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Smart Glasses

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Jay Cormier

	Eyedaptic EYE6 with Ivy AI-powered visual assistant provides vision enhancement and visual assistance.
	An Eyedaptic customer sporting EYE6 smart glasses.

“The intersection of AR and AI is particularly fertile ground for smart eyewear. These applications will extend far beyond just the visually impaired, which is Eyedaptic’s initial target market,” Cormier said.

Navigating the World of Assistive Technologies
“Smart headsets have been transformative for the assistive device category and we want to ensure these technologies can get to the people who need them the most,” said Ruth Yomtoubian, senior director, VSP Vision Global Innovation Center. “That’s why we published the Emerging Tech for Accessibility Guide, a comprehensive resource to help innovators navigate the world of assistive technologies. The guide, which contains key insights for the AR-enabled low-vision solutions market, is designed to spark conversation, encourage the use of inclusive design principles, and advance understanding of low vision and the emerging assistive device category,” she said.

“One of our main focus areas is to reduce the friction customers experience when trying to get prescription lenses for smart eyewear and VR/AR headsets. In that respect, we worked with Amazon on their Find a Doctor directory, enabling consumers to more easily find providers who are knowledgeable in the smart eye category and experienced in these fittings,” explained Yomtoubian.

VSP said it is currently in a pilot project with Heru, a virtual reality headset that enables physicians to rapidly screen patients for visual defects, which can indicate the presence of glaucoma or age-related macular degeneration. Through the virtualization of several tests, Heru can reduce the duration of an in-person examination, freeing up time for doctors and allowing them to see more patients daily, Yomtoubian said. “While it’s important to ensure that optical retailers are ready to embrace smart eyewear, we’ve identified an opportunity to help providers tap into the technology to optimize workflows.”

Yomtoubian feels that eye tracking is the most intriguing technology for consumers. She said, “The eye’s intimate connection with the brain—and the brain’s connection to the rest of the sensorimotor system—means the human eye is capable of a lot more than just vision. AI-powered eye tracking is being integrated into B2B solutions to boost an individual’s productivity and occupational performance. Smart eyewear and spatial computing headsets are helping turn the eye into a next-generation mouse.

“Earlier this summer, I was at Cannes Lions and one of the major trends discussed was how smart eyewear will continue to emerge as a new form factor for content creation. Smart eyewear isn’t necessarily trying to ‘take over the eyewear market,’ but rather create a new market in itself and position itself as an essential tool for creators and influencers to capture and livestream their daily lives,”
Yomtoubian said.

The Attraction to Smart Display Eyewear
Jerome A. Legerton, an OD and inventor of contact lens-enabled extended reality eyewear systems, components and methods for prescribing them, contends that smart display eyewear, as differentiated from audio or image capture eyewear, won’t be adopted until it’s fully usable. “For smart display eyewear to be worn like normal spectacle eyewear it must be lightweight and comfortable. The bar is high right now because common spectacle lenses and frames are extremely lightweight and comfortable. The big players stimulate awareness. If they succeed, the adoption will be significant. However, if they stumble, the first reaction of consumers to the subject may be negative,” Dr. Legerton said.

“The next challenge is to make the smart display eyewear acceptable in appearance. I believe the acceptable smart display eyewear must be positioned in the context of standard spectacles. Most commercialized smart display eyewear has ‘eye relief distances’ or vertex distances of greater than 20 mm, with greater thickness for beam combiners or wave guides, as well as for heat dissipation,” said Legerton, who describes a wave guide combiner as a thin, transparent sheet that guides light projected from a small display to an area in front of the user’s eye where the image is emitted. The end result is greater thickness and distance of the front of the eyewear from the face, which moves the center of gravity further from the face. This optimizes eyewear comfort and stability.

According to Legerton, the smart eyewear market hasn’t evolved significantly over the past few years. It has been sluggish with only the release of first- and second-generation products that are more headsets than eyewear. His patents concentrate on contact lens-enabled wearable display eyewear. The purpose of the contact lens is to reduce the weight and complexity of the smart display eyewear while increasing the field of view, decreasing the vertex distance and allowing more simple eye tracking with less weight and power demand. Legerton feels that the smart eyewear feature most interesting to consumers is “anytime and anywhere information and entertainment.”

Engineering Advances Emerge
“Over the past few years, we’ve started to see smart eyewear being successfully commercialized,” noted Darren Ihmels, systems engineer in the Office of the CTO at Applied Materials, leaders in material engineering solutions. “Early innovators have launched fashionable brand-name smart glasses. Components and integrative circuits are becoming smaller, more efficient and purposed-designed, and the final products are starting to resemble eyeglasses that can be comfortably worn all day,” he said.

Applied Materials designs, manufactures and supplies high-quality wave guides to the smart glass industry. They collaborate with device manufacturers who have already launched products or are in the engineering or ramp-up stages of their product development cycle. “By building on our decades of expertise in materials engineering for the semiconductor industry, Applied Materials is in a unique position to provide high-yield and high-volume affordable wave guide manufacturing solutions to smart glass system builders,” Ihmels said. The company has in-house tooling capability to co-develop Rx solutions with its partners and customers.

“Artificial intelligence in smart eyewear is the most compelling future technology use case. In hardware trends, we’ll see smart glasses looking and feeling much more like current fashionable dress eyewear. Rx-ability will also be a native quality in most smart glass offerings,” said Ihmels.

Innovation Powers the Smart Glasses Market Forward
“The breakneck speed of innovation is probably the most notable change,” stated Rocco Basilico, chief wearables officer for EssilorLuxottica. “More has happened in the past year than in the previous 10 years. Five years ago, consumers weren’t comfortable wearing technology on their faces, but we overcame a significant obstacle to adoption by designing a beautiful pair of frames with all this great connective and intuitive technology built in seamlessly, invisibly. Being able to miniaturize the technology and integrate it into Ray-Ban eyeglasses has helped bring wearables into the mainstream,” Basilico said.

“We’ve evolved smart glasses into a transformative experience with the latest generation of Ray-Ban Meta which features AI, live streaming and a multimodal AI update that can translate signs and identify objects, simulating a multilingual personal assistant. In addition, we enhanced the audio with improved bass and noise suppression, and upgraded the camera to a 12 MP ultrawide lens,” Basilico said. Ray-Ban Meta can be customized with the consumer’s prescription lenses and is available with Transitions lenses as well.

“Ray-Ban Meta is sold everywhere—from independent eyecare practices and sun and optical retailers to leading electronics retailers and e-commerce sites. Its high-touch accessibility, where consumers can play with the features and try on different styles, is a key driver of our success. The features that consumers love the most are the ones that allow them to stay connected and live in the moment. Sharing and calling features, for example, mean you can be mountain biking, making a soufflé or dancing at a concert and enjoy the experience hands-free,” noted Basilico.

Nuance, EssilorLuxottica’s hearing assistive device, seamlessly integrates open-ear hearing technology into fashionable eyeglasses, providing an immersive auditory experience, the company said. It’s designed to minimize listening fatigue in noisy environments, delivering a high degree of clarity in the direction of the line of sight. The microphones capture sounds from the direction the user is facing. These sounds are instantly digitally processed and transmitted to micro speakers embedded in the spectacle frame, delivering them directly to the user’s ears. Nuance is expected in market by Q1 2025, according to the company.

“The next technology revolution will not be about making a better phone. It will be about freedom from the phone without sacrificing any of its connectivity,” added Basilico “This is why smart glasses have so much potential. We already wear them up to 18 hours a day, they help us express our personal style, and they help us see the world clearly. AI and other features have already enabled us to reach a new level of practicality and connectivity. A well-integrated and seamless AI assistant will be a true superpower—a direct and seamless integration between human and machine, without the need to implant a chip in your brain,” Basilico concluded.

A Shift Toward a More Cohesive Strategy
Alessandro Bellati, director of front-end innovation at Safilo Group, stated that while smart eyewear was initially characterized by a disjointed, gadget-like approach, the sector is now shifting toward a more cohesive strategy. Manufacturers are increasingly focused on delivering tangible value to consumers by continuously introducing new features that seamlessly integrate with complementary services. “Carrera Smart Glasses with Alexa, for example, launched in November 2023, seamlessley blend high-end fashion with the power of Alexa AI.

“These innovative eyeglasses are built for an on-the-go lifestyle,” Bellati said. The open-ear audio technology delivers crystal-clear sound directly to your ears, while minimizing sound leakage for those around you. This lets you enjoy hands-free control with Alexa, allowing you to listen to podcasts while cooking, make calls, or control your smart home—all without ever needing your phone, according to Bellati.

“Carrera Smart Glasses have an IPX4 splash and sweat resistance rating, making them ideal for rainy days or adventurous hikes. Additionally, customers can choose between blue light filtering lenses for digital eye protection or UV400 sunglass lenses with an anti-reflective coating to shield their eyes from the sun’s harmful rays,” he said.

These eyeglasses offer six hours of continuous media playback on a full battery charge, or up to 14 hours of moderate usage. In addition to the Alexa features customers already know and appreciate, such as listening to music, adding items to shopping lists, turning lights on or off, or asking for information while on the go, Carrera Smart Glasses can connect simultaneously to multiple devices, start a music playlist, filter notifications and easily locate misplaced eyeglasses, Bellati said.

“Safilo smart glasses are fully Rx-able and were designed with opticians in mind,” stated Bellati. “By integrating all electronics within the temples, we’ve ensured the front of the frame can be easily manipulated and heated like any standard acetate frame, making the prescription process as smooth as possible. Consumers seem most interested in seamlessly integrated devices that extend the capabilities of smart assistants beyond the home environment. Privacy and audio quality and control are primary concerns,” he said.

Looking to the future, Bellati said, “We anticipate growing emphasis on integrated services like those found in smartphones and smartwatches. Additionally, AI-powered features will likely become increasingly prevalent. Given the unique positioning of eyewear on the human body, combining multiple sensory inputs offers immense potential, although technological advancements are necessary to fully realize this vision. Ultimately, design and brand identity will also be crucial factors as smart eyewear significantly impacts a person’s appearance, unlike smartphones or smartwatches.”

The company said it is pursuing a hybrid distribution approach, strongly connected to the commercial strategy of their partner Amazon.

The Fashion Side of Smart Eyewear
Paul Travers, president and CEO of Vuzix Corporation, agrees that the fashion element is an important consideration in the development of smart eyewear. He said that five years ago there were virtually no options available and all smart eyewear was either clunky VR headsets or mixed reality eyewear for enterprise.

“We’re transitioning to a time when people are starting to expect smart glasses to not only look like traditional frames, but also have options as to what style and features they want to wear,” Travers said. “To that end, prescriptions are going to be critically important for this industry. We offer prescriptions for our Blade, Shield and Z100 smart glasses, and we use a professional service to support the scripts.”

One significant innovation was the introduction of Vuzix Shield, a revolutionary pair of micro LED-powered AR/smart glasses with binocular wave guide displays that deliver high performance packaged in a wireless, lightweight design. It’s been Travers’ vision to create smart glasses that are indistinguishable from any fashion forward pair of eyeglasses—light, stylish and comfortable. He said, “We’ve found huge success with deaf and hard of hearing audiences using Shield’s microphone and real-time translation tools to provide conversational captioning for wearers, and this is truly just the beginning.

“This past January we followed Shield with our sleek, sexy Z100 eyeglasses. While Shield has a full operating system and twin wave guides, the Z100 serves a different market, using just one wave guide and a single Bluetooth connection to provide notifications and instructions from the wearer’s cell phone.

“The Z100 is incredibly lightweight and can run for several days before needing to be charged. It’s essentially an AR display peripheral, rather than a workhorse computer, and it’s completely fashion forward in design. The Z100 can serve a variety of markets, from logistics workers receiving scan confirmations in their eye, to retail uses like mapping and text notifications. Providing prescriptions is crucial for long-term adoption. All of our most recent products, including our custom offerings, provide this flexibility,” said Travers.

Vuzix said it employs a global channel distribution network, but because their audience is primarily enterprise, they offer only online and direct sales. With the popularity of their Z100, however, this may change as they’re able to create a variety of styles and options for major optical clients.

Travers said he is a big believer in the role optical retailers play in influencing trends and purchases. “I think we’ll see optical staff partially leading the trend. They need to know where the market is headed and they need to understand the options. Do you want just a camera and speakers? Would you like to read texts in your eyeglasses? Would you prefer a more immersive experience? What’s the experience you’re looking for? Price, features, weight and style—all of these factors create very different product options that optical staffs will have to help their customers understand,” Travers said.

“Privacy is a growing interest. If you’re accessing sensitive information, you may not want what you’re looking at to be viewable by others. Here again, Vuzix is ahead of the market. We rolled out a breakthrough Incognito technology that minimizes the forward light on your smart glasses, making the wave guide in your lens virtually disappear. To other people it seems like you’re not wearing smart glasses at all.

“On the awareness side, people’s expectations are now more in line with what’s on the market. Our Z100 is indistinguishable from any other pair of frames, and with it you can get turn-by-turn directions, an AI interface, text and social media notifications, work instructions, fitness data and a lot more. Adoption may take longer, especially on the consumer side, as many people still don’t know there are now AR options available to them. Vuzix is looking to change that,” Travers concluded.

Meeting Consumer Expectations for Traditional Eyewear
Harrison Gross, CEO and cofounder of Innovative Eyewear, the developer and retailer of smart eyewear under the Lucyd, Nautica and Eddie Bauer brands, interprets the evolution of smart glasses as a transition from “clunky, expensive and over-engineered products like the Apple Vision Pro and designs in both Bluetooth and mixed-reality eyewear to products much more consistent with consumer expectations for traditional eyewear.”

“Components miniaturization has enabled very slender smart eyewear temples and tech-free front plates enabling smart eyewear that looks fashionable and feels lightweight,” Gross said. “The rise of generative AI has given new life to smart eyewear as a product category naturally suited to communication with people and AI, given its proximity to the mouth and ears. The general trend of traditional devices becoming ‘smart’ or infused with interactive technology, has led more consumers to actively seek out technology-enabled eyewear. In our opinion, massive user adoption of smart watches has led to an increased acceptance of other wearables.”

Gross views his firm as a “precocious upstart. We’re doing something a bit different than other companies entering the category. We have an end-to-end approach that makes smart eyewear useful and accessible to everyone. To achieve this, we have to produce form factors that vary greatly, from svelte frames designed for all-day eyeglass wear, to full-coverage sturdy frames for safety and sport use, and everything in between.”

He said that Innovative Eyewear has several upcoming launches in the safety and sports eyewear category. Lucyd Armor ANSI-rated smart safety glasses are expected to launch in September at $149 MSRP, and the Reebok Powered by Lucyd line, the company’s first true sport collection, will launch in Q1 2025 at the same price. All of these new collections have their standard smart features, like call answering, open-ear audio, Walkie Talkie functionality via the Lucyd app, and seamless access to ChatGPT. The safety and sport glasses have high-relief tactile controls to support use while wearing gloves,” Gross said.

Every frame the company has produced since 2018 is Rx-able and designed for all-day optical use. The only exception will be three of the four styles in the upcoming Reebok collection, which have high base wraps with vented lenses, and they won’t be lab-changeable. One of the Reebok styles is a more lab-friendly base 6 and is fully Rx-able.

Gross contends that what consumers are seeking most is “AI, AI, AI! What was once the stuff of sci-fi movies, is now real life—and smart eyewear has an important role to play in delivering the expanded-consciousness, Iron Man functionalities of the future. As much as I, and many of our customers, enjoy listening to music and taking phone calls on our Lucyd eyeglasses, there are a zillion ways to do that. Only AI has the incredible potential to expand our cognitive abilities, and as a technology optimist, I believe it will be an essential part of work and leisure for almost everyone in the near future.

“As the technology components and design philosophies of smart eyewear allow it to become closer to traditional frames in price and style, consumers will be presented with an important but obvious choice—do I want glasses that just correct my vision, or do I want glasses that do that and literally make me smarter, more easily connected to information and loved ones, less dependent on screen time, and more competitive professionally? We’re committed to making that choice easy for everyone,” Gross concluded

Where the Market Is Headed
Patrick Ho, president of Rochester Optical, commented that over the years, the market has diverged into two pathways. “One pathway is moving toward more practical and achievable solutions, catering to consumers with simple circuitry tapping into the computational power of smartphones (like the iPhone) with cellular and Wi-Fi capabilities. Companies that have focused on enhancing affordability and simplicity have found a good amount of success,” Ho said.

“For instance, smart glasses that function as secondary screens when connected to smartphones are gaining traction, along with audio glasses without a display. The other pathway is the continuing development of powerful computers with sophisticated displays, forming the basis of AR and VR applications focused on enterprise deployments. These are being integrated into manufacturing processes to improve efficiency and into medical and surgical applications that enhance quality of life while lowering costs.

“Some technology-forward enterprises have adopted these devices, but significant research and development work remains. The future success of these technologies could be truly life-changing, providing tremendous benefits to humanity,” Ho predicted.

“Our experience has revealed that smart glasses appeal to a broader demographic than initially expected. While younger users were once seen as the primary market, we’ve found that middle-age and older individuals also benefit greatly from smart glasses. These devices help enhance vision, stay connected with family, stream videos, and even provide real-time transcription for vision-impaired users or real-time translation, breaking language barriers in tourism and business.”

Rochester Optical’s prescription eyewear is sold exclusively online, collaborating with smart glasses brands in both the enterprise and consumer space. “Selling online aligns perfectly with the purchasing habits of our target audience who prioritize the convenience and efficiency of digital shopping. Our customers value the ability to place orders, upload their prescriptions and receive their eyeglasses directly at their doorsteps,” explained Ho.

“Real-time transcription and translation are especially compelling as they help break down language barriers and enhance communication. In the health care sector, smart glasses are making significant strides, such as aiding Parkinson’s patients by assisting with cognitive therapies to relearn essential skills,” he said.

“AR is another exciting area of development. For instance, Magic Leap, a Rochester Optical customer, has deployed their advanced AR glasses across various industries including logistics, manufacturing, architecture and health care. One notable application is in surgery, where their AR glasses have enabled surgeons to access comprehensive patient data in real time. This reduces the need for verbal communication and minimizes operational time, while the hands-free capability allows surgeons to focus entirely on critical tasks, enhancing efficiency and outcomes,” he said.