Google just filed a patent that reveals a lot about the company’s plans for Android XR smart glasses, and without getting too personally psyched, the potential talked about here is huge.
The best smart glasses of the future are looking to merge augmented reality and AI, but while that sounds good on paper, no company has really figured out what this would mean for an everyday user in a practical way. It’s either game demos or image slideshows.
But now, the big G just stated its intentions around Android XR, and how hardware and software will come together to really enrich your day-to-day work, play and travel. Let’s talk about it.
What did Google patent?
The Mountain View company snapped up quite a dense patent across a rather impressive pair of smart glasses (on paper) that will deliver plenty of real-time assistance. These include:
- Multimodal awareness and sensing: Cameras, microphones, proximity sensors, ambient light sensors and even inertial measurement units (IMUs) for motion tracking.
- Adaptive display tech: I’m not just talking about adaptive in the sense of moving to a high contrast mode when in direct sunlight, but also adapting to environmental conditions — such as putting information in your peripheral when it's just small instructions.
- Intelligence around privacy and interaction: Not just user toggles for microphone and camera access, but dimming content automatically when someone is in your proximity, and processing any sensitive data locally.
Patent translator
This is cool and all, but what does it actually mean for the Android XR glasses of the future? Good question.
Some of it is covered in the patent that covers some broad bases — real-time translation and transcription (my personal game-changer with the Ray-Ban Metas), object recognition and contextual search (think Gemini Live but on your face), health and fitness tracking and even workflow automation. But that’s only one broadly described piece of the pie.
Whenever I’m around anyone who is wearing a pair of smart glasses, there’s a bit of a social faux pas around one simple question: is the person actually paying attention to you or not? This gets even more complicated when those glasses have displays built in — particularly the likes of Xreal’s Project Aura that will put prisms between your eyes and the lenses.
Throw in that combo of cameras, proximity sensors and IMUs, and that tech should adapt to if you walk up to your friend and ensure they have your attention.
Then, of course, there’s adaptively throwing Google Maps directions up in the corner of your peripheral vision to not take up your entire view, multimodal AI that works with the context of what you see and maybe even gamification in the future (my friend would probably faint at the idea of playing Pokémon Go on these).
Outlook
As I’ve mentioned many, many times in the past, the next generation of smart glasses will be when AR and AI meet on one unified platform. From what I’ve seen in testing various prototypes to predict smart specs in 2035, the tech for this next step forward is basically ready.
And now, Google is ready to bring it all together with software, set to compete in this ever-accelerating race between itself, Meta and Apple. Who will win? I can’t say company-wise, but you definitely win for sure, given how this competition will definitely turbocharge innovation!
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