A look at AI glasses

I’ve been following smart glasses for a while now (and the more embryonic camera-augmented eyewear category a “bit” longer than that). As with smart watches and more recent smart rings, they’re intriguing to me because they take already-familiar, mature and high volume consumer products and make them…umm…smart. Plus, there’s the oft-touted potential for smart glasses to augment if not supplant the equally now-pervasive smartphone (for the record: I’m dubious at best on that latter replacement-potential premise).

With all due respect to Google, with Glass, introduced in 2013 and near-immediately thereafter spawning “glassholes” terminology:

and other technology trendsetters—Snap’s multiple generations of Spectacles, for example:

I’d suggest that the smart glasses category really didn’t “get legs” until Meta and partner Ray-Ban’s second-generation AI Glasses, released in October 2023. Stories, the first-generation product introduced in September 2020 by EssilorLuxottica (Ray-Ban’s parent company) and then-Facebook (rebranded as Meta Platforms a year later) had adopted the iconic Ray-Ban style:

but it was fundamentally a content capture and playback device (plus a fancy Bluetooth headset to a wirelessly tethered smartphone), containing an integrated still and video camera, stereo speakers, and a three-microphone (for ambient noise suppression purposes) array.

The second-gen AI Glasses first and foremost make advancements on these fundamental fronts:

• A still image capture resolution upgrade from 5 Mpixels to 12 Mpixels
• Video capture up-resolution from 720p to 1080p (plus added livestreaming support)
• 8x the integrated content storage capacity (from 4 GBytes to 32 GBytes)
• An enhanced integrated speaker array with two ports per transducer and virtual surround sound playback support, and
• A now-five-microphone array for enhanced ambient noise reduction, also capable of “immersive audio capture”

Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses

They’re also now moisture (albeit not dust) resistant, with an IPX4 rating, for example. But the key advancement, at least to this “tech-head”, is their revolutionary AI-powered “smarts” (therefore the product name), enabled by the combo of Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1, Meta’s deep learning models running both resident and in the “cloud”, and speedy bidirectional glasses/cloud connectivity. AI features include real-time language Live Translation plus AI View, which visually identifies and audibly provides additional information about objects around the wearer (next-gen glasses due later this year will supposedly also integrate diminutive displays).

The broad market seems to agree; in mid-February, EssilorLuxottica announced that it’d already sold 2 million pairs of Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses in their first year-plus and aspired to hit a 10 million-per-year run rate by the end of 2026. As I noted in my 2025 CES coverage:

Ray-Ban and Meta’s jointly developed second-generation smart glasses were one of the breakout consumer electronics hits of 2024, with good (initial experience, at least) reason. Their constantly evolving AI-driven capabilities are truly remarkable, on top of the first-generation’s foundational still and video image capture and audio playback support.

That said, within that same coverage, I also wrote:

I actually almost bought a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses during Amazon’s Black Friday…err…week-plus promotion to play around with for myself (and subsequently cover here at EDN, of course). But I decided to hold off for the inevitable barely-used (if at all) eBay-posting markdowns to come.

As it turns out, though, and as any of you who read my recent Mercari diatribe may have already noticed, I didn’t end up waiting very long. Turns out, at Meta Connect in September 2024, EssilorLuxottica had unveiled a limited edition (only 7,500 pairs worldwide) transparent version of the AI Glasses (versus the more recent translucent limited edition ones), priced at $429, and which sold out near-immediately. I didn’t snag a pair at the time—admittedly, I didn’t even know they existed at the time. But I ended up buying someone else’s barely used pair a few months ago, at a “bit” of a markup from the original MSRP (but to be clear, nowhere near the five-digit price tags I usually see them for-sale posted for on eBay, etc.). Some stock images to start:

(no, there will not be any pictures of them on my head. Trust me, it’s for the best for all of us.).

So, why’d I buy them? Part of the motivation, admittedly, combines my earlier noted belief that they’re the first truly impactful entrant in this embryonic product category, therefore destined to be a historical classic, with the added limited-edition cachet of this particular variant. Plus:

• Nobody’s going to confuse these with a normal pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, such as might be the case with the ones below. I don’t want anyone belatedly noticing the camera and pseudo-camera in the corners of the frame and then go all paranoid on me, worried that I might have been surreptitiously snapping pictures or shooting video of them.

• They’ve got transition lenses, as the stock photos show. Candidly, it creeps me out when I see someone wearing conventional always-tinted sunglasses indoors. But I still want them to be sunglasses when I’m outdoors (versus also-available always-clear lens variants). And I’d like to use them both places.
• And, because they’re transparent—no, I’m not going to take mine apart—I can still do a semblance of a teardown on them for you today, in combo with a video I found of someone who did take theirs apart…for science…and viewer traffic revenue, of course.

(in-advance warning; some of the dissection sequences in this teardown video are quite brutal on the eyes and ears, IMHO at least!)

The AI glasses teardown

Follow along as I showcase my AI glasses, periodically referencing specific timestamps in the above video for added visual data point evidence. I’ll start out with some (already opened by the previous owner, obviously) outer box shots, as usual accompanied by a 0.75″ (19.1 mm) diameter U.S. penny for size comparison purposes. This particular AI Glasses variant comes in only one style—Wayfarer—and size option—M (50-22) —and they weigh 48.6 grams/1.71 ounces, with the charging case coming in at an incremental 133 grams/4.69 ounces:

Open sesame:

Before continuing, this shot shows one of the uniqueness aspects of these limited-edition glasses. Standard ones’ cases have a tan-color patina instead:

Onward:

I like black better. Don’t you? Totally worth the incremental price tag all by itself (I jest):

The front LED communicates the charge status of both the case and the glasses inside it:

The USB-C connector on the bottom:

is…drum roll…for charging purposes (surprising absolutely no one by saying that, I realize):

Open sesame, redux:

I’m sure that the cleaning cloth was more neatly packaged when the glasses were brand new; this is how it was presented to me upon my reception of gently-used it:

Look closely and you’ll be able to already see the “3301/7500” limited-edition custom mark on the inside of the right temple (or, if you prefer, “arm”…“temple” is apparently the official name) of mine (#3,301 of 7,500 total, if the verbiage is unclear).

It matches another custom mark on the inside of the case flap (with the “3301” hand-“drawn”, if not already obvious):

And here are a few shots of the charging “dock” built into the case. Per the earlier teardown video (starting at ~6:00), the case’s embedded battery has a capacity of 3,034 mAh (he says “milliamps” in the video, but I’d guessed that my alternative measurement-unit version was what he actually meant, and the markings at the center of the cell shown in the closeup at ~6:20 concur…although the markings on the left end of the cell seem to say 2,940 mAh?).

Now, for our patient, beginning with what the glasses look like immediately post-case removal:

The circular structure in the corner of the left endpiece (upper right corner from this head-on vantage point…I received research validation of my initial suspicion that glasses’ parts are traditionally location-referenced from the wearer’s perspective) is indeed the camera:

In the opposite (upper right from the wearer’s perspective) corner is what looks like another camera, although it’s not:

It’s instead (first and foremost, at least) the capture LED, brighter than the one on the Stories precursor, which alerts those around you when you’re shooting photos or video. For still images, it blinks (along with making a shutter-activation sound in the speakers, for wearer benefit):

while for video, it remains illuminated the entire time you’re recording. That said, it also has sensing capabilities, specifically to ensure others’ privacy. If you attempt to cover the capture LED with a piece of tape, etc., the camera won’t work. By the way, in the first image of this latest series, you may have also noticed other circuitry embedded in the rim on both sides of the right lens, but not around the left lens. Hold that thought for a revisit shortly.

Here’s what they look like from above, both with the temples still folded:

and fully unfolded:

and from below, with the temples now partially unfolded:

Next, let’s dive in for a closer view, beginning with the outsides of the temples. The left one, as the video shows in more detail beginning at ~1:40, contains one of the speakers (with upper and lower ports), two of the microphones (one pointed downward toward the wearer’s mouth, the other outward for ambient noise capture and subtraction purposes) and the main system PCB, comprising 32 GBytes of flash memory (along with, I suspect, an unknown amount of DRAM in a multi-die “sandwich”) and the aforementioned Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 SoC. The packaged memory and application processor are individually covered by Faraday cages (which the video narrator refers to as “cans”), and EMC shielding (plus thermal spreading, I suspect) material spans the entirety of the PCB. Here’s an overview of the outer left temple:

along with a closer look at the front half:

and the back half of it:

Within the right temple, conversely (see the video beginning at ~4:00), although you’ll again unsurprisingly find a matching speaker (and ports) and two-microphone set, the remainder of the “guts” is quite different. First off is the battery, in this case 154 mAh (again misspoken as mA, and mentioned at ~8:30). The narrator also believes that he’s found the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi antenna structure in the right temple, leading to a reasonable assumption that the wireless transceiver chip is there, too. And there’s also a large capacitive touch sensor structure on the outside, used for glasses control via both taps of and pressed-finger movement along it.

Here’s an overview photo of the outer right temple:

Now, a close-up of the front half:

and the back half of it:

Remember those outward-facing mics I mentioned earlier? Haven’t seen them yet, have you? I finally found them while writing thanks to an illuminated loupe, even though I’d already known their general location within (or nearby) the Ray-Ban logos on both sides. Post your specific-location guesses in the comments, and I’ll put the answer there a few weeks post-publication!

Before examining both temples’ insides, let’s first cover their upper and lower regions. Back to the left temple; here’s an overview of the top edge first:

and a close-up of the upper speaker port.

Now, the underside of the left temple:

with another speaker port along with, ahead of it, the aperture for the down-facing microphone.

The right temple is similar, with one exception: a topside switch near the hinge. But you’ve seen it in action before; it’s the camera shutter button. Topside first:

and underside.

Now for the temples’ inner sides. Left first, beginning with an overview shot:

The front half:

A closeup of the power switch (Pro tip: Don’t forget, as I did, to turn the glasses on prior to attempting to pair them with your smartphone. Simply ensuring they’re in the case is insufficient!):

Now the back half:

Moving over to the right side now:

Front half:

There’s that limited-edition notation (numerically matching the other one, thankfully) again!

And the back half:

There’s one area of the glasses left to explore, with many more interesting bits encompassed to showcase than you might initially expect. Behold the backside of the front frame:

Not much of note in the left half, aside from that dark area running horizontally through the bridge and over the lens, which I’ll discuss in detail next:

The right half, on the other hand, is hardware-rich (as alluded to earlier in this writeup):

That embedded structure at far right is the wearer-viewable notification LED, with varying colors (and steady or blinking states) dependent on the glasses’ mode and what’s being communicated:

And the assemblage on the left side of the lens, running along the right portion of the nose piece? It has dual (at least) purposes. Those who remember the charging contacts inside the case may be unsurprised to learn that there’s a matching set here. And those with really good memories may also recall that I earlier mentioned a five-microphone array, although we’ve so far only seen four of ‘em. Where’s the fifth? It’s here, too:

Regarding the mysterious dark region spanning the entirety of the top of the front frame, notably including the bridge, you may have already caught that the camera shutter button is on the opposite side of the glasses from the actual camera. More generally, as already noted, there’s no shortage of bidirectional interaction between the power, communications, and touch electronics on the right and the processing electronics on the left, not to mention the bilateral audio input and output facilities. Turns out there’s a whole mess of wiring in the front frame, as a particularly brutal segment of the teardown video starting at ~4:35 reveals. Fair warning: the use of hand tools, bare hands, and (ultimately) a Dremel to chop the front frame into pieces isn’t for the squeamish. That said, I did learn a new term: insert injection molding. From Wikipedia:

Pre-moulded or machined components can be inserted into the cavity while the mould is open, allowing the material injected in the next cycle to form and solidify around them. This process is known as insert moulding and allows single parts to contain multiple materials.

One feature implementation remains a mystery, although I have a theory. There’s a Wear Detection sensor somewhere that detects whether you’ve put the glasses on your face. I’ve read lots of theories online as to how this function might be implemented, although nobody has seemingly yet definitively determined how it is implemented. One thing that I can say with certainty from my experimentation is that the sensor’s not anywhere on either/both temple(s), since I’ve experimented by covering them with paper “sleeves” (which they protectively come with from the factory) and Wear Detection still works.

My guess is that there’s actually no special sensor at all; that the glasses instead detect the slight current flow caused by skin conduction (also known as galvanic skin response and electrodermal activity, among other terminology) between the two charging contacts when pressed up against the wearer’s nose. Part of the rationale for my theory is that it incurs no additional bill-of-materials cost, assuming that the power management controller between the charging contacts and the battery is sufficiently intelligent to handle this additional discernment task. And part of it is that the function can be user-disabled if found to be unreliable, which inconsistent electrodermal activity certainly is, both person-to-person and moment-to-moment. Not to mention that if you’ve got a wide nose, it may never touch the bridge underside at all.

And with that, nearing 3,000 words and as-always mindful of Aalyia’s wrath (more accurately: her precious, not-unlimited time and energy), I’ll wrap up for today with one more photo, taken using my AI Glasses of the view looking west from my back deck toward the Rocky Mountains:

I’m not terribly fond of the 3024×4032 pixel portrait orientation (which can’t be helped unless I took pictures with my head at an awkward 90° to the usual vertical instead, I suppose). But otherwise, not bad, eh? More on-head AI Glasses usage observations to come in future posts. Until then, let me know what you think so far in the comments!

—Brian Dipert is the Editor-in-Chief of the Edge AI and Vision Alliance, and a Senior Analyst at BDTI and Editor-in-Chief of InsideDSP, the company’s online newsletter.

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