It might not feel like it yet, but the world of smart glasses is heating up.
On top of new entries from companies like Xreal, Meta took the next steps with its Ray-Ban smart glasses this year, imbuing them with AI and adding even more potential for future uses down the line. As I've written previously, Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are arguably my favorite (and maybe the most underrated) gadget of the year.
They have great audio capabilities, they make taking pictures and videos easy, and they actually look like normal, Ray-Ban, glasses. When it comes to style and capability, they stand alone in the smart glasses category.
At least for now...
Samsung enters the chat
Looks like Meta might not be alone in the world of fashionable smart glasses much longer.
According to a report this week from Korean outlet Yonhap News, Samsung may be preparing to launch its own pair of smart glasses soon, potentially during January's annual Galaxy Unpacked event where it typically introduces its flagship Galaxy phones.
On one hand, that's to be expected — Meta has already made a clear case that smart glasses with a camera and solid audio are a marketable commodity. On the other hand, it could represent one of the biggest sea changes in smart glasses we've seen yet.
Let me explain.
Meta's glasses are great. They do a lot more than you might expect for a relatively nascent product category and they might do even more in the future thanks to Meta AI which imbues the glasses with a bit of computer vision.
But as solid as they are, they're still lacking something — something that actually has almost nothing to do with the glasses themselves. That something is an ecosystem.
Smart glasses, for all of their surprising use cases, still need to be coupled with a real computer, and in that case, that computer is your phone. Your phone is the only reason that Meta's Ray-Ban glasses are useful and thanks to that synergy they can play music, announce turn-by-turn navigation in your maps apps, take calls, and more.
But for everything Ray-Ban glasses can do thanks to your phone, there are just as many things that they can't. That has almost nothing to do with the glasses themselves or their technical limitations, but a lot to do with your phone.
Meta's Ray-Bans just don't have the deep system-level access to your phone to bring them the extra mile. Imagine for a moment a pair of glasses that plays nice with everything your phone does — I'm talking text messages, calls, voice assistants, timers, calendars, you name it.
Sounds useful, right? That's exactly what Samsung might have to offer.
A smarter pair of smart glasses
A pair of Samsung smart glasses has no real limitations when it comes to which apps it has access to and which it doesn't, and for that reason, they could unlock the true potential of the category.
Paired with system-level access, Samsung's rumored smart glasses would be a real-functional extension of your phone in the same way that a watch is — maybe even more so since it can capture media as well.
Think about it. A pair of deeply integrated smart glasses could take pictures and videos and send them directly to your photos app; it could take calls; it could send messages through voice; it could integrate with your phone calendar and send you reminders; it could interact with your phone's voice assistant to search the web or, heck, draft an email for you. By borrowing your phone's ecosystem and compute power, I can't think of anything that smart glasses can't do.
In short, they could cease on basically all the shortcomings of Meta's Ray-Bans.
This is all hypothetical for now, but when you start to unpack the possibilities, a pair of smart glasses made by a company that also manufactures phones just makes sense. It'd still be pretty far off from the AR future promised by prototypes like Meta's Orion, but it would also easily be the best pair of phone-like smart glasses we've seen yet.
As much as I love Meta's Ray-Ban glasses, favorites are a fleeting thing and if Samsung really pulls the trigger, we may have a new king of smart glasses.
