Is anybody making smart glasses that are just a display? For me, the rest of the feature set verges on being anti-features. I'd much rather a very rudimentary display that my phone or another device could send relatively low bandwidth data to over bluetooth or some other protocol and build from there.
Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.
You can send low-resolution images to them via Bluetooth. I just figured out how to read button presses. There are speakers and a mic, but I haven't figured out how to use them yet (they don't show up as regular audio devices on Linux).
You'd need to write custom stuff to generate the images, but with a little imagemagick scripting I've had some pretty usable results.
Not quite "smart glasses", but if you want "glasses that are just a display", the Lenovo Legion Glasses are pretty good and they look like normal aviators at first glance.
I have a pair and I've been experimenting a bit.
For iOS you can mirror display or use Stage Manager. For Android, at least with Samsung, DEX is pretty decent.
For audio, they're decent too, I like the convenience and comfort. The audio has good fidelity, but depth is mediocre (better than phone speakers though).
FWIW I say DEX is decent, having much of the same gripes as I do with Stage Manager. Dual screen, resizing windows, and full screen support is still a mixed bag on all mobile devices. It can be very frustrating at times. Application support on iOS and Android is about the same, which is disappointing. Supposedly iOS 26 fixes some of this, but I haven't tried the beta.
Reframe this to accommodate for the prevalence and general expectations of where cameras exist.
Many people walk around with a mobile device out, essentially carrying a device with (increasingly) close to a 360 camera view. Cameras are ubiquitous and targeting one niche device is a waste of time and effort.
Good to see someone jump on these early with FOSS. Seems pretty early days for the this OS and the tech though. No device has full support yet. I'm still not convinced smart glasses are going to have any staying power either.
I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.
Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).
So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.
I was about to make the exact same comment. But then I remembered that there are billions of people who buy products advertised on Facebook and TikTok because it's "cool" and "fun". So what do I know about the future of smart glasses OS? Probably nothing.
This comment reminds me of a simple `esp32` project I saw recently that lets you send your LLM requests via SMS. It basically offloads everything. Particularly useful when you don't have a decent data connection, but can still send SMS.
Live translation is something I've been dreaming about since Google Glass. I just want translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions, and ad blocking.
Even Realities G1 glasses, which support Mentra, will do the first 2. The 3rd is partial, not quite turn by turn, but you can see a map around you with them on
The idea of ad blocking with smart glasses kind of freaks me out. I'll take additive but I don't want subtractive reality where parts of the world are being hidden from me.
Is anybody making smart glasses that are just a display? For me, the rest of the feature set verges on being anti-features. I'd much rather a very rudimentary display that my phone or another device could send relatively low bandwidth data to over bluetooth or some other protocol and build from there.
Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.
Not to toot my own horn, but I've been fiddling with a now-discontinued, very cheap pair of display smart glasses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087803
You can send low-resolution images to them via Bluetooth. I just figured out how to read button presses. There are speakers and a mic, but I haven't figured out how to use them yet (they don't show up as regular audio devices on Linux).
You'd need to write custom stuff to generate the images, but with a little imagemagick scripting I've had some pretty usable results.
The "Even Realities G1" and "Vuzix Z100" options listed in the compatibility doc look interesting.
https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/blob/main/glass...
https://www.evenrealities.com/g1
https://www.vuzix.com/products/z100-smart-glasses
I think most of Xreal's offerings are just a display you plug into a phone or laptop.
Not quite "smart glasses", but if you want "glasses that are just a display", the Lenovo Legion Glasses are pretty good and they look like normal aviators at first glance.
I have a pair and I've been experimenting a bit.
For iOS you can mirror display or use Stage Manager. For Android, at least with Samsung, DEX is pretty decent.
For audio, they're decent too, I like the convenience and comfort. The audio has good fidelity, but depth is mediocre (better than phone speakers though).
FWIW I say DEX is decent, having much of the same gripes as I do with Stage Manager. Dual screen, resizing windows, and full screen support is still a mixed bag on all mobile devices. It can be very frustrating at times. Application support on iOS and Android is about the same, which is disappointing. Supposedly iOS 26 fixes some of this, but I haven't tried the beta.
https://store.vufine.com/ I think vufine might be what you are looking for, I don't know much about them as well, also found it here on Hacker News.
Glasses with a camera should be legislated away with specific narrow exceptions for e.g. safety in certain industrial tasks.
Reframe this to accommodate for the prevalence and general expectations of where cameras exist.
Many people walk around with a mobile device out, essentially carrying a device with (increasingly) close to a 360 camera view. Cameras are ubiquitous and targeting one niche device is a waste of time and effort.
Sounds like a lobbyist pitch from Big Camera Glasses
Love this bit from mentra's careers page, https://mentra.glass/pages/careers
I love how direct Chinese language/culture is. (At least from my perspective.)
Good to see someone jump on these early with FOSS. Seems pretty early days for the this OS and the tech though. No device has full support yet. I'm still not convinced smart glasses are going to have any staying power either.
> Devs get to write 1 app that runs on any pair of smart glases.
Except it seems they only run on Mentra glasses. Not Meta Ray-Bans, Echo Frames, or any of the many other existing smart glasses platforms.
Here's the deal, you don't need any of this.
I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.
Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).
So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.
I was about to make the exact same comment. But then I remembered that there are billions of people who buy products advertised on Facebook and TikTok because it's "cool" and "fun". So what do I know about the future of smart glasses OS? Probably nothing.
This comment reminds me of a simple `esp32` project I saw recently that lets you send your LLM requests via SMS. It basically offloads everything. Particularly useful when you don't have a decent data connection, but can still send SMS.
edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1n7r3vl/a_textbot_...
How open-source are these glasses really? Are all software components compilable from source, or do they just publish an SDK Espressif-style?
It looks like it really is open source. Even the "cloud" components appear to be open source, and are in this repo.
https://docs.mentra.glass/contributing
I just found out about them and it seems super good. I wonder why Meta doesn't support such a thing called "Meta Glasses Application Store"
because developers would immediately make ick apps that violate privacy or do black mirror type things that would kill any momentum
I'm more than happy to develop my own apps, but it doesn't appear that they support any one product with all the features yet.
Related. Others?
Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906442 - May 2025 (25 comments)
this doesn't include AR right? it can't overlay stuff on what i'm seeing? if not, then it's pretty useless
I'm with you. Augmented Reality is what I'm looking for. I've been dreaming about it for decades.
Live translation is something I've been dreaming about since Google Glass. I just want translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions, and ad blocking.
Even Realities G1 glasses, which support Mentra, will do the first 2. The 3rd is partial, not quite turn by turn, but you can see a map around you with them on
The idea of ad blocking with smart glasses kind of freaks me out. I'll take additive but I don't want subtractive reality where parts of the world are being hidden from me.
> and ad blocking
The possibility of shooting ads directly into the retina is probably the main driving force behind smart glasses.
And ultimate attention analysis
So without their cloud service no apps.
Wouldn‘t call that an OS.
Ah. I was about to ask if it is private and if the AI can run on-device, but I guess this comments answers all my questions in the negative. Too bad.
If smart glasses can’t self-adjust vision or flag cataracts, they’re missing the point. This is not being discussed.