This is very much not Google Glass 2.0. Google is entering the AI smartglasses arena this fall to go up against Meta (and whatever Apple is cooking), and it’s partnering with Samsung, Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to make “Intelligent Eyewear” powered by Android XR.
As you might expect, Gemini is the headline feature. Having a smart assistant as your literal eyes has the potential to help you get a lot done on the go without having to constantly whip out your phone. But Juston Payne, who leads the product management team for XR at Google, also knows that the smart glasses category is fraught with controversy, especially over how to handle recording in public and user privacy.
“If people don't feel comfortable wearing these glasses, and privacy is part of this, they just won't wear the glasses. It’s as simple as that,” Payne said.
I had a chance to sit down with Payne to discuss these issues and a lot more ahead of the Intelligent Eyewear launch, including how to design for the masses, the roadmap to built-in displays and the totally separate Android XR spatial computing glasses coming from Xreal this year.
The lessons of Google Glass
Anyone old enough to remember the original Google Glass from 2012 probably remembers them for embarrassing reasons.
The trouble was that the vision was good, but the reality was that the tech just wasn't quite there yet.
— Juston Payne, Google
For me, my mind instantly goes to that infamous photo of Robert Scoble in the shower, which became a symbol for the device’s voyeuristic dangers. And then there’s that SNL Weekend Update bit, during which Fred Armisen lampooned how difficult the interface was to use.
I asked Payne directly about the lessons of Google Glass, and he admits that they were ahead of their time.
“The trouble was that the vision was good, but the reality was that the tech just wasn't quite there yet,” Payne said.
He cites three reasons for the Google Glasses flop that Intelligent Eyewear hopes to get right. First was the nerdy form factor. They didn’t really look like regular glasses. There was also a lack of content, which you now get with Android XR. And the third thing is versatility, which AI brings to the table.
“So there were these huge building blocks missing,” Payne said, “Hardware, platform, AI.”
And that brings us to the present…
What does Intelligent Eyewear do?
For the first round of Intelligent Eyewear, the glasses will be audio-only. Glasses with single and dual displays will be coming later, though Google will start offering a trusted tester program sometime this year.
In the meantime, the glasses coming this year from Samsung, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker will leverage Android XR to (hopefully) make your day easier by having Gemini always at the ready.
“Gemini can take your personal context — we call it personal intelligence — and then it can start feeding that into your experience,” Payne said. “These glasses are designed to give you ambient assistance throughout the day while keeping you connected to your digital world and the real world.”
For example, because Gemini has personal intelligence built in, it knows you, and you can ask about what’s on your calendar, the score of a sports game or a random fact.
“Just having a real-time conversational interface all day long is incredibly valuable for a lot of people,” Payne continued. For example, when Payne is driving with Intelligent Eyewear on he can ask about other podcasts Gemini might recommend based on the one he’s currently listening to and do it on the fly.
Payne cited a couple other major use cases for Intelligent Eyewear. The first is navigation, such as looking up a local restaurant that might be good around you.
“The audio experience for that is fantastic,” Payne said. “It uses the camera to localize you, so it knows that you're pointing in the right direction. It can give you contextual navigation to help you get to where you're going without being vague, you know, like ‘turn right there.’”
Translation is another potential killer app for Intelligent Eyewear, promising a quick “UN translator experience.” And when you’re cooking you can get step-by-step instructions even without a display.
But Payne argues that display glasses are nice to have as opposed to a must-have, such as seeing that your upcoming turn is 300 feet away.
“We think of the display more as almost an augmentation to the audio experience rather than something that is a hard dependency in many cases,” Payne said.
Design first, features second
Anyone who has been paying attention to the smart glasses market knows that there’s a sliding scale of geekiness. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses and Meta Glasses look very much like regular sunglasses or glasses. But the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are bulkier, and the even more ambitious Snap Specs look pretty geeky with their extra-wide frames.
Can we make a product that is genuinely valuable for people so that if they walk out of their house and they forgot them, they'll actually go back and get them?
— Juston Payne, Google
For Google, the approach is pretty simple: they have to be great glasses first.
“We lead with design and then we ask the question ‘what can you make within the constraints of a great design?’” Payne said. “Can we make a product that is genuinely valuable for people so that if they walk out of their house and they forgot them, they'll actually go back and get them?”
The early design from Gentle Monster has chic oval-shaped lenses that wouldn’t look out of place on a runway, while the Warby Parker design is a bit chunkier and more retro. They both feature dual cameras, but they look a bit more discreet on the Gentle Monster specs.
Google doesn’t seem willing to push the limits and risk the sort of backlash the Snap Specs have been getting for their overtly techy look.
“If you make a product that provides really novel new experiences, people might be willing to tolerate a design that has some larger compromises. I think it's great that people are out there testing that theory. It's just not the approach that Google's taking. We're really leading with design,” Payne said.
Major privacy landmines — and what Google is doing about it
By now you’ve probably heard some of the horror stories coming out of the Meta glasses camp around privacy concerns, including a woman who discovered her esthetician was wearing Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses at a European Wax Center in Manhattan. And 404 Media reported on how men were wearing the glasses to covertly film massage parlor workers.
Then there’s the black market that sprung up around disabling the LEDs on Meta glasses so that others don’t know that you’re recording. Meta recently attempted to close this loophole with a software update that automatically disables the cameras if the LED has been tampered with or destroyed.
It’s safe to say that Google is walking into a minefield of privacy concerns, but the company has a plan to address them.
“If people don't feel comfortable wearing these glasses, and privacy is part of this, they just won't wear the glasses. It’s as simple as that,” Payne said.
To help combat some of the concerns people have about these issues, Google is starting by making sure that Intelligent Eyewear users are signaling to the people around them when they are recording and that the LED is accurate.
Payne told us that Google will share more details later this year around how they ensure this accuracy, but the bottom line is that the light should be on if whatever you’re recording or shooting can be reviewed later.
Google will also be employing Android permission frameworks to help protect users, as well as other security and privacy techniques already on your phone.
Lastly, Google is “investing to make it so that the hardware itself holds up,” Payne said. “So if people try to mess around with it somehow, we have ways of detecting that.”
Google vs. Meta vs. Apple
Launching in 2023 and with over 9 million units sold already, it’s fair to say that Meta has had a pretty big head start with its Ray-Ban glasses and other eyewear, but Google is pretty confident that it can make a splash in what is still a pretty nascent market.
I asked Juston directly about his largest competitor and he told me that “Meta’s doing a great job” with “very nice glasses.” But while the Meta glasses are good for things like photos, videos, calls and music, Google is taking a different approach with Gemini front and center.
"I'm sure that [Apple] will provide very real competition for everybody else playing in the space.”
— Juston Payne, Google
“We think a lot about moments throughout the day. And these moments throughout the day are really the things that are driving our approach to the platform. ‘How does Gemini show up in glasses? What kinds of hooks are we making from Gemini into apps? How are apps making themselves available to Gemini? So so much of our thinking is about versatility.”
That thinking includes making things super easy for developers to get their apps running in Android XR, while Meta’s app ecosystem is still fairly skimpy.
“The platform will know if their app, which is running on the phone, is talking to audio glasses or glasses with a display, and it'll tailor that app experience for it,” Payne said. “So that means that developers really only build once. They just build an Android app, and then we take care of the rest.”
Payne also is acutely aware of the fact that Apple is working on its own Apple Glasses, which will likely debut in 2027. And it will be taking the same vertically oriented approach it has with all of its other products: Apple’s own design. Apple’s software. Apple’s ecosystem.
“Apple has a very strong track record,” Payne said, “and I think that one thing that Apple has always done well is that they play to their strengths. I would expect that they'll keep doing that. And I'm sure that they'll provide very real competition for everybody else playing in the space.”
The difference between what Google is doing with Android XR and Intelligent Eyewear and what Apple is doing is that Google is building a multi-partner platform, while Apple is focusing on making a product.
“So each time that these categories come along, Google makes a platform and there's a lot of value. Google's a partnership company. And as you look through when we've done best, it's when we partner.”
At the same time Payne shared that Google has a lot of “skin in the game” with its first-party apps, including Gemini, Google Maps and Google Translate.
Despite being a fierce Apple competitor, Google is working hard to make sure that Intelligent Eyewear devices work well with the iPhone, though there will be some platform-level restrictions the company may not be able to work around.
Aura farming
Google’s partnerships extend to companies like Xreal, an early pioneer in the smart glasses space, and they are collaborating on spatial computing glasses that attempt to squish pretty much all the functionality of the Samsung Galaxy XR headset into a pair of fairly sleek specs.
However, while Intelligent Eyewear works with your Android phone or iPhone, the Xreal Aura are wired glasses that connect to a computing puck. Coming this fall, the glasses promise an immersive see-through display and AI assistance from Gemini.
You can work across multiple virtual monitors, experience over 100 apps made for XR, enjoy a private cinema anywhere for watching 3D movies and more. Think Apple Vision Pro but in a design you might actually want to wear. But there’s some trade-offs versus headsets, like a narrower field of view.
For example, the Xreal Aura has a 70° Diagonal FOV, compared to 109° horizontal and 100° vertical for the Galaxy XR.
“Some people would say, ‘hey, I'm okay actually giving up some of that,’” Payne told me. “I need to keep the core value, but I'm okay with giving up some of that so that I can take it with me more easily.”
Will smart glasses replace phones?
If smart glasses like Google’s Intelligent Eyewear are designed to help you use your phone less often, will there be a tipping point where the vast majority of people leave their phone behind?
For Payne, that’s not happening anytime soon.
“The phone is here to stay,” Payne said. “Phones are incredibly powerful. They have a user interface to them that is well adopted and highly robust. I'm not so sure that there's even a great reason to get rid of the phone, even if you could.”
The true benefit of smart glasses — at least for now — is that they allow you to be less distracted. How many times have you opened your phone to respond to a notification only to find yourself knee deep in some other app?
“Glasses can fit into your experience throughout the day by adding a lot of value on top. It'll shift some of the minutes that you’re spending on the phone to the glasses, which have all these nice benefits because you can then stay more present with what you're doing.”
We’ll be keeping a close eye on Intelligent Eyewear and will bring you our full reviews once we have a chance to test out Google’s Android XR platform — and its partner’s designs.
