There's momentum building behind smart glasses right now—as these gadgets gradually get more useful and less ugly—and the Halliday Glasses are the latest pair to arrive, launching at CES 2025 (and yes, the company is named after the inventor of the virtual world in Ready Player One).
The lightweight specs tip the scales at just 35 grams (1.2 ounces) and come with a couple of interesting features: The first is a small built-in monochrome green display, which projects information right on to your eyeball. This can be used to show anything from incoming messages to responses to web searches.
Secondly, there's an optional smart ring available that lets you control the glasses using gestures: It seems to work a bit like a miniature trackpad. You don't have to use the ring, though, because you can also tap on the side of the specs or use voice commands to navigate through the interface.
There's some artificial intelligence here too, of course—which appears to be powered by Proactiva.AI, at least in part (Halliday hasn't said too much about AI models or how they work). The AI assistant runs from a connected smartphone, and offers real-time translation, document summaries, notification management, and the usual AI chatbot responses to any questions you've got about life, the universe, and everything.
The promotional materials for Halliday also mention step-by-step navigation right in your eyeline via the integrated display, though as with the AI, there isn't much in the way of detail about how this works or what's powering it. Music playback is mentioned as well, while the maximum battery life is said to be around the 12-hour mark.
"AI glasses shouldn't make you look like a weirdo or frustrate you with annoying display issues," says Halliday, addressing one of my key goals in life—to not look like a weirdo. "Halliday adopts an everyday style design, powered by the world's smallest optical module, eliminating light leakage and rainbow effects while offering practical features for daily use."
The obvious comparison here are the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, which we reviewed last year and have been largely impressed by. As with the Halliday Glasses, they look like a normal pair of spectacles, which is the crucial first step in putting together a product that people are actually going to want to wear on their faces.
Meta's smart specs don't come with a display like the Halliday Glasses do, relying instead on integrated speakers to feed information back to you. They're voice- and gesture-operated, and also come with built-in AI to answer your pressing questions about sports scores or the address of a restaurant.
What Meta's glasses do have is a built-in camera for taking photos and videos on the go, which the Halliday specs lack. The Ray-Ban Meta Glasses are a touch heavier at 49 grams (1.7 ounces), give you somewhere in the region of four hours of battery life, and start at $329 for the most basic pair. Both the Halliday and the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses support prescription lenses, if needed.
Halliday is bringing these to market through a crowdsourcing campaign, and a Kickstarter is launching later this month. Right now there's an early bird offer on the Halliday website where you can put down $10 to get the Halliday Glasses for $370 (with a free prescription lens upgrade). By the time the crowdfunding is up and running, they're expected to retail for $490.
More smart glasses are expected later this year, but as both the Halliday Glasses and the Ray-Ban Meta Glasses show, some compromises are still required: Adding a camera means adding extra weight and reducing battery life, for example. The success or failure of this particular pair may depend on how well that integrated display works, and how useful the attached AI assistant proves to be.
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