Frame Smart Glasses from Brilliant Labs Are a Vehicle for an Always-There AI Assistant
Plus, it has AR functionality which so many products today ignore
Frame smart glasses from Brilliant Labs may represent the product focus the AR/VR world has been missing. Previous generations of smart glasses have focused on everyday utility or social connectivity and creation. That latter category has its adherents and proponents, namely Meta. However, most users are not creators. Instead, everyday consumers simply want a tool that adds convenience and reduces their reliance on handling their smartphones for access to every digital service.
Brilliant Labs CEO Bobak Tavangar told the South China Morning Post that smart glasses “always lacked that existential purpose … which we believe is generative AI.” The article added:
Brilliant Labs co-founder and CEO Bobak Tavangar believes this is the right time for smart eyewear, but not for the same reasons as Apple. As Tavangar sees it, generative AI – the tech underpinning ChatGPT and similar products – is the real game-changer that could potentially get everyone wearing a smart display on their face. He said the Frame is more akin to the Rabbit R1 – an AI powered handheld device that debuted during CES 2024 – than other augmented reality (AR) glasses on the market.
The price point is also reasonable at $349. Snap Spectacles' first generation was $200, and the third version rose to $380, which was a bit much considering the limited functionality. Meta Ray-Bans begin at $300 and have no built-in AR screen. This makes the Frame immediately competitive.
The AI Core
Frame is tapping into multiple generative AI foundation models to meet user needs. Perplexity is onboard for search and knowledge tasks. GPT-4 offers text generation. Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion can generate images. Whisper is on board for speech recognition. You could imagine a future integration with Rabbit’s large action model for mobile app navigation and access to additional services.
Notably, Frame also offers two essential smart glasses features: visual display and visual item recognition. These key features are missing from Meta Ray-Bans, Alexa Frames, and Bose Frames. Meta Ray-Bans can capture images and live stream to Facebook but do not provide any augmented reality (AR) services.
Brilliant Labs recognizes that the always-available AI assistant will be the central convenience to delight users. Whether ChatGPT, Gemini, Meta AI, Perplexity, or something else, the assistant will offer the interface and services to elevate the everyday value of smart glasses. As Bobak told the South China Morning Post:
“We feel that it is analogous to multitouch for the smartphone. Until that technology and interface modality was invented, smartphones were really not a thing,” Tavangar said in an interview with the Post.
The Ignomious History of Smart Glasses
Google Glass created the utility category of smart glasses. However, it was a finicky piece of kit that never assembled a meaningful developer community or provided useful apps for everyday users. It also suffered from outright cultural rejection, the coining of the term “Glasshole,” and an out-of-reach price tag of $1,500.
North was much stronger in the utility category, with apps built in-house, a clever fitting regimen, and a connection to common services. It was acquired by Google in 2020 and then put on ice.
Snap Spectacles were designed for creators. It launched with a lot of user momentum and enthusiasm. While the common narrative is that Snap botched availability, the bigger issue is the feature set was just too thin. And there was a camera but no display. That severely limited the value of the glasses element of the device. It is almost identical to Meta’s situation. The key difference is that Meta has an AI assistant on the way.
Smart Glasses Plus AR and Not VR
It is tempting to discuss smart glasses in relation to VR goggles, like Apple Vision Pro. However, the only thing these two categories have in common is that they are headwear. VR goggles are designed for an immersive environment that tethers a user to a space; no amount of passthrough technology changes this fact. Smart glasses are about augmenting the world with digital services as opposed to augmenting digital services with a peek into the world.
This model of use means that smart glasses are likely to be a far larger market than VR can ever hope to achieve. Most technological progress over the past forty years has brought digital services into the world. Personal computers brought digital from the office into the home. Laptops offered the first taste of mobility. Smartphones have made digital services available anywhere at any time.
However, smartphones still demand attention focused on the screen and not the world. Smart glasses take this to another level. Smart glasses with full AR and an AI assistant are the next logical evolution of digital platforms.
Granted, Frame from Brilliant Labs may not be the company to finally break open the market and reverse the moribund history of smart glasses. One additional angle Brilliant Labs has going for it is a commitment to open-source. While there will always be some skepticism of tech giants launching new device platforms, open-source offers a chance to build an ecosystem that maximizes trust.
The other side of this argument is that open-source device platforms don’t have a long history of market success. Quite the opposite, it actually raises the likelihood of failure.
The good news for Brilliant Labs is that it appears to be following the most logical product playbook. Whether it is another “too early” introduction of smart glasses remains to be seen. Maybe it will set the stage for a true smart glasses revolution. That will largely depend on its reliability and the number of useful apps on the platform. Keep an eye on the apps. Remember how critical that was to the iPhone’s early adoption momentum. Just a few apps that add everyday value to Frame users will likely make or break the product.
Oh, and an early investor is the founder of Niantic. You probably know the company as the inventor of Pokémon GO. Adam Cheyer, the co-founder of Siri and Viv Labs is also on board. That is just the right brain trust you want for a product fusing AR and AI assistant innovation.
