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Smart eyewear promises to transform how we see and interact with the world. Among its many potential advantages, the technology offers hands-free access to information, vision enhancement, and accessibility tools. But until recently, technical limitations—bulky hardware, short battery life, and awkward design—have prevented more widespread adoption of wireless visual assistance solutions.
Now advances in the sensors that collect complex data, power efficiency, and creative architectures are moving the vision for smart glasses much closer to everyday reality.
Why smart glasses are hard to get right
The perception of smart glasses as a science-fiction gimmick is fading into the past. Popular features and benefits of these increasingly practical wireless products can include real-time facial recognition, visual assistance, text translation, eye tracking, or even adaptive focus.
But making all of that happen on a face-worn device is uniquely difficult. Complex tasks like eye or face tracking generate lots of data, while running computations on-device (‘Edge AI’)—although fast and private—is power-hungry. Sending video to the Cloud also raises privacy issues and introduces lag. Furthermore, glasses need to be light, comfortable and stylish – not weighed down by bulky batteries. No one wants to wear a computer that looks like a prototype.
Lessons learned from Google Glass attempt
To understand why smart glasses have previously struggled to make a bigger impact, look no further than Google Glass. Launched with fanfare in the early 2010s, it promised a futuristic heads-up display. Unfortunately, the product faced serious backlash. Google Glass’ battery life and performance were limited, the visible camera raised major privacy concerns in public settings, there were few compelling apps for the average user, and perhaps most importantly, the design was too intrusive – both socially and physically.
Glass failed to catch on with consumers, though it found some niche uses in healthcare and enterprise. For the industry, the lesson was clear – to succeed, smart eyewear must deliver value, wearability and aesthetics all together.
Detecting facial expressions and eye movement
One innovative approach comes from Cornell University researchers, who have developed sonar-based smart glasses[1]. Instead of relying on cameras—which impose heavy computational, bandwidth, and power costs—their prototypes use inaudible sound waves to detect facial expressions and eye movement.
The systems, called GazeTrak (for eye tracking) and EyeEcho (for facial expression recognition), emit ultrasonic pulses from tiny speakers built into the glasses. Reflections from the user's face or eyes are captured by microphones and processed using machine learning (ML) to infer attention and emotion.
EyeEcho runs on Nordic Semiconductor’s compact and power-efficient nRF52840 Bluetooth LE SoC, demonstrating that advanced sensing can be achieved without the overhead of heavy camera systems. While this approach is still in development, it shows great promise for building lower-power, privacy-preserving smart eyewear.
A Nordic-powered autofocus smart lens solution
While Cornell’s sonar-based system is still a prototype, ViXion Inc. has released a real-world example of smart eyewear that solves the common problem of changing focus. ViXion01S is an autofocus smart lens solution targeting users with presbyopia (long sightedness) or myopia (short sightedness). The glasses use integrated sensors to measure the distance to viewing targets automatically and adjust focus between near and far vision based on the sensor input.
What sets ViXion01S apart is its integration and power efficiency. The device employs Kaga FEI’s EJ2840 module based on the Nordic nRF52840 SoC to supervise the sensors and control all product functions, including lens control, sensor control, and button and buzzer operations. It also uses Nordic’s nPM1300 Power Management IC (PMIC), a compact power management chip that handles battery charging, voltage regulation, and more – reducing component size and improving energy efficiency. The result is a lightweight 33 g design with 15 hours of battery life on a small 150 mAh battery.
Nordic nRF54 Series to enhance visual assistance applications
For wireless visual assistance applications to perform optimally, the combination of powerful processing, reliable wireless connectivity and ultra-low power consumption is critical. To that end, Nordic Semiconductor’s next-generation nRF54L15 ultra-low power wireless SoC doubles the processing power, triples the processing efficiency, and significantly reduces the power consumption of its comparable predecessor.
In addition, Nordic’s acquisition of Neuton.AI and partnership with Edge Impulse (two leading providers of ‘TinyML’ platforms) have unleashed ultra-efficient and easy-to-use machine ML on the edge, with the nRF54 Series SoCs enabling Edge AI with low power consumption and extended battery life.
- Read more: AI and machine learning goes mainstream
Practical uses of smart glasses today and tomorrow
As the relevant technologies evolves, clear use cases are emerging for wireless visual assistance. For visually impaired users, smart glasses that can read text aloud, identify objects or faces, or warn of obstacles are beginning to reach usable levels. In manufacturing, logistics, and field work—where hands‑free displays and heads‑up guidance prove valuable—form and ruggedness perhaps outweigh fashion, but efficiency and reliability are essential. For tasks where overlaying data (such as augmented reality in surgery, repair, or navigation) adds real value, smart eyewear can help productivity.
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And with consumer lifestyle and fashion merging, companies are trying to embed tech discretely so people can wear smart glasses without looking ‘gadgety’. A prominent example of this is Ray‑Ban Meta AI glasses, which blend cutting-edge tech with the brand’s iconic style.
These trends are being supported by improvements in low‑power chips, Edge AI, better optics and displays, and new sensing modalities. Looking to the future, smart eyewear might yet become the next big thing in wearables.
References
1. Smart glasses see without vision. Hackster, 2024
