iVue The Glide review: a functional if unspectacular pair of camera glasses

Smart glasses and camera glasses have something of a chequered history. It’s hard not to think about high-profile failures like Google Glass, whose users (dubbed ‘glassholes’) were effectively bullied out of existence. However, there’s been a resurgence of interest recently, with Meta partnering with Ray-Ban to launch its AI powered smart glasses – and, on the cheaper end of the scale, these simple camera glasses from iVue, called The Glide.

With no wireless connectivity or AI smarts, these are designed to be a decidedly simpler prospect than other camera glasses. They’re operated via a single button, and they have 64GB of built-in memory – meaning no fussing with SD cards. When you want your footage and photos, you simply plug in via USB-C and drag them off the old-fashioned way.

So, in a market more crowded than it has been in a long time, how do iVue’s The Glide camera glasses stack up? I donned them to find out.

iVue The Glide: Specifications

iVue The Glide: Pricing & Availability

iVue’s The Glide glasses are available for around $119 / £112. This is, as mentioned, significantly cheaper than Meta’s $300 Ray-Bans, while also being more expensive than some of the bottom-end camera glasses you can find on Amazon, which can be picked up for as little as $60 / £50. So, they’re sitting fairly comfortably in the mid-range.

iVue The Glide: Design & handling

I like to think we’re friends, dear Digital Camera World reader, and I’m going to admit something quite personal to you: I have a somewhat large head. Not massive, but certainly not small. As such, the slim-fitting Glide glasses were at first quite uncomfortable for me – to the point where I wondered if I was going to be able to wear them for anything like an extended period. Fortunately, we got used to each other, and the pressure on my temples eased up.

The glasses are constructed from TR90, a thermoplastic material that’s commonly used in products like these, and this makes them durable but lightweight at just 46g. They have an IP22 waterproof rating, which should protect them from sweat and light rain. You can swap the shaded lenses out for clear ones if so desired. They come with a hard shell case, a pouch, a USB-C to USB cable, and a cleaning cloth.

The glasses can actually record while being powered via USB-C, so if you don’t mind looking extremely odd, you can slip a battery pack into your pocket, run a cable up to your ear, and plug them in for practically indefinite recording.

Operation is all conducted via a single button, and there is of course no LCD settings screen, which makes reading the instructions a necessity to have any idea what you’re doing. The red indicator light shines solid red in standby mode, flashes red when recording video, and is supposed to flash blue when a photo is captured; mine never did flash blue, which always left me delightfully unsure as to whether I’d managed to take a picture or not.

The indicator light is not visible to others, meaning people you record won’t have any idea you’re doing so. I’d personally consider this a negative – I think it’s polite and healthy to let other people know when you’re recording them.

iVue The Glide: Performance

In terms of stills, the Glide glasses can capture images up to 24MP in resolution, and given that the box proudly touts that they have an 8MP Sony CMOS sensor, it doesn’t take a genius to work out that there’s likely some interpolation going on. As such, images are muted and rather fuzzy.

Video is a similar story. It’s somewhat drab, and objects at distance are grainy and indistinct. Though as I found when testing the glasses on a walk, the main problems you’ll find with your footage are just problems inherent to camera glasses. The video constantly wobbles and it never seems to be level (I think one of my ears might be higher than the other, and I’m distressed that this is how I found out).

With that said, the footage is clear enough that when I spotted a bee, you can just about see him making his way across the frame, and when I pulled some leaves close to the camera, you can pick out a bit of detail. It’s nothing to write home about, but it's fine.

The lack of any kind of preview means you’re always kind of guessing at what you’re capturing. There is a microphone – I tested it by speaking into the glasses while holding them at arm’s length, and it picked up my voice clearly, but very quietly. I wouldn’t trust it to record a conversation at any distance. Otherwise, the mics mostly pick up wind noise, footsteps and breathing.

The one-button operation means that you can’t change settings on the fly – doing so requires the old-school technique of manually editing a config.txt file in Notepad. Here you can change things like the video/photo resolution, how long your clips are, whether you want a timestamp, etc. The options are exactly the same as those offered by the Oho Sunshine Glasses that my colleague Matthew reviewed – indeed, a cynic might hypothesize that their internals rolled off the exact same production line.

iVue The Glide: Sample images and video

Below are some unedited stills and a compilation of otherwise unedited video clips from The Glide.

Above: sample video shot with the iVue The Glide glasses

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Above: sample stills photos shot with the iVue The Glide glasses

iVue The Glide: Verdict

The Glide is the kind of product that’s hard to really criticise given that it does the job it's designed for, but is also hard to get particualrly excited about. It produces imagery at about the level of quality you’d expect from a pair of glasses with a tiny sensor in them. The glasses themselves look fine, and feel reasonably well-built, but if you’re thinking of using them for serious image-making – don’t. They’re a fun novelty, and a cheap means of capturing POV footage, but not much more than that.

Alternatives

Ray Ban Meta Smart Glasses

Significantly more expensive than The Glide, Ray-Ban and Meta’s Smart Glasses offer a good deal more functionality in terms of their AI capabilities. However, image and video quality are pretty similar, so if you aren’t bothered about being able to have your questions answered by the Meta View app, you may as well go with the cheaper option.

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Oho Sunshine Camera Glasses

These can be bought more cheaply than The Glide and seem to be pretty much the same in terms of their imaging capability. They are available as pricier 4K versions if you want more pixels in your video.

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