There’s a new set of smart glasses in town.
Warby Parker opened presales on Thursday for its Intelligent Eyewear collection, a partnership with Google and Samsung. It’s Google’s first return to consumer eyewear since the whole “Glasshole” debacle. These glasses film, translate, and answer questions with AI.
Those use cases might sound familiar: Meta glasses do the same things.
“This is the kind of product that, on the surface, may seem similar to other devices,” Warby Parker co-CEO Dave Gilboa told me. “But, as soon as you put it on, start demoing the functionality, and do that head-to-head, a lot of the differences become pretty clear.”
So, I spent a rainy Friday morning traipsing around Warby Parker’s New York pop-up to figure out what makes these glasses different. My answer: not much.
What the glasses do
Warby Parker’s glasses have Gemini built into them. That means users can ask the standard chatbot questions: What’s my schedule? What should I text back? What’s my horoscope?
The glasses also have visual intelligence, an added perk. They can describe the room you’re looking at, or give directions based on the street in front of you.
All of these conversations are verbal, meaning glasses users must speak aloud to their devices. That’s a bit awkward: Am I really going to say out loud, “Gemini, where am I going?” on the streets of New York? Meta glasses have the same problem; they assume we’re comfortable saying everything at all times.
I found it difficult to weave between conversations. After Gemini told me something, I’d repeat it back to someone else in the room. But Gemini took my repetition as a response and kept asking me questions. It became sonically overwhelming.
Users can also prompt the glasses from their phones, but then why have the glasses in the first place?
Some of the tech also seemed too early to use, like the translation feature. Talking to a Spanish faux-retail worker at the pop-up, I asked my glasses to translate what he said into English. It switched the language slowly, inching through each word.
My biggest takeaway from the demo: this tech is cool! It’s cool just like Meta glasses are cool. It’s nice that I can ask what book I’m thinking of or take a picture without taking out my phone, a black hole I’m bound to get sucked into.
The frames come in three styles and start at $395. Warby Parker took its time developing them, focusing on style above all. “This is a fashion product,” said co-CEO Neil Blumenthal. “At its core, it’s someone’s identity.”
There were trade-offs, and the company spent “hundreds of hours” figuring out how to maximize battery life without making the glasses too big, Gilboa said. Nobody wants to be Evan Spiegel with his ears folded down from heavy glasses.
They did look good. So do Meta glasses (the normal ones, not the chunky ones with the screen and neural band).
‘Pervert’ panic risks
Meta glasses have run into another problem: their “pervert glasses” reputation.
Even with a light to indicate when the wearer is filming, Meta glasses were thrown into controversy after men used them to unknowingly film women. The company has introduced updates to brick the filming abilities of users physically tampering with the light and banned some harassers’ Instagram accounts.
The Warby Parker glasses have a similar light that indicates camera use and anti-tampering features. The company says it also redacts faces before images are analyzed by Gemini and that camera visuals aren’t used for AI training or ad targeting.
Still, launching camera glasses in the current environment carries risk. Warby Parker, Google, and Samsung could easily be ensnared in the same blowback that Meta is facing.
“For someone to wear it all day, every day, it has to provide real utility to them,” Gilboa said. “It also has to be a product that people around them are comfortable with. We think we’ve achieved both of those elements.”
I pushed back. The “pervert glasses” pushback sprung up right in the middle of these glasses’ development. What were the CEOs’ reactions?
“Our reaction is we should all be concerned about privacy,” Blumenthal responded.
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