making the display flexible and making the entire computer disappear. Separate controller circuits and battery packs still support this prototype, so the electronics haven’t all become yarn. The researchers report breathability comparable to common fabrics, including cotton and denim, but a wearable system also has to account for where its power supply and other hardware sit during use.

For now, this remains a laboratory garment, with no announced retail price or release date. Higher resolution and more integrated electronics are among the challenges ahead. There’s a practical design question underneath the glowing sleeve, too. If the interface lives in your clothes, charging, repairing, and eventually replacing it become wardrobe decisions, alongside the ordinary matter of choosing something that fits comfortably.

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Titanium Smart Glasses Concept Refuses to Hide Its Tech

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Fitting a computer into a pair of glasses creates an awkward design problem: the electronics need room, but the result still has to belong on someone’s face. Povilas Grigas approaches that tension without pretending it can disappear. His Glasses concept gives the hardware a deliberately different silhouette, treating smart eyewear as its own design category rather than ordinary frames with a technological secret. I like that starting point.

Developed for his 2024 design BA thesis, the mixed-reality concept imagines an alternative to being tethered to a phone or desktop screen. The ambition is to make computing available through something worn rather than something you continually look down at or sit in front of. That’s an appealing proposition, although moving digital information closer to your eyes doesn’t automatically make it less demanding of your attention.

Designer: Povilas Grigas

Visually, these glasses have enough personality to carry that discussion. The broad, rounded lens openings sit within a flowing silver-colored frame, while the bridge has two dark circular elements above an oval opening. In the front view, that arrangement almost resembles a tiny surprised face. It’s an unexpectedly playful detail in an otherwise polished object. To my eye, the overall effect lands somewhere between sculptural eyewear and a science-fiction costume department with unusually good taste.

Grigas specifies CNC-milled, polished grade 5 titanium for the frame and optically polished sapphire crystal for the lenses. Those are proposed material choices, not evidence that the finished glasses would feel featherlight or survive everyday abuse. Still, I appreciate the intention behind them. A computer worn this prominently deserves the material attention we give a watch or a favorite pair of glasses, especially if the expectation is that it becomes part of someone’s daily appearance.

The frame’s outline follows the bones around the eyes, according to Grigas, and the vision sensors occupy the bridge for a centered point of view. That placement gives the front a clear organizing feature. Rather than scattering visually competing details across the brow and corners, the design concentrates its most conspicuous technology near the middle. It’s a convincing composition, even if a convincing composition is only one part of making wearable computing practical.

From the side, the arms look substantial, with long, smooth surfaces that curve downward behind the ears. Their thickness is part of the visual identity rather than a detail the presentation tries to conceal. I’d rather see that volume handled deliberately than watch a designer chase thinness at the expense of the overall shape. Here, the broad arms and generous front feel like parts of the same object.

The personal question is whether I’d want such a distinctive object defining my face every day. I’m not sure, and that uncertainty is worth keeping in the conversation. Glasses are unusually intimate technology because people look through them while other people look at them. A frame can be beautifully resolved and still feel wrong for an individual wearer. I’d want more than an impressive image before deciding these belonged in my routine.

The proposed leather charging case helps make that routine easier to imagine. The glasses fold flat inside it, and the presentation shows a dark, textured exterior with visible stitching and a circular metal closure. It reads as an eyeglass accessory rather than a miniature electronics bag. More importantly, putting the glasses away feels like a recognizable action. I find that more reassuring than an expectation that a wearable computer should remain on your body indefinitely.

For now, this is an academic design proposal, not a demonstrated replacement for your laptop. Its presentation doesn’t establish battery endurance, display quality, or long-term comfort, so those questions remain open. What earns my interest is the willingness to give computing a visible presence without making the frame look apologetic. I wouldn’t ask these glasses to pass as ordinary eyewear. I would ask whether their eventual usefulness could earn the space they occupy on my face.

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