Samsung today teased a new slate of smart glasses designs, which includes two new frames from eyewear partners Gentle Monster and Warby Parker.
The News
When Samsung and Google finally unveiled their jointly-developed smart glasses at Google I/O in May, US-based Warby Parker and South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster showed off their initial designs, seen below.
At the time, Gentle Monster’s initial ‘cat eye’ design seemed to fill a gap in the current smart glasses milieu, which was notably before Meta revealed it had collaborated with Kylie Jenner on a strikingly similar design.
Now, at Samsung Unpacked in London, the brands have shown off two new designs, which funnily enough still don’t have names. Here’s Gentle Monster’s next design:
And here’s Warby Parker’s next design, which is very similar to the first, albeit with a slightly less-pronounced nose bridge:
All four are ostensibly set to launch sometime this fall, making them essentially the first smart glasses to run Google’s Android XR operating system.
Much like Meta’s fleet of audio-only smart glasses, the Gentle Monster and Warby Parker frames pack in a single camera sensor for things like photo, video, and to give AI access to what you’re seeing, so it can do things like answer questions, real-time translation, and more.
That said, there’s still a lot to learn about them too, as we still don’t know specific release dates or prices for any of the pairs revealed thus far. For now, Samsung says all of the smart glasses are built on the Snapdragon AR1 Gen1 platform, and are set to offer up to nine hours on a single charge with up to seven additional full charges from the charging case.
My Take
If Samsung, Google and Co. want to beat Meta at smart glasses supremacy, the cheapest of these need to not only match (or beat) Meta at its own game, but also come in somewhere around $300 – $400. That specific range just happens to be the price of Meta’s own in-house styled Meta Glasses last month, which now lack any flashy EssilorLuxottica sub-brands.
As an aside: jettisoning Ray-Ban and Oakley for a cheaper frame feels as much a tactic by Meta to redefine what the price should be in the minds of potential buyers as it does a way of lowering costs and gathering more users before competition sets in, at whatever price.
Aside … aside, an important thing to remember is all of these smart glasses are effectively AI end points. Google/Samsung runs Gemini and Meta runs Meta AI, which leaves the former in a surprisingly advantageous position. Gemini can hook into the entire Google ecosystem, and possibly have a wider set of app integrations as a result, which could give it the edge if Google can communicate it effectively.
Personally, I’m more excited for the display-clad smart glasses models promised by Google and/or Samsung, which sound cool, but may actually be a device generation away. Whatever the case, Meta’s own $800 display glasses, Meta Ray-Ban Display, are only available in the US for the foreseeable future—which isn’t where I live—so I’m looking forward to the mounting competition so I can finally read my emails while staring deeply into a friend’s face while feigning a reassuring nod.
