Last week, Google unveiled the first two designs of its much-anticipated AI smart glasses, which are due to be released this fall. Combining Google’s Gemini AI model with Samsung’s hardware engineering and Gentle Monster and Warby Parker’s eyewear designs, they’re a direct rival to incumbent Meta’s Ray-Ban AI smart glasses, with in-built speakers, cameras and microphones, so wearers can look up information, make calls, take photos, and get live translations and directions on demand.
It’s not Google’s first wearable — the company is still selling multiple generations of its Fitbit health tracker and Pixel smartwatches globally. But where Google was years behind rivals like Apple and Samsung in releasing these first-generation wearables, it’s moved much more decisively into AI smart glasses, second only behind Meta. Apple, Samsung, Snap, Huawei, and even Nothing are all expected to follow suit, each releasing rival AI smart glasses in the next 12 to 18 months.
Why? Because the next AI battleground is likely the ability to capture ‘always-on’ rich real-world data on consumers’ everyday behavior — or what the tech industry is now calling “ambient AI”.
“A lot of people in Silicon Valley are noticing that as AI is getting more and more powerful, it’s still not that helpful for everyday life. So the big debate among those pushing AI forward is that we urgently need to give the models more context,” says Will Wang, CEO of challenger wearables brand Even Realities. “That’s what’s driving this notion of all-day, every-day data recording. People are passionate that it’s the next big thing.”
As it stands, frontier AI models like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, and Meta AI are each trained on bounded data sets — largely static snapshots of internet data like web crawls, licensed texts, and chatbot conversations. Smart glasses, however, can potentially capture what you look at, dwell upon, where you go, what you buy, who you speak to, your routines, environmental data, and emotional signals, along with all the other sensory aspects of your day. That gives the tech companies behind these glasses a privileged position over search, shopping, navigation, memory, payments, messaging, entertainment, and personal assistance. It’s a contextual data goldmine as useful to the tech companies racing to build humankind’s primary AI interface as it is to fashion brands wanting to advertise and intercept purchase intent.
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Google’s smart glasses collaboration with eyewear group Warby Parker, which will be released this fall.Photo: Courtesy of Google and Warby Parker
