I just tested the futuristic Rokid Glasses — bringing AR and AI together to make Meta nervous

The future of the best smart glasses is going to be watching the two worlds of AR and AI merge into one set of specs. I’ve been saying this for years, and we’re closer than ever to seeing the proof.

Meta could launch its Ray-Bans with a screen codenamed ‘Hypernova’ at Connect later this month, Snap is launching its Specs in 2026, and Xreal is teaming up with Google to bring out a pair of Android XR specs codenamed ‘Project Aura.’

But here at IFA 2025, I’ve seen Rokid Glasses beat them all to the punch — officially the world’s lightest AR/AI glasses you can get, and launching at price far below the competition. Let me tell you about them.

Rokid Glasses Specs

A specced-up helping hand

We’ve all been loving the Ray-Ban Meta glasses — especially its most recent update with Meta AI really making them an essential part of any portable gadget arsenal. But the next step of adding a screen has been clear for a while now. The applications of AR in glasses are huge from turn-by-turn directions to live translation, all without taking your phone out.

And now, Rokid Glasses has shown me this future, while keeping the glasses featherweight at just 49g (1.7 ounces). Style-wise, they are definitely more Jimmy Neutron than Jimmy Choo, and while that’s an aesthetic that works with my face, it may not be the case for others. Elegance may not be at the top of the list here, but they look fine enough.

Interaction is done either by voice or buttons and the touchpad on the right stem. That 12MP camera is capable of shooting some nice imagery based on my time testing the snapper, and if Meta is going down the road of a single display on one eye, Rokid is going to have such an advantage with its dual waveguide panels.

The quality of the display is very minimal with a monochrome green, low resolution and low field of view. But that's a good thing here given it's primarily giving you data in your peripheral view — very much distraction-free, and acting more to complement your view with information rather than dominate it.

Throw in a Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip for all the on-board AI functionality and speed when connected to the dedicated phone app for GPT-5 and other features, and you’ve got a beasty pair of glasses.

The sum of its parts

As I’ve been saying, these are fine specs individually, but they don’t really do much on their own. It’s what happens when it all comes together that's the secret sauce — and during my short time in Berlin, I’ve quickly fallen for this recipe.

Live language translation is impressively zippy, with subtitles appearing at the bottom of the display that you can read along in your periphery. ChatGPT-5 is given eyes with the camera on-board for a multimodal interaction — working fast to answer questions in a more intelligent way than I’ve seen Meta AI do. When giving directions, you get subtle instructions on the display in the glasses rather than having to pull out your phone.

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And my favorite bit? It’s so small, but having a viewfinder appear when you click the button to take a picture. You have no idea how many times I forget I have to rotate my head slightly to capture the good shot on my Ray-Ban Metas. So to get this visual guide of where to point is huge.

This is barely scratching the surface. There’s also getting text translation of different languages using the camera, transcribing audio through the mics, providing a teleprompter with intelligent captioning, using the glasses as a tour guide and having the screen smartly place the bubble of text near the subject you’re looking at. The possibilities are huge.

Outlook

And here’s the kicker — all of this tech and capability doesn’t weigh down the device on your face, and neither does it hit the price tag too hard. We’ve been hearing all kinds of rumors around the new Ray-Ban Meta glasses with a screen coming in at a thousand bucks, but the MSRP of the Rokid Glasses comes in at just under $600.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s still a big price tag for glasses. But in terms of what’s on offer here, compared to the competition, it's a huge undercut of what we could be seeing from Meta or Google once Android XR comes around.

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