The Best Smart Glasses to Augment Your Reality

The dream of a real-time, video-game-style heads-up display over real life is creeping closer to reality. We've seen early examples that can translate text and speech, recognize places, and help you navigate to a destination. You can already use smart glasses as you would a Bluetooth headset, to make and take calls, send messages, and even have video chats. But most of the smart glasses you can buy are focused on mirroring content from your phone or computer and providing you with one or more virtual screens. More recently, we are seeing artificial intelligence seep into glasses; you can query or task them like your phone or smart speaker.

The more technology that needs to be packed in, the bigger and heavier the smart glasses are. Battery life is inevitably limited. Most need to be tethered to a device and/or battery with a wire that runs down behind your ear. They can get warm and uncomfortable and cause motion sickness. Comfort and focus can prove elusive as your eyes adjust to a close-up virtual display that creates the illusion of a screen a few feet away. Let's not forget the obvious privacy concerns with smart glasses that have cameras and microphones onboard.

HUD stands for heads-up display and refers to information overlaid on your view of the world without obscuring it (usually around the periphery of your field of view), like in video games. Simple HUDs might display the time or mirror notifications from your phone, with more advanced versions capable of translating text on signs or identifying places around you.

DoF stands for degrees of freedom, and at least three degrees of freedom are essential for the tracking that enables spatial computing. With 3 DoF, you can fix virtual screens in specific places so they stay put as you turn or tilt your head instead of moving with you. I find this crucial to avoid motion sickness. This is also what enables you to look around in virtual environments. With 6 DoF, you can move your entire body around in virtual environments and interact with virtual objects.

FoV stands for field of view, and most smart glasses today have a very limited one, around 50 degrees or less, which compares poorly to a fully immersive VR headset like the Meta Quest 3 (8/10, WIRED Review) with its 110-degree field of view. Because of this limitation, the virtual displays in smart glasses are often blurry or feel cut off around the edges, sometimes called fringing.

Controls can be tricky with most smart glasses, including small buttons on the stems. Connected devices, like smartphones, that mirror the screen to the glasses require a separate Bluetooth controller for gaming or navigating because the phone screen is turned off when they are connected. Some smart glasses have apps that offer trackpad and pointer controls. More advanced smart glasses with outward-facing cameras can track your hands.

Compatibility is another minefield with smart glasses, so check that your preferred devices are supported before you buy. Some devices, like your iPhone or handheld gaming console, require an additional adapter or dock. The range of available features and how well everything works is also variable in my experience.

Setup and fitting are crucial to get the most out of your smart glasses. Smart glasses with virtual displays tend to be adjustable and often come with interchangeable nose pads and maybe diopter dials to adjust focus. You can often tweak things like interpupillary distance (IPD) in the software. It's worth spending some time fiddling around to find the right mix of comfort and focus.

While prototype facial computers date back as far as the late ’60s, it was Google Glass that popularized the idea of smart glasses. First released as a developer kit, Google Glass is more than a decade old. They gave rise to a serious privacy debate but were also beloved by early adopting “Glassholes.” After failing to take off as a consumer product, Google Glass pivoted into factories and warehouses, highlighting the potential of augmented reality in the workplace.

The first wave of augmented reality glasses looked bad and largely flopped. They were chunky and heavy, were light on features, and made wearers look like cyborg extras from a sci-fi B-movie. The first pair I tried from Vuzix made me question the entire category. There was a lot of hype about augmented reality, but most of these chunky glasses offered relatively low-resolution displays superimposed over your field of view. For smart glasses to truly blend the real world in front of you with the virtual world, they would need cameras, processing power, and some very smart software.

Many players, big and small, have tried and failed to make an impact in this space. The early excitement generated by companies like Magic Leap evaporated amid clunky hardware at high prices. The trouble with some of the most ambitious examples thus far, like Microsoft HoloLens 2 or Apple’s Vision Pro, is that they are relatively big and heavy and, more importantly, horribly expensive. The most successful smart glasses so far, and the only ones we can recommend, are far more focused, less ambitious, and cheaper, though they also fall well short of the original vision.

But there’s a palpable sense that smart glasses are ready for another try. Google’s Android XR opens up the space for developers to make the killer apps needed to drive adoption, and it has begun showing off new AI-powered smart glasses and a mixed-reality headset developed with Samsung. Xreal is also working on some new Android XR glasses dubbed Project Aura—these are expected to arrive in 2026. Many other smart glasses are in development, like Meta’s Orion glasses, new Snap Spectacles, and Emteq’s inward-looking smart glasses.

It's normal to see someone raising their phone and recording a video outside these days, but that doesn't quite compare to the discreet recording possibilities of smart glasses. Sure, the cameras may be visible on the frame, and there's often an LED to indicate when they're capturing content, but people are already circumventing these visibility measures. Combined with the fact that many of these smart glasses feature AI capabilities that can recognize and memorize objects, they're a real surveillance risk. Much of this responsibility is being passed on to you and how you use the glasses, so be aware of local recording and privacy laws.

It's also worth noting that smart glasses and their companion apps often ask for access to a lot of your data, including messages, photos, and other sensitive information that you might rather keep private. Try to check out the privacy policies and consider whether they need all the permissions they are requesting.

This is a hard question to answer. Smart glasses may not be as expensive as a smartphone, but they're not cheap. The category is still new, and we're seeing many new companies come to market while established brands release new models faster than you can say augmented reality. As soon as we finish testing one product, there's already another model with better features available. Just be cognizant of that fact and invest only if you have the cash and don't mind the tech being eclipsed within a few months. Alternatively, that also might mean it's better to wait and watch the space play out in the rest of 2025 to see if there's a clear winner.