2024 was a big year for spatial computing, bookended by the release of two major virtual reality headsets: the powerful but expensive Apple Vision Pro and the more affordable Meta Quest 3S. While these devices transport their users to vast, strange digital realms, they can also feel limiting, because they reduce—or even sever—the wearer’s connection to the real world.

That’s where their lighter, more (um) wearable cousins come in: smart glasses. Turns out, lots of people like a device that you can take out of the house and onto the street. There’s an incredible convenience to interacting digitally with the real world at the same time you’re actually looking at it, all without obscuring your view with a bulky headset or distracting you with a phone screen.

These more approachable face computers have come a long way since the days of the Glasshole. Smart glasses—which I’ll loosely define here as internet-connected eyewear with apps built into them—have crossed the divide from an era of goofy, unappealing wearables like Google Glass into genuinely useful devices that you might not even be too ashamed to wear in public.

Ray-Ban Meta is the big dog in the smart glasses pack. Meta, a company whose reputation has been mired by its own often problematic uncoolness, has managed to leverage the long established cool factor of the Ray-Ban brand to make a range of smart glasses that people actually like. They look nice and have real functionality that many people can easily grasp and that proponents find incredibly useful. They can take photos and video, act as a headset for music and calls, and use voice features powered by Meta AI to send texts or ask about something in the world. New features added this month give the glasses the ability to do things like remember where you parked your car and use Shazam to figure out what song is playing near you. All this happens without a built-in display, which means you can keep your eyes on real life.

The success of the Ray-Ban Meta frames has shown that there’s a market for display-free smart eyewear that doesn’t just work like VR-light. Smaller companies and startups have been barreling ahead with every kind of smart lens imaginable. This year alone, we’ve seen new smart glasses, or the technology to power them, from companies like Oppo glasses, Swave, and Emteq. Some were a little goofy and disappointing, like Brilliant Labs’ Frames released in May. Others have yet to materialize, like glasses by the company Looktech that work with a variety of different chatbots and have been billed as potential Meta Ray-Ban killers after the project recently exceeded its funding goal (by far) on Kickstarter.

Display-driven AR glasses are still in the running, though. After all, a device that gives the wearer an active heads-up display or offers a window into the mirrorworld has long been considered the brass ring of spatial computing. Meta is pursuing this goal with its Orion glasses—a pair of ambitious AR tech that, while still deep in the development process, aim to do just about everything your smartphone can do, but on your face. Snap is in a player here too, with cyberpunky Spectacles with apps that focus on social interactions for its younger, more playful users.

Through the Glass

Another augmented reality leviathan has recently awakened. In early December, Google announced the launch of its Android XR software platform, which includes an upcoming pair of smart glasses with a display in the lenses. Google’s efforts are similarly a work in progress, but the company has an advantage due to the sheer magnitude of its developer partners who are already building on Android’s many platforms. Google’s glasses run Android apps, essentially taking a lot of stuff that currently lives on a smartphone—maps, texting, news feeds—and putting it directly in front of your eyeballs.

“They’re probably the closest of the big, tier one competitors that can ship something to compete with Meta,” says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights and Strategy. “Meta doesn’t have a display yet. So they might even beat Meta to shipping one with a display.”

The AR nerd trophy is still a long way off. Full-fledged augmented glasses are very difficult to make in a fashionable form. An array of issues come with trying to pack the computing power into the small frame, balance the thermal management so it doesn’t melt the skin off peoples’ ears, and find which optics can fit into which forms.

“The minute you start trying to put displays in smart glasses, you enter a world of pain,” says Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insights. “There is this absolute glut of challenges that emerge that require all sorts of inventive computing solutions. That’s where we still have some distance to go.”

That distance has led some companies to scale back or abandon their AR ambitions. In October, Microsoft discontinued its HoloLens VR headset, a device that had been positioned as offering all the power of a desktop computer right there on your face. Magic Leap, another of the old gods of VR, has also recently ended support for its first headset and laid off its sales and marketing teams in a pivot of some kind. The reigning XR titans—Meta, Google, Apple, Samsung, and Snap—aren’t in danger of going away quite yet. But they’re also not yet ready to deploy the life-changing tech they keep promising.

Despite all the advances in this space, “We’re in this weird period where AR has kind of gone backwards a bit this year,” Gebbie says.

Zoom In

That recalibration might make room for the smaller, more niche uses of smart glasses. Companies like Form, which makes smart swim goggles that display the wearer’s swimming metrics right on screen. Or XReal, which focuses on mimicking a big screen display right on the lenses to let users feel like they’re watching media on a big screen. Companies like Emteq focus on medical or more holistic fields like psychotherapy and diet that aim to (imperfectly) detect emotions and watch what you eat.

“The devices that we’re left with right now aren’t the super advanced ones, or the ones that claim to be all-encompassing,” Gebbie says. “Those have kind of fizzled out. The things that are still standing and more active are the specific use case-driven headsets.”

What’s less clear is how the smaller companies in the glasses game might navigate the many complexities of wearable computing without the mind-boggling resources of a company like Meta. Especially in the hardware space, bigger companies have a habit of buying up the smaller ones and folding them into their R&D labs. Smart swim goggles, say, might be a very nice use case that appeals to a specific user. But it’s unclear whether they’ll be able to stay afloat once Meta or Google start circling.

“The successful AR and smart glasses companies all got acquired,” Sag says of the early days of XR tech. “So nothing really came to market because they were all gobbled up or they all ran out of money. That’s the fundamental problem that we had. And if you look at the companies that got acquired, they all ended up getting acquired by Google and Meta and Apple and none of those products ever came out.”

Glasses may not wind up being the end-all wearable for every bit of tech we want with us at all times, but the future is looking more and more like it will rest on our faces. Companies will keep churning out new glasses, breathlessly sharing their new, exciting, never-before-seen features that may fit one use case but not many. So keep your lens cleaner handy. Smart glasses will be in your face—if not on it—all year long.