Why You Might Want To Pick Up AI Smart Glasses

Have you noticed — the smartphone, though still an integral part of everyday life, is starting to fall out of favour?

Newer devices on the market are pitching themselves as either a smartphone replacement or a companion and, in the process, turning us away from the smartphone and its exceptionally attention-seeking, app-filled screen.

Examples of these devices are the Humane Ai Pin, the Rabbit r1, and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. (Read this and this for context.) The Ai Pin and smart glasses are wearable devices that you must have on yourself, while the r1 goes into the pockets alongside the phone.

The idea behind coming up with this new generation of devices is the highly distracting and depleting nature of the smartphone. The mobile device makes life easy, but also sucks life away by asking more and more of your time and attention every waking hour.

Furthermore, the smartphone today represents a gap in human-computer interaction which wasn’t apparent earlier, thanks to the novelty and great ease of the touch, scroll, swipe, and pinch to zoom features, but is now seeming bigger by the day as the mobile device drifts away past its prime.

The newer devices promise to give people back their valuable time by freeing up their eyes, ears, and fingers, and probably reorienting their neck back to normal, and thereby bringing human life and interaction back to regular programming. They are also enlisting the help of artificial intelligence (AI), which is powering the next great technology wave right now, to change the consumer technology paradigm.

Of the new breed of AI devices, the smart glasses appear to be the type of device most suitable for a smartphone transition. This is because while devices like the Pin and r1 are radically different from the smartphone, they are still devices ‘outside’ of ourselves, falling into our line of sight and needing the occasional use of hands or hand gestures, touch, scroll, and the like, with the large language model (LLM) doing the heavy-lifting.

AI smart glasses, however, have the potential to blend seamlessly into our living reality, as if they are an extension of our eyes, and accomplish routine tasks for us, like play music or search the web.

Even with these goggles, the hands do come into play for, say, light taps to take pictures or videos, but the hardware is still largely ‘unseen’ to the eye. This ‘unseen’ quality of AI smart goggles might make them most suitable for common use in the future.

These smart glasses are able to fuse the real and reel worlds together, combining eyesight and hearing with technology add-ons like advanced cameras, speakers, microphones, and multimodal LLMs, meaning an integration of various input and output.

The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are an example of this kind of wearable device.

The Meta glasses are equipped with an ultra-wide 12-megapixel camera and a five-mic system, enabling the capture of surroundings. The photos and videos thus recorded can then be live-streamed directly to Facebook and Instagram.

The glasses possess open-ear speakers which are said to be audible even in noisy or windy environments. The audio-visual capture provides a point-of-view perspective on moments currently unavailable with the smartphone, such as when you are with a loved one.

The Meta AI built into the glasses can be activated by saying “Hey, Meta” followed by the instruction. Such a mode of digital operation — speaking with an LLM in search of answers — is now mainplace, propelled by the ChatGPT phenomenon.

However, integrating AI into a hardware that is fully open to what you are seeing and hearing all the time, in real time, and then responding in context makes smart goggles genuinely a turning point in consumer technology.

Besides, the glasses sit neatly into a portable charging case, just as any wireless Bluetooth earbuds currently do. So, it’s a familiar feeling. A companion mobile app, with which smart glasses would be paired, helps to manage the device.

The best part? Unlike the earliest offerings of smart glasses, goggles like the Ray-Ban Meta type don’t look funky, futuristic, or dorky, and so you don’t stand out from the crowd in a weird way. They look like any good-looking pair of sunglasses, giving the wearer a sleek style upgrade while being mighty useful as a digital assistant.

All this is not to say, however, that AI smart glasses will be an automatic popular choice in the future. This piece of wearable technology will have to contend with privacy concerns. The ability to take pictures and shoot videos with minimal movement can make human interactions suspicious and uncomfortable, more so in a crowd or when people who don't know each other come together.

Further, in their early forms, such AI glasses might operate quietly on the side as data collection devices. When in use, they could be picking up on your activities, movements, memories, and other data to improve their AI models, among other uses — not all of them preferable, thereby infringing on personal privacy.

However, as long as privacy protections are active considerations in our collective psyche, both ethically and legally, AI smart glasses might grow to respect data privacy, or else compelled to do so, over time.

In the meanwhile, it’s time to delight in the possibilities of a future technology that could become commonplace in everyday life.