With Vision Pro, Apple is clearly marching toward a future where sleek smart glasses can augment our views with useful information and applications. Perhaps we should think about Apple Vision Pro as the desktop, and Apple glasses will be the desktop’s miniaturization into the laptop.
Anyway, we don’t have to wait and see what Apple is cooking up to get our first taste of what smart glasses may offer. Meta/Ray-Ban and Amazon have been in the business for a few years, and more bespoke AI products are popping up on the regular. The latest is this open-source pair of AI glasses from Brilliant Labs.
Cool concept, potentially
My first reaction? They look like Steve Jobs glasses if Steve Jobs was James Bond. I know, that’s a lot to take in.
The rundown is this: Brilliant Labs is selling pre-orders for $349 AI glasses under the product name Frame. (Brilliant Labs previously released the $299 Monocle hardware for hacking around with ideas.)
OpenAI and Perplexity are involved, Frames ship as soon as April, and early adopters will have free AI service with a daily cap on requests. A paid AI plan will be announced later.
Frame comes in three colors: black, white, or transparent. They work with prescription lenses, use a microOLED panel for displaying augmented reality, plus design files and code are freely available on Github.
The nose piece includes a tiny camera. The ear pieces look like coin battery-shaped speakers that aren’t actually speakers. Just batteries.
But WTF is Mister Power?
Speaking of batteries, Frame glasses feature all-day battery life in the Vision Pro sense. That’s to say that you can use them through the day as long as you charge them throughout the day. That’s where things get weird. Like upside down charging Magic Mouse levels of weird.
Frame glasses recharge with an orange pear-shaped fake nose called Mister Power. Mister Power recharges Frame’s ear hole batteries. You recharge Mister Power by shoving a USB-C cable up its center solo nostril.
Okay, at this point I feel obligated to apologize for invoking the names of both Steve Jobs and James Bond earlier.
But what does it do?
Anyway, what does Frame do? It can translate languages, answer queries with AI, and tell you how many calories are in raspberries. You know, just like the other wearable/GameBoy-esque AI products coming this year.
Still, Frame has some interesting ideas, a just-buy-it-and-try-it price, and some interesting open-source potential behind it. Pre-orders are available now. Mister Power unfortunately not sold separately.
On the one hand, Frame looks like another fun piece of hardware to tinker with and try out. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d want to invest in corrective lenses for these.
Apple Vision Pro is in its own category at 10x the price, of course, and not even Mister Power could deliver all-day battery life to a glasses frame-sized version in 2024.
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