Tag Archives: Wearables

The90Gem smart necklace tracks UV exposure in real-time for sensible skincare

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Wearables are targeting most of our burning health concerns, but sun exposure damage is still in the guessing game. Stacy Salvi, who has previously led the acquisition of Fitbit by Google, and is a health expert when it comes to tech wearables, wants skincare to be more considerate when it comes to active sun exposure. Under her new venture, The90, Stacy has launched the Gem wearable that looks like a stylish round necklace for women.

On the inside, the wearable has a built-in UV sensor to track the skin’s UV exposure in real time. The gadget makes complete sense, as most of the time we are left guessing about the real exposure to damaging Sun rays, and are dependent on integrated weather apps’ UV index, which only show generic localised data. Gem goes beyond that and actively tracks the real-time exposure, whether you are lounging in the mid-day Sun or spending afternoons sitting near an office window. It basically takes out the guesswork and focuses on the real-time solution.

Designer: The90

The90Gem keeps a tab of the UVA and UVB data received from the sensors in real time, and over time builds a personal skincare profile that is actually beneficial. “The90 transforms sunscreen from a one-time morning ritual into an adaptive, responsive system built around your actual UV load,” Salvi said. Micromanaging the skin type, sunscreen used, and any sun-protective clothing that you’re wearing is another feature of the accompanying app. For now, the wearable is specifically targeted towards women who tend to be more informed about the risks of UV exposure. The brand, however, eventually wants to expand the product line to men and children as well.

Detecting UVA and UVB exposure is one part of the wearable. The most important bit is the timely beaming of notifications for sunscreen application, or a reminder of the sun protection habits that should eventually be ingrained in your muscle memory. The app also provides data on Vitamin D targets for a mindful suncare routine. The Gem is essentially a titanium case with the sensor inside, wholly encapsulated in a pendant. The battery on the gadget should last for around a week on a single charge, but that remains to be seen in real-world usage.

This piece of smart jewellery is available in silver or gold finish to complete the aesthetic look. Priced at $299, The90 Gem wearable is just borderline affordable for a specific benefit, but the members of The Skinny Confidential community can get it for an exclusive price of $199 in the early access offer. The company also has plans to incorporate the smart wearable as other items as well, which should further expand the options to gauge your sun exposure in style.

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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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This 48g Monako Glass puts Claude Code in front of your eyes so you can vibe code anywhere

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In the age of artificial intelligence, when you can tell the computer what you want, and it builds it for you, something seems missing. Maybe a wearable input device that would let you interact, code and build using AI, and you wouldn’t even have to move a muscle. Introducing the Monako Glass, the world’s first heads-up display smart glasses designed for vibe coding. It comes with wave guide display, camera, speakers, and bone conduction microphone.

Human and AI interaction is taking new turns with every passing day. Nothing is constant, it seems. In this overly paced world, the possibility of coding on a pair of glasses while walking around in the lab or sitting at home preparing a project for class sounds futuristic in the best way possible.

Designer: Monako Glass

The 48g Monako Glass – a nicely developed Buildroot Linux computer in a pair of glasses – can run Claude Code, Codex and even allow you, as a creator, to run AI coding agents you’ve trained to your liking. The glasses feature all its electronics – including an ARM Cortex A7 chipset – on the right temple tip. A 300mAh battery, providing the power backup to all the vibe coding you’re going to do on these glasses, rests in the left temple tip. This positioning, Monako CTO informs, allows the glasses to feel light on the nose, making them wearable for long periods of time during the workday.

If you think it’s straight-up out of a sci-fi flick, this is not even the start. Inspired by Apple Vision Pro (which apparently takes a back seat in favor of AR glasses), Monako uses something called the Vision Engine (in the integrated camera), to translate finger and palm gestures into precise digital commands. For instance, raising the hand opens up the apps on the glass’s display, while pinch and slight back and forth drags of the forefinger and thumb can help scroll through the generated code or toggle volume in the music app.

With the apps like “Claude Code, Codex, Unreal Engine, Blender and After Effects” on board, Monako Glass can be a single tool for all your needs. But still, you have the choice to “wipe the bundled apps clean, and replace all code with your own,” company CEO Candy informs. “The onboard Linux is fully open to you and your Claude,” she adds, so running full Linux, Claude Code, and your AI agents hands-free can be as smooth and fun as you like with the Monako Glass.

What really impresses me more than the gestural input system is the bone conduction microphone placed on the nose (bridge). The mic is strategically placed that it listens to the vibrations coming from your nasal bone. For instance, you’re in a busy café, the AI (courtesy the microphone) will listen to you alone and execute your input as a prompt to get the next computation of the code done on Monako’s monochrome screen.

Monako Glass is still in the preproduction stage, but the company is hopeful of getting this first-ever wearable Linux computer to the market by August this year. It is for now available on preorder on Monako’s official website for $19, which should reserve a unit for you. Candy says, “early supporters will get Monako Glass for $399.”

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