I’m sitting here, writing this on my laptop, music playing through my glasses. I ask my glasses about the weather and a green text display appears, floats in front of my eyes.
These are smart glasses, sure, but they aren’t Meta’s new Ray-Ban Display Glasses, which I’ve also been wearing for the past week. Instead they’re made by a company named Rokid. Available via Kickstarter right now for $479 (less than the $599 they’ll go on sale for when they ship later this fall), they offer a lot of the same features. The price is expected to go up when the glasses hit a full retail price of Unlike Meta’s glasses, however, these actually have prescription lens inserts that work with my eyes. With Ray-Ban Displays, I have to wear contacts for now. I don’t have to do that with Rokid.
Why don’t more glasses take an approach like this, I wonder?
It depends on the strength of your prescription. The Meta Ray-Ban Displays glasses only support prescription ranges from minus 4 to positive 4, something my minus-8 level eyes won’t work with. But Rokid solves for prescriptions like mine with magnetic lens inserts. I’ve been wearing them around my neighborhood, and I appreciate that I can actually wear them while working, reading and doing normal activities. When I use Meta’s display glasses, I need to wear contacts.
Worse, they reflect back a lot of everyday light, and at certain angles, the waveguide squares and even green hints of what I’m seeing via the displays are visible to people around me. The glasses also rest at a somewhat strange angle for my face.
While Rokid is promising support for other AI large language models, as well as Google Maps and map-based navigation, I haven’t seen those features yet on the early models I’ve been trying.
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