Created by Google’s Nano Banana Pro. “Make a tangled miasma of smart watches, smart glasses, earbuds, smart rings, and AI pins deep in the ocean.”
A few months ago I reflected on the overload of wearables that sometimes feels put upon me. It can make me feel like a cyborg. It comes with the job. But what if or when the wearables start to be marketed as package deals? Maybe that’s happening quite soon.
Reports of Apple releasing up to three AI-ready wearables keep growing. Upgraded AirPods (with cameras), glasses, a pin. Also, don’t forget the Apple Watch. Are these a quad of AI-ready things? Do we wear them all? Do we wear one or two? Is this like the iPad and Mac (and Vision Pro), where each one is the “best computer” until the next one is announced? Is Gemini going to power these with camera-aware “visual intelligence,” as I expected it would?
Then there’s Meta. Reports say a second version of Ray-Ban Displays are coming this year, and along with them, a watch. I’ve been waiting for Meta to build out a wrist device with more features to better justify wearing the neural band that, as of now, only controls the glasses. That might be exactly what’s happening. Do we even want a Meta fitness watch? What if it’s a Garmin watch? What if it’s also a remote control for the glasses?
And then, Google. Samsungs and Google and Warby Parker and Gentle Monster’s smart glasses are coming this year, and so is Xreal and Google’s Project Aura, which are tethered display glasses that can run VR and mixed reality apps. But then these glasses will also work with watches. And maybe also rings? And also don’t forget earbuds, for audio privacy. And all of this will triangulate with our phones, just like Apple’s wearables aim to do.
These things aren’t far off. They’re this year, next year. This is the 2026-2027 Wave of New Wearables, a movement sparked by the meteoric hype rise of AI, and we still need new interfaces to make these all work better.
And what about the privacy protections, and the new abilities? Apple’s lip-reading AI tech, Meta’s possible facial recognition. Neural tech on the horizon. AI accelerating.
I’m just here, this week, to flag that these things are coming. All the little stories I’ve been paying attention to are following a similar pattern. I’m perking up and listening.
This is a short one this week. Just a marker on the trail. Dealing with snow, and also drifting into writing a play right now that’s filling me with excitement and apprehension. Another play about AI, my third now. But this one’s intimate, reduced, concentrated. I’m trying to find books to read that resonate with my mind. Right now, “When the Angels Left the Old Country,” by Sacha Lamb, is my comfort read. It’s a fantasy novel about an angel and a demon and Jewish diaspora to America a century over. I was meant to read it for a book club and didn’t get it done in time because of “The Antidote” by Karen Russell, another book I finished…a haunted novel about America’s injustices and also, immigration to America. And ghosts. And witches.
More on these things to come…in the meantime, I’m prepping for my trip to SXSW in March (my first ever!) where I’ll be speaking on a panel with Meow Wolf and Niantic Spatial about infusing reality with the unreal in location-based experiences. And, I’ll be speaking at AWE in Long Beach in June. So much to come! And it’s only February. Hanging in. Let’s make it through the snow and ice.