The smart glasses space is getting crowded fast. Less than six weeks after Snap unveiled its AR Specs, Samsung took to the stage at the Galaxy Unpacked event in London to show off its own entry in the category: two new designs of what it's calling "intelligent eyewear", developed in collaboration with fashion eyewear brands Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. No price, no firm release date, but a clearer picture of what Samsung's answer to the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 glasses is going to look like.
They run Android XR, Google's operating system for extended reality devices, powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chipset. AI assistance comes via Google's Gemini, which can see what you're seeing through the built-in camera and respond to voice commands or touch controls on the temples. You can take photos, record first-person video, get real-time translations, and pull up navigation based on your surroundings. Impressive stuff.
But what's most striking, for anyone who's followed this category, is how normal they look. Both designs could pass for upscale fashion frames at a glance, give or take some thicker temples and a small LED indicator on the front.
That's not a small achievement: the history of smart glasses is littered with products that announced themselves from across the room. But it raises a question the industry hasn't fully answered: if nobody can tell you're wearing a camera, is that a design triumph or a privacy problem waiting to happen?
Is it creepy?
Smart glasses with cameras have had a rough time of it lately. The UK's data privacy watchdog, the ICO, wrote to Meta earlier this year after reports that content moderators had been shown footage filmed with Ray-Ban Meta glasses without subjects' knowledge. Harvard students made headlines by demonstrating how smart glasses could be used to identify strangers in real time. The category has a trust problem, and making the glasses look more like ordinary eyewear doesn't obviously help.
Samsung's response, like Snap's, is an LED indicator that lights up when recording. It's the industry's current best answer, and it's better than nothing. Whether a small light on the frame is sufficient disclosure when you're standing next to someone on the Tube is a question regulators in the UK and Europe are likely to be asking as these products arrive.
Battery breakthrough
Privacy issues aside, what about the specs? Well, battery life is one area where Samsung has a clear edge over Snap: nine hours on a single charge, with the carrying case providing up to seven additional full charges, giving a theoretical total of 72 hours. The trade-off is that these are audio-first glasses with a camera rather than a full AR display device, so the two products are aimed at different ends of the market.
The two designs are distinct in character. The Gentle Monster edition has a cat-eye oval silhouette in slim black, fashion-forward and recognisably on-brand. The Warby Parker design is softer, a subtly upswept brow in brown that sits closer to the Ray-Ban Meta aesthetic, and probably the more wearable of the two for everyday use. Frustratingly, though, Samsung hasn't published camera specifications yet.
Both designs are expected to launch this fall, alongside Snap's Specs and, reportedly, Google's own smart glasses. Whether Samsung can match Meta on price will be crucial. But perhaps the harder question is whether the public is ready for a world where the person opposite them on the bus might be filming – and you'd never know it from looking.
Check out our guide to the best camera glasses you can buy right now
