Smart glasses are hot right now, and Google is poised to turn that temperature up even further. In a very brief teaser on Friday, Google’s President of the Android Ecosystem, Sameer Samat, gave the tiniest of glimmers for what the company may have in store on the smart glasses front. At the end of Google’s I/O edition of its Android Show series, Samat can be seen very coyly taking out a pair of glasses and sliding them onto his face while proclaiming that Google will have “a few more really cool Android demos” in store for viewers who tune into I/O next week.
If we’re to read between the very obvious, billboard-sized lines, that means Google is going to show off some smart glasses—and soon. For me, personally, that’s very exciting, but I can think of one company that might not receive Google’s teaser so well. I’ll give you a hint: they own a little social media platform called Facebook. As nascent as smart glasses may be as a device category, they already have a clear poster child, and it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. As an owner of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, I can say for sure that, despite not having many competitors, the smart eyewear has earned the frontrunner title.
Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are stylish, they take surprisingly nice pictures, and they have a voice assistant that is more adept than most (ahem, Siri). They also deliver shockingly good audio for phone calls and music playback, which makes them a perfect gadget for when you want to listen to something but you don’t want to wall yourself off with ANC earbuds or over-ear headphones. In my opinion, they’re the one device that you don’t think you need, but as soon as you try a pair, you’ll likely want them.
But as bullish as I am on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, I’m also fully aware that the field for smart glasses is entirely wide open. Meta, as I alluded to previously, has the benefit of being a big fish in a relatively small pond, but that arrangement is destined for a disruption, and that shakeup could come by the hands of several companies—Google included.
Google’s hardware, though we don’t really know much of anything about it at this point, might not have the classic Ray-Ban silhouette if and when it’s released, but it would have one thing that Meta doesn’t: Google’s ecosystem. Paired with a Pixel device, for example, Google’s smart glasses could go places that Meta has only dreamed of. Imagine tight integration with messaging on your phone, phone calls, audio recording apps, or the camera app. Those are little things on the surface, but having photos or videos taken with your smart glasses appear directly in your photos app on your phone are quality-of-life improvements that could be the deciding factor for lots of people. As great as Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are, they’ll never have full, native integration with say, an iPhone. Google on the other hand? Well, the lane is wide open.
To make matters worse, Google may also have a leg up on AI. If there’s one thing I don’t love about Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, it’s Meta AI. Though Meta AI does well for basic voice assistant commands like “take a video,” when it comes to the beefier, more complex tasks, I find it to be more volatile. During a recent excursion on the beach in Florida, for example, Meta AI very confidently told me that almost every shell I was holding was a shark’s tooth or that the car I was looking at was an “In-fin-ee-tee” instead of an Infiniti.
It’s hard to say if Google’s Gemini would perform better in those tasks, but worth noting that it has been around for slightly longer in the generative AI game and has lots of different models to throw at a pair of smart glasses. And again, with tight integration between phone and glasses, Gemini (especially an agentic Gemini) might be able to squeeze out even more functionality and give Google’s smart glasses an edge over Meta’s Ray-Bans.
Google already teased a little of what its smart glasses might be able to do with AI last year during I/O 2024. Project Astra, as Google calls it, is a smart glasses UI that leans on computer vision to do all sorts of things. In a controlled demo, Google showed off how Astra could read lines of computer code off a screen and give advice or even remember objects in your environment in case you lose them. It’s a compelling, if potentially far-off, vision of what a pair of Google-made smart glasses could bring to the table, and one that we might get a better look at next week.
No matter what transpires at I/O in a few days, though, time is of the essence for Google and Meta. While neither Samsung nor Apple have officially announced their own smart glasses yet, both are almost certainly devising their own gadgets that would have all of the same benefits of a Google device (tight integration and AI acumen), plus an even larger ecosystem of augmentative products—phones, TVs, speakers, etc.
Though, to give Meta some credit, it might not be overshadowed by Google, Samsung, or Apple just yet if it can actually bring its Orion prototype to fruition. Orion, for the uninitiated, is a pair of real-deal AR glasses that can actually superimpose digital objects (texts, pictures, videos, games) onto your vision, and Meta’s goal is to shrink them down to a form factor that’s about the size of a regular pair of glasses. According to Meta, it could have Orion ready for market by 2027, but a product that can do as much as Meta has suggested would be nothing short of game-changing.
When it comes to Google, almost everything is conjecture at this point, but the possibilities for a pair of Google-made smart glasses are definitely vast, and hopefully, we’ll have a better look at what that potential is very soon. Here’s to hoping this goes a lot more smoothly than Google Glass.
