I’m Keen On Smart Glasses (But The Tech Just Isn’t There Yet)
By: Fergus Halliday
Tags: Gadgets, Tech, Eyewear, Apple, Smart Glasses

While these might sound fairly respectable numbers, the reality is that they’re probably about half what they need to be to truly close that gap on regular headphones when it comes to convenience. You can’t exactly take your glasses off halfway through the day in order to top them up for later.

Fast-charging tech like that found in the Huawei X Gentle Monster Eyewear II can play a role here but it alone likely won’t be enough to get battery life in smart glasses over said precipice. There are serious engineering issues to be solved here. Smart glasses need to have enough battery life per charge that you never need to actually think about it. The fastest way to get more battery life might be to use bigger batteries but this will likely have a negative knock-on effect when it comes to the weight and comfort involved with actually wearing smart glasses.

Comfort and Design

This leads nicely into the question of design. Credit where it’s due — the smart glasses I’ve messed with to date have all felt lighter to wear than their long jargon-heavy list of features might lead you to expect. However, there’s a difference to be defined here between lighter than expected and actually comfortable.

For all that the elegance of headphone-free audio playback wins me over to the cause, the discomfort of actually wearing for more than a twenty minute train ride.

I have a suspicion why this might be the case.

From what I can tell, few — if any — smart glasses manufacturers are working directly with brands that already work in the eye-wear space. Y’know, companies that have actually made products that real people want wear on a day to basis?

Focals by North

I can only hope that this situation changes in the future because, right now, their absence is felt fairly literally. That goes double for manufacturers brands that don’t offer prescription lenses. Upselling me — a person who is already going to spend several hundred dollars on a pair of glasses because I have to wear them to see — is surely easier than starting from scratch.

One More Thing

If rumors are to be believed, Apple are looking to launch a play in the smart glasses space that emphasizes augmented reality sooner rather than later. If they do — and even more-so if it’s a success — it could shift the landscape for smart glasses and their proximity to mainstream consumers overnight.

Apple aren’t faultless but they do deserve credit for propelling things like tablets, cloud storage and smartwatches from niche gadget to tech necessity.

One of the things that might be holding back smart glasses as a category is the incoherence of it all. Google (who acquired North earlier this year), Snap, Bose, Huawei and the rest all have very different ideas about what smart glasses actually are, who they’re for and what they should do.

The arrival of a brand as big as Apple on the scene will likely lead to a consolidation in the answers to the above questions. Regardless of the final product itself, Apple’s strength as a brand will likely see it exert a form of gravity on its competition. Some will rush to embrace or adopt the things that Apple’s smart glasses get right, standardizing them. Others will lean on the inevitable weak-links to differentiate themselves.

Either way, I’m increasingly convinced that I will probably own a set of smart glasses sometime in the future. The tech world’s first wave of serious smart glasses aren’t compelling enough to push me over the line but their shortcomings provide a blueprint for the gadget that inevitably will.

It’s just a matter of time.