Despite announcing and showing renders of Samsung’s smart glasses in partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, Google is not showing them at Google I/O. Which is not a huge surprise, I fully expected that to be an Unpacked announcement in a few months.
But Google is showing off its own prototype Android XR glasses. These are the same sort of display glasses they showed off last year at I/O, but it’s a prototype that is further along, with more demos available.
Hardware-wise, I don’t think much has changed. Of course, we’re still unable to take many photos of the glasses to really see the specifics. But the glasses themselves are really good. They aren’t quite as feature-rich as the XREAL Project Aura, which I also went hands-on with today.
There seem to be three, maybe four, tiers of Android XR products right now. There’s the audio and display glasses (think Meta Ray-Ban and Meta Ray-Ban Display), then XREAL Project Aura, which is more about entertainment, and then there’s the whole schbang, the Galaxy XR. And I fully expect these to all have different price points, but only the Galaxy XR has a price right now.
These Google display glasses are not launching this year; they might not even launch next year. But that is when I would expect them to be available. The audio glasses will launch this Fall, however.
Google’s display is bright, and Gemini looks beautiful
One of the first things I noticed when going into the display portion of the demo was, the display was bright, crisp, and Gemini looks so good. Google is giving you a few pill-shaped widgets on the home screen. One of the widgets included a countdown to Google I/O, with another for Google Translate.
A demo that Google has all of us doing is with Google Translate. Having someone talk in Korean and translate it to English in real-time. It worked quite well, despite all of the WiFi issues that demos like this at events like Google I/O tend to have. That right there is a huge reason to have these glasses, particularly if you’re like me and do a lot of international travel. Google doesn’t have a set number of languages that are supported. But I was told the usual ones will be supported, since it’s just using Google Translate.
Finally, there is also a demo where you can ask Gemini to take a photo in front of a mirror for a selfie, and give it a prompt to edit the photo with Nano Banana. Like putting yourself on a stage. Now this one did take a bit to create, which Google told me is because Nano Banana has been updated to offer much higher-res images. So you’re getting a lot more details.
Google’s going to have a wide range of Android XR products very soon
As I mentioned already, Google seems to have four tiers of Android XR products, with most of them launching this year. Really, only the display glasses from Google will be the only ones not launching this year. As the XREAL Project Aura glasses are shipping later this year, as well as the audio-only glasses they built with Samsung, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster. Google did say that Samsung would be offering a ton of different styles of these glasses this Fall. So that’ll be very exciting to see.
This is a category that I am very excited to check out. I’ve been wearing the Meta Ray-Ban glasses for the last couple of years, though I mostly only wear them when traveling or when at events like Google I/O. Simply because they are amazing for capturing content. But throw in Gemini, and this could be a really huge advantage for Google over Meta.
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