New smart glasses are in town. And this time, it’s a pair of $349 frame glasses that are said to offer multimodal “AI superpowers.” The open-source eyewear comes from a startup called Brilliant Labs, which touts his Frame as a way to bring AI translation, web search, and visual analysis right before your eyes.
As shown in a video posted by Brilliant Labs, you can use your voice to ask the glasses to identify a landmark you’re looking at, search the web for a particular pair of sneakers you’re looking at, or search for it. can. Nutritional information for the food you are about to eat. Information is displayed as an overlay displayed directly on the lens.
The frames come in three colors: black, gray, and clear, and are available for pre-order now. There is also the option to add prescription lenses, which increases the price to $448. Frames will start shipping from April 15th.
Smart glasses aren’t a new concept, but none have really taken off. Several attempts at smart eyewear include North’s Focals glasses, Bose’s now-discontinued audio augmented reality (AR) sunglasses, and most recently Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which still have AI capabilities. has already been seen. In beta version. These special glasses from Brilliant Labs look even more exciting because they are completely open source and hackable, giving users even more freedom compared to what we’ve seen so far.
The frame pairs with an app from Brilliant Labs called Noa. The app includes an AI assistant that uses OpenAI for visual analysis, Whisper for translation, and Perplexity for web search.In an interview with venture beatBrilliant Labs says its Noa AI “learns and adapts to both you and the tasks you receive.”
Although Noa is free to use, “there is a daily limit.” Therefore, the startup plans to offer paid tiers through his Noa, but there is no information yet on how much that will cost. However, as Brilliant Labs says on his company’s Discord channel, there is “no paywall or subscription” and you are free to use the eyewear in other apps, so there is no fee to use the hardware alone. You don’t have to pay.
Brilliant Labs provides an overview of Frame’s specs on their Discord channel. The glasses feature a 640 x 400 pixel color micro-OLED that projects light through a prism in front of the user’s eyes. This provides a diagonal field of view of about 20 degrees, which is on the small side for mixed or augmented reality glasses, especially compared to something like his 52 degrees that you get with Xreal’s new Air 2 Ultra design. That is, only the text or image inside the small box will be displayed.
The frame also comes with a 1280 x 720 camera, microphone, and 222mAh battery. It runs a “fully open source, Lua-based custom operating system with very few dependencies” and is powered by an nRF52840 Cortex-M4F CPU. Some of the specs, such as the display, are the same as those used in another wearable product called Monocle, which Brilliant Labs describes as “a pocket-sized AR device for imaginative hackers.”
The glasses also come with a silly Mr. Power charger (the glasses have a “nose” when you plug them in) that provides fast charging and “all-day battery life.” It’s too early to tell how the Frame will compare to other smart glasses, such as Meta’s $299 Ray-Ban glasses or the troubled Google Glass effort. But at less than 40 grams, it will feel lighter than Apple’s 600-gram Vision Pro.
