Everyone wants a piece of the smart glasses pie. With Meta plowing full steam ahead, releasing three new pairs of smart glasses in one go at its Connect conference this year (including the Ray-Ban Display with a screen), other big-name competitors are following suit. Apple, for example, is reportedly attempting to expedite its first pair of smart glasses by diverting resources from the Vision Pro team. To give you a sense of how urgent that pivot is, Apple is reportedly de-prioritizing the development of a cheaper and lighter version that people might actually, ya know, buy, to pursue said smart glasses.
Now, it looks like another smartphone titan is being swept up in that push, and the result could be Samsung-made smart glasses on shelves sooner than you think. According to a report from the Financial News in South Korea, we could see “Project Haean,” Samsung’s rumored (Google-powered) AR glasses, as soon as early next year. It’s hard to say how much stock to put in that rumor without any official timeline from Samsung, but if you’ll allow me to speculate for a moment, it does feel very possible.
On top of the palpable push toward smart glasses, there’s also solid evidence that both Google and Samsung are heavily invested in AR. This year at I/O, Google showed off a preview of its XR glasses, which have a similar featureset as Meta’s Ray-Ban Display. While there was no indication of when those glasses may see the light of day, it’s clear that this isn’t some pie-in-the-sky prototype. Gizmodo’s Senior Editor, Consumer Tech, Raymond Wong, got to try the XR glasses a little bit, and while the demo only ran for a grand total of 90 seconds, they were at least real in the sense that Google was letting people try them on.
That’s all to say that new hardware is clearly in the pipeline, and while Samsung hasn’t gone as far as announcing anything official (it certainly hasn’t offered demos in a public setting), we have gotten some strong hints. At the I/O keynote in May, for example, GM of Android XR, Shahram Izadi said, “We’re taking our partnership with Samsung to the next level by extending Android XR beyond headsets to glasses. We’re creating the software and reference hardware platform to enable the ecosystem to build great glasses alongside us. Our glasses prototypes are already being used by trusted testers.” Well, well, look at that; Samsung and Google sittin’ in a tree…
That’s not a clear yes or no, to be sure, but it’s not, not a no either. No matter how this plays out (or when), I’m personally looking forward to Samsung entering the fray. Even more so than Google, Samsung has a chance to make smart glasses that feel truly useful. Given the breadth of its presence in phones and other hardware, it could offer tighter integration between mobile devices and smart glasses than Meta could ever dream of, and that’s huge for delivering a quality smart glasses experience right now, since they still rely on phones for all the big-time computing.
In the U.S., Samsung might not have the same weight as an Apple-scale ecosystem, but it’s still a huge player and would be the biggest one (sorry, Meta) that smart glasses with a screen have seen yet. Personally, my body (or my face, I guess) is ready for the varied and non-Meta-dominated smart glasses field that many of us have been waiting for.
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