In our Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses review, we described the gadget as the best AI wearable on the market right now – and it looks like Google is ready to return to the smartglasses market with its own augmented reality (AR) glasses.
According to The Financial Times And The edgeMeta is considering acquiring a stake in EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear manufacturer that is co-producing two generations of the AR-enhanced Ray-Bans with Meta.
At the same time, Google has apparently also approached EssilorLuxottica to launch another pair of Ray-Bans, this time with Gemini AI on board. It’s not quite Google Glass, but it’s in the same territory.
While the reports indicate that it is unlikely that EssilorLuxottica will cut ties with Meta and instead partner with Google, it is more evidence that Google is indeed working on some AR specifications and wants to implement Gemini in more hardware.
The story so far
Before Luxottica merged with Essilor, they actually worked with Google on the Google Glass devices, so the two companies have a history together. It makes sense that they would want to work together again, even if Google Glass wasn’t a huge success.
We’ve seen plenty of signs that a new and improved version of Google Glass is on the way, including code hidden in the Google app for Android. We briefly showed off some specs at Google I/O 2022, but there’s been little substantive news since then.
In May, Magic Leap announced it was working with Google on “Extended Reality (XR) solutions and experiences,” but we don’t know exactly what that will entail yet. Google is also working hard with Samsung on XR hardware.
At Google I/O 2024, we also saw some clever specs in a demo of Project Astra, Google’s vision for how advanced AI can improve everyday life. However, no specific specs were hinted at, and no official details about the device have been revealed.