Smarter tech, dumber looks — smart glasses are in their awkward phase

It’s an exciting time for smart glasses. As I keep saying, my dream device brings the best of AR specs like the Xreal One Pro’s display quality and squishes it together with the standalone AI smarts of the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2. And we’re actually starting to see this happen…but boy does the end result look goofy right now.

I mean, look at these — the RayNeo X3 Pro. Technologically, a stellar pair of specs that realizes the smart glasses future I’ve been waiting for, but I look like the most obvious spy blended with Jimmy Neutron. Not even Dexter from Dexter’s Laboratory would want to be seen in them.

And even when it comes to brands with bigger budgets to work with those more fashion-minded, you get the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. Again, crazy good tech to make it a reality, but like all the more advanced smart glasses in 2025, they fall victim to being weirdly larger than life. Let me explain what’s going on here.

A lot of tech to cram into glasses

When building any gadget, companies need four things: a chip to do stuff, a battery to power it, a way to interact with it and a way to know what you’re doing (be that a speaker or a display). In something like a pair of glasses, companies are finding out that’s difficult to do while not making them look strange.

To get a display on your face, traditionally, it was about popping prisms in front of your eyes, like the Viture Luma Pro and projecting an image through them.

Obviously, that has its drawbacks in terms of remaining inconspicuous, which is why they’ve found a home in many a tech arsenal as an ultraportable big screen experience for entertainment on long journeys.

The usual Wayfarer-esque design does hide the tech pretty effectively on long-haul flights, so you’re just that weirdo who wears sunglasses indoors instead, with a USB cord running out the back of them (with no battery, this is the only way they run).

But now, we’re moving ever closer to the true smart glasses era — cutting the cord from any device with a built-in battery and adopting a new waveguide display tech. Instead of prisms, there’s now a pattern etched into the actual lenses of the glasses themselves, and the image is projected in from the side.

It certainly does the job of removing the obstacles in front of your eyes, but to pull it off, the frames themselves have to get noticeably bigger. In any gadgets that you can put in your pocket or backpack, that’s something we’re used to. But when it’s on your face, the size is so much more obvious — and not in a “fashion statement” kind of way.

The phase will end, but you have to be patient

But fear not, because this moment will pass. The whole tech industry is throwing everything and the kitchen sink at doing this right. Meta and Snap have been at it for years, Android XR in AR glasses is just around the corner, and Apple is reportedly hellbent on it with a hard pivot away from the Vision Pro.

And if you read the tea leaves in what tech we see around us so far, you can see what direction this all goes in. Chips manufactured on a 2nm process will allow companies to do more with less and make something smaller.

Silicon-carbon batteries in phones could be brought over to glasses to offer more life in a small package. Then there’s the display tech itself, which, as I’ve seen when looking into the future of smart glasses, is getting equally smaller and higher in quality.

Over time, smart glasses will start to look a whole lot more like actual glasses, but we’re a ways off at the moment.

There are workarounds for now

But what about right now? Well, the biggest way to get to smart glasses that look normal is to ditch the display altogether. You see that clear as day in the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses — no display, but AI smarts, speakers and a camera bring together the whole experience.

If you’re keen for the display but don’t want the huge size coming with it, the Rokid Glasses are definitely more subtle alongside the Even Realities G1. The screen quality is limited, but at least it’s closer to what you’ve been looking for. Given the pace of this sector, it’ll be a couple of years before we see any full-color display specs that aren’t going to drive some confused double-takes.

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