Brilliant Labs is making a play for the open-source crowd with its new Frame smart glasses.
Building on the tech the brand debuted with last year's weird-but-wonderful Monocle, these smart glasses use a combination of built-in cameras and microphones, a transparent and tiny Micro OLED screen and the generative AI-powered smarts of the Noa companion app to "give you superpowers."
Strip away the hype and what you're left with isn't all that different to the Ray-Ban Meta Smartglasses. Like that wearable, the big selling point for the Frames is multi-modal AI applications.
Rather than just entering a prompt into ChatGPT and getting an answer, you're able to look at whatever has caught your attention in the real world and allow the cameras and microphones on the Frames to put two and two together.
All the usual AI possibilities get a mention on the Brilliant Labs website, from real-time language translation to reverse image searches to seamless online searches and shopping. You can even use AI-powered image generation to reimagine the world around you.
No word on how reliable or responsive any of that is in practice, but there is a glossy hype reel out there showing what this experience is supposed to look like.
While your mileage with the style of the Frames might vary, Brilliant Labs said that the glasses are designed to fit most people. At 40g, they're also quite light. One of the neater touches here is that the battery is built into the temples of the Frames.
Thanks to a colourful and unique fast-charging accessory called Mister Power, the Frames are said to last all day. However, the Brilliant Labs website doesn't drill down into any specific numbers that might paint a picture of what that looks like in practice.
Digging a little deeper into the reasons why you'd opt for this over alternatives like the aforementioned Ray-Bans, the Frames are built with hackers in mind.
If you've got the time and a talent for getting your hands dirty, you could feasibly connect the hardware here to all sorts of other software and services rather than being limited to the ones that a given gadget manufacturer has in mind.
Between this, the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1, the race to get AI into the hands of consumers is only just beginning. That said, neither the form factor nor a popular use case for these kinds of hands-free AI-powered gadgets has taken off as of yet.
If that hasn't put a damper on your enthusiasm, you can preorder the Frames via the Brilliant Labs website this week at an RRP of US$349.
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