(Image by Nano Banana Pro)
On Friday, I took a long train ride to Brooklyn, territory I’m not familiar with. I was invited to NYU to guest judge a student presentation on mobile AR by Jesse Damiani, who teaches the graduate class and is someone I’ve been in touch with for years covering the XR landscape (he has his own newsletter, Reality Studies, too).
And so I found myself listening to eight presentations and exploratory research into unique challenges and dreams of what augmented reality could be, and in listening, I got glimpses of yearning…and frustrations…and friction, and the opportunities of a fragmented landscape of tools.
Making AR experiences isn’t easy. Toolsets can be incomplete. Visual positioning systems may not work. Scans you’d hoped would be reliable may not be. It’s all bits and pieces, and AI keeps pouring in everywhere, and it’s not a solution yet, either. Vibe coding could work, or it could fail.
I was so glad to listen in. It reminded me of visiting to judge MIT Reality Hack last winter, which I’m aiming to do again. It reminds me of talking to developers at places like Meta Connect and AWE. I want more of these moments.
And I say this because we are still at the dawn of strange new technologies that, for all their continuing hype, still aren’t fully born yet. I feel haunted by the past of future technology promises long gone, that echo again in the present. And the ghosts of the technologies Yet To Come.
I was visited by these three spirits this week, and over the last few months, writing a very long feature about the immediate present and future of smart glasses. And my latest set of demos of Google’s multiple smart glasses, all coming next year.
I remember, all too well, wandering around with Google Glass back in 2013. Getting on a train with the visor on, contact lenses in. People would stare, like I’d escaped a Starfleet vessel. Was I able to scan them, they’d ask? No. I’d see little pop-up notification once in a while, and maybe a map. I’d record a little bit of video or a photo. That was about it. Your imagination of what I could do was greater than what I was doing.
Today, that’s still sort of the same. Smart glasses now are far more powerful: the Meta Ray-Bans, which I wore out to Brooklyn to NYU, played a podcast I’ve been listening to about the 2024 game compilation UFO 50, particularly Combatants (fascinating chat on game design, and a reminder to look up the book The Grasshopper, by Bernard Suits.) I can snap a photo of an interesting moment. But the AI is spotty. I can ask the AI to describe what it sees, but it’s far from scanning you.
Google’s next glasses are coming in two flavors: Meta Ray-Ban competitors, made by Warby Parker and Gentle Monster, with display and non-display models. That’s all one flavor. One big subset of flavor. They’ll wirelessly connect with phones, use Gemini, and get notifications more easily than Meta’s. I’ve seen impressive demos with them: directional navigation, where I can look down and see a map below me that turns as I turn to show me my specific spot. I see bits of YouTube clips on them. I can ask about things in the world, and the glasses try to describe them by using the camera, like Meta’s do. I watch them auto-recognize the language of someone talking to me in Chinese, and I get the translation in my ears. These look like they’re worth waiting for, and Google’s Director of Product Management for Android XR, Juston Payne promises they should work even with my prescription, unlike Meta Ray-Ban Displays. And, they’ll work with Google’s smartwatches. You could use tap gestures to interact and even see things on the watch screen.
But there’s a second flavor: Project Aura. These tethered glasses aren’t everyday: they’re modified Xreal glasses that can plug into phones or laptops or game consoles. But Aura also plugs into a phone-sized processing puck that runs apps like Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset. It can show multiple floating apps in the room in front of me. It can run 3D VR apps like Demeo, a tabletop-style RPG. I can use my hands to grab objects in the air or click on icons. It feels like a little portable mixed reality headset in glasses form. And the micro OLED display is really good. It’s not as wide or big as on Apple Vision Pro or Samsung Galaxy XR, but the 70-degree field of view is bigger than Xreal’s other glasses. I’d wear these on a plane, do work with them, tuck them back in my bag later.
That puck will eventually be a phone. And Google will get company from Apple, someday soon, maybe as soon as next year if Apple announces something at its WWDC conference to compete with Google’s IO conference. The Game of Glasses continues.
And yet? And yet, right now, right here, it’s all unknown, Strange incompatibilities. Dreams that have to be glued together with random parts. Fumbling at what puzzle pieces exist in the giant pile of clutter that’s 2025.
I think Google’s glasses sound like the best thing the smart glasses landscape has seen yet, mostly because they’ll be working to deeply connect with the phones we already use. That’s something I’ve been waiting for for years. But even when they do hit next year, there will still be many unconnected pieces before we ever hit the dream or nightmare of what most people think smart glasses can actually do.
That ongoing sense of not-quite-there is what keeps me interested, curious about the possibilities and frictions.
And I saw little glimmers and sparks and shards in those student presentations, too.
After I talked to the students, and caught up with my friend, I walked a little while to find a store called Art of Play that I’ve shopped from online but never been to in person. It’s a wonderful little curiosity shop, full of books on art and magic and puzzles. There are special decks of cards, kinetic art, mysterious little objects. There’s a hidden close-up magic theater speakeasy somewhere behind the walls. I wasn’t able to make it to the night show, but I bought myself Seeing Stones prophecy dice, rune-like, and took them home with me. My magic beans.
I feel haunted by a future that’s almost here and still not here. And I’m collecting little magic moments in the present where I can.