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Smart glasses have a public perception problem. People wearing Meta's popular Ray-Ban glasses have been labeled “ Meta Creeps .” But it didn't start with Meta—when Google Glass launched in 2013, “ Glasshole ” was the word used to describe people wearing them.
It boils down to the fact that these smart glasses have cameras on them that let people record whatever’s in front of them with the push of a button. The cameras aren't easy to see, and while an indicator light activates when the glasses are recording, they're far less conspicuous than someone holding a smartphone up to record video or photos. It also doesn't help that people have tried to tamper with the LEDs and block them, and have recorded women without their consent.
But Google is on a mission to change the perception of smart glasses as socially intrusive tech. The first Android XR Intelligent Eyewear smart glasses—made in collaboration with Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster—are now available for preorder, with sales kicking off on December 10. You can read about how they work and what they can do in this separate story .
But you might be more interested in how Google is trying to separate its glasses from Meta's optics and positioning them as the more privacy-minded option to assuage public concerns.
“There's this whole feature set of AI privacy that we think is super important,” says Juston Payne, Google's senior director of product management for XR. “Ultimately, what we're trying to do here is say: Look, these are choices. These are, honestly, not hard technical problems. They're decisions. And we would like other companies to make different decisions, sort of like a bar-raising thing.”
All of the Intelligent Eyewear glasses have a power switch to turn them off completely, so you can wear them as regular glasses. They also have a recording light that illuminates when the glasses snap a photo or record a video, which is intentionally limited to 90 seconds for privacy purposes.
Here's a collection of the things Google says it's doing to make its smart glasses more private:
Payne hopes these policies and actions will encourage other companies to follow suit. “We hope that never again do glasses launch from some other company that doesn't have good algorithms built in,” he says. “That should not have happened; hopefully it doesn't happen again.”
Privacy experts I spoke with acknowledged that Google is trying not to repeat Meta's mistakes, but they point out that smart glasses are still vehicles for collecting sensitive data. Even with an indicator light, it's harder to tell when someone's recording you in public than if someone is holding out their smartphone.
Reem Suleiman, senior campaign director at the nonprofit digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, says camera-equipped glasses shouldn't be normalized in public because they are a precursor to mass surveillance and have the capacity to identify people. (This summer, Meta silently added a face-recognition code to its smart glasses and then subsequently deleted it after a WIRED report; in 2024, two Harvard students built a face-recognition tool for Meta's glasses.)
“People find ways around it,” Suleiman says. “There's no actual aspect of consent.”
Janusz Swierczynski, who researches human interactions with emerging tech at the University of Oxford's Saïd Business School, tells WIRED these privacy measures are meaningful. However, they still largely address privacy at an individual level rather than thinking about people affected by them. That's partly because the technology is advancing faster than policy and research.
“A lot of privacy is managed by social norms, by what we think is acceptable to record, and that prevents people from recording anything and everything,” Swierczynski says. “Normalizing recording does have unintended consequences, which is why it's important to focus on bystander privacy.”
Intriguingly, Payne highlighted that tech companies like Google need to make clear, declarative statements about what the glasses are doing.
“Ambiguity is not your friend here,” Payne says. “I think that a lot of that concern came from some trust being broken. So there is a rebuilding thing happening right now … You can hopefully have your cake and eat it too, which is cool glasses that everybody's excited about—that you're comfortable with.”
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Google and Samsung's next face computers have arrived. Nearly two years after the companies first announced the Android XR platform that powers the hardware, the smart glasses are finally on sale.
The “Intelligent Eyewear” is a collaboration between the two tech companies, with Samsung providing its hardware expertise and Google handling much of the software platform. Smart glasses are just one part of Android XR—there are also mixed-reality headsets and glasses for more immersive experiences, like last year's Samsung Galaxy XR and the upcoming Xreal Aura .
Eyewear brands Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are heavily involved in the new smart glasses, responsible for the design and fit, similar to how Meta tapped Ray-Ban for its competing—and market-leading—wearables. Google and Samsung are leveraging Warby Parker and Gentle Monster's brick-and-mortar presence and retail expertise, which lets people demo the glasses before buying them. (Kering Eyewear, which owns brands like Lindberg and Maui Jim, has also signed up to make glasses for Android XR in the future.)
The first models are available for preorder now, with official sales starting on December 10. Warby Parker's frames start at $395 and come in three styles—Alden, Reid, and Wren—as optical or sunglasses, with various prescription, lens, and width options. Gentle Monster's glasses start at $449 and come in six designs, various colors, and tints, with prescription options for most frames.
The hardware is identical across both brands. The glasses weigh around 41 grams (10 grams less than Meta's new Gen 3 glasses ), have a nine-hour battery life, and include a charging case that can recharge the glasses up to seven times. They have a 12-megapixel camera with an LED indicator that shows everyone in eyeshot that you’re recording. There’s a button to capture photos and 90-second videos at up to 3K resolution with a press. A touch-sensitive temple piece lets you tap to activate the onboard Gemini assistant, or slide two fingers back and forth to control the volume of the audio coming out of the glasses' speaker.
They are the first devices to support the “Hey Gemini” hotword, though you can use the well-known “Hey Google” hotword if you'd like. Still, the new spoken wake phrase distinguishes the glasses as Gemini's “optimal form,” according to Juston Payne, Google's senior director of product management for XR.
“We felt that these are a Gemini-forward device,” Payne tells WIRED. “It's really you and Gemini going through your day together, so it was feeling a little dissonant for us. You're not talking to Google, you're talking to Gemini.”
Oddly, these glasses are only compatible with certain devices— Google Pixel phones , Samsung Galaxy phones , and iPhones —and only select models. You'll need a Pixel 7 or newer, Galaxy S or Z Fold running Samsung's One UI 9.0 or higher, and the iPhone 13 Pro or newer. A Google spokesperson tells WIRED the company will share more about how it plans to expand support to other phones in 2027 after launch.
The arms of the glasses are similarly thick.
Since you'll be buying the glasses from an eyewear brand, they will be the customer-facing party to handle any problems you may have with the device or prescriptions. On the backend, Payne says there are elaborate business integrations and handoffs, so the customer service workload is split between all the companies.
Google has already previewed Intelligent Eyewear glasses with displays built into the lenses—useful for showing navigation instructions or real-time captions for folks with hearing issues. However, they are not ready yet; Payne says they're currently being tested by “non-Googlers” and are still on the road map, though he didn't share a specific release window. As for plans to launch audio-only smart glasses, like Meta's recent Ray-Ban Audio , Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa tells WIRED, “There's a pretty robust pipeline of additional products.”
Smart glasses have been around for a few years, but they come in many forms. Unlike display smart glasses designed to plug into a laptop to mirror or extend your screen, or more immersive glasses like Meta's VR Glasses , which layer virtual experiences over the real world, Intelligent Eyewear is more akin to what Google pitched years ago with the original Google Glass .
You can hear notifications pipe through from your connected smartphone and respond to messages by speaking to Gemini. You can listen to music, take phone calls, and get audio navigation through Google Maps. Yes, you can snap photos and videos too, though Payne quickly notes that these glasses are designed more to have Gemini assist you throughout the day than to capture content.
That's likely because Meta has faced public scrutiny over how people use its smart glasses, so much so that it has spawned a new term for people wearing them: the Meta Creep (harkening back to when anyone wearing Google Glasses was called a “ Glasshole ”).
“We learned through Glass that you can make people uncomfortable if you're not clearly communicating,” Payne says.
To that end, Google is announcing a series of policies and features alongside the glasses to assuage concerns. They include tamper detection, so the camera will know if you tried to disable the indicator light. If you try to block the indicator light while recording, the camera will stop. When you ask Gemini to look at something, those visuals are not saved in your Gemini History, and Google says it will not use them to train AI models or target ads. The glasses will automatically redact the faces of people around you before Gemini processes the visual data. We've highlighted all of Google's privacy-focused announcements around its glasses in a separate story .
Gentle Monster's Intelligent Eyewear comes in six different styles.
Most of the features that Google is positioning around Intelligent Eyewear rely on Gemini. See a poster for a comedy show? Just ask Gemini for more information, or add it to your calendar. You can ask Gemini to add items to your shopping list or whip up a travel itinerary with hotel recommendations and save them to a note. Some of these are saved in the Gemini app, but it can leverage other apps on your smartphone. For example, Gemini can play music on Apple Music if you're on an iPhone. And if you use Samsung Notes on a Samsung phone, it'll know that's where you likely want your notes saved.
When you activate Gemini, it's technically a “ Gemini Live ” experience, meaning the assistant activates and you can have a free-flowing conversation. A swipe back on the glasses' arm will end the interaction. When you want it to “look” at something in front of you, be specific in your query; otherwise, it won't use the camera. You can ask it to look at a page in a book and summarize the content, or if you have a bunch of cocktail ingredients in front of you but don't know what to make, you can ask Gemini for suggestions and step-by-step instructions to craft a drink—at your pace.
Some Gemini controls are on-device and don't need to travel to the cloud, like asking the assistant to play the next track. Speaking of, early next year, Google says users can use gestures on devices like the Fitbit Air or Google Pixel Watch to control music playback or activate Gemini on the glasses right from their wrist.
Another big capability is translation. Gemini will automatically detect languages and translate them to your preferred tongue. You do need to stare at the individual to hear their words translated, and there's a limited range; the quality depends heavily on the environment and noise level, but it worked remarkably well in my controlled demos, with only a few errors. The translation tries to mimic the speaker's tone and voice so it feels like their own words.
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