The good news is that Samsung finally let media touch its AI smart glasses—sorry, intelligent eyewear—designed in partnership with
Warby Parker, Gentle Monster, and Googleat its Galaxy Unpacked event in London, where the company also announced a trio of new foldable phones and two new smartwatches. The bad news is that Samsung didn’t let anyone wear the smart glasses on their face.
Samsung also shared some tech details about the smart glasses (I refuse to call them anything else), but not everything. We still don’t know how much they’ll cost and when they’ll launch, other than a vague timeframe around this coming fall. So let me go over what I did learn and experience. The two styles on display are very light—so light it felt like there weren’t any electronics inside of them. This is by design.
In a media roundtable, James Choi, Head of XR R&D Team EVP at Samsung, said that one of the top priorities when designing the smart glasses was to make them as thin and light as possible. Smart glasses need to be extremely light for consumers to want to wear them all day long. If they’re not light, it doesn’t matter if they’re stylish, Choi said. “We put tremendous levels of engineering into intelligent eyewear, but what customers should feel is simply just a normal pair of glasses.”
I’m supportive of that priority, and Samsung achieves the desired lightness of elegantly balancing the weight so that one temple is not heavier than the other, but the materials for both the Warby Parker and Gentle Monster frames felt cheap. The plastics scratched easily and picked up tons of fingerprints. These demo units may not properly represent the build quality of the final production models, but a cheap feeling is not what I expect from premium eyewear brands. Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses and Meta’s own brand of AI glasses feel more high-end.
Despite that, and the fact I couldn’t try them on, the two styles of smart glasses did look good. The Gentle Monster pair is a slim oval silhouette, which is very trendy at the moment. It wouldn’t surprise me if Meta rushed out its Starfire Kyle Edition AI glasses to beat Samsung to market. The Warby Parker frames are more traditional and classic—similar to Ray-Ban’s iconic Wayfarer design.
One thing I observed is that neither pair has adjustable nose pads. Meta’s own brand of AI smart glasses has plastic nose pads that can be snapped at various degrees to better fit different nose shapes. Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses don’t even have that. Choi said Samsung is planning more models, some of which may have more levels of adjustability.
Otherwise, the smart glasses share the same standard features as Meta AI glasses. There’s a camera and LED indicator on the front for letting others know when you’re recording video or taking a video. The camera supports Gemini Live, so the AI chatbot uses computer vision to tell you about what you’re looking at. Samsung didn’t share the resolution of the camera. There’s a capture button on the top of the right arm. Each side has an open speaker for making and receiving calls, listening to music, and hearing incoming notifications from apps like messages and emails, just like on Meta AI glasses.
The only specific tech spec that Choi could share was battery life. He said Samsung’s smart glasses can last for up to 9 hours on a single charge. He stressed that it isn’t 9 hours of continuous music streaming, which typically uses less battery life, but mixed use with heavy Gemini Live access, camera capture, and audio. I’ll be the judge of that when I get a pair to test.
He also said that the charging case, which, funny enough, is more premium-feeling, can hold an additional seven full charges. I mean, it’d better hold that many charges considering the size of the case. It’s larger than Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses cases and doesn’t fold flat like the one for the Meta Fury AI glasses.
Outside of the battery spec, Choi emphasized how Samsung focused on making the frames durable, stress-testing their designs to not only ensure that they could withstand everyday wear and tear but also any unexpected abuses. Samsung engineers dropped and bent all parts of the smart glasses, like the hinges, arms, and temples to go beyond the durability of even regular glasses. Choi said the durability needed to be several magnitudes stronger than regular glasses because the electronics have to survive even if the exterior is bruised. Water, cosmetics, and sunscreen tests are also performed on them. “Usually, if you apply the same tests to regular glasses, they break much earlier,” Choi said. “I think maybe they could be the most durable glasses ever built so far.”
Choi said that Samsung had over 200 patents for the design of its smart glasses. The number sounds impressive until you hear that Snap has more than 7,000 patents covering its entire portfolio of smart glasses throughout the past decade.
He also revealed the smart glasses can be controlled with a Samsung Galaxy Watch, where the screen can be used as a touchpad. Samsung envisions an era of “split computing” where different tasks are offloaded from your phone to Samsung smart glasses, a smartwatch, and wireless earbuds. “Our goal is not to replace smartphones,” he said. “Ultimately, we want to create AI glasses that help people use their phone less while getting more value from the mobile experience they rely on.”
The similarities between Samsung and Meta’s display-less smart glasses were inevitable. Meta laid out the blueprint for what features would be table stakes, and now everyone is following. As I put the smart glasses back on their podiums, I pondered the term “intelligence eyewear” and its implications. At the roundtable, Choi said he was aware that there are privacy hurdles to overcome but also cultural challenges ahead. How do you sell camera-equipped smart glasses to people that are increasingly associating the product with being “pervert glasses” used for secretly filming others? There may be different levels of acceptance depending on the country. Perhaps that’s why Samsung didn’t share camera details and instead framed (no pun intended) the utility of its smart glasses more around intelligence (AI and Gemini Live), more as an AI assistant/companion than a recording device on your face.
Choi said Samsung is working with different governments regarding regulation and will monitor consumer reception based on region. He added that innovation can’t stop just because of some bad actors. “Just like how you use your knife, the intentional bad uses need to be covered and protected. But if you stop the innovation, you don’t go anywhere. So this is an industry-shared problem, and I believe we’ll find a way to optimize a wide solution for this.”