Smartphones are recognized for being a one-size-fits-all expertise answer. They work for nearly everybody, and if they do not give you the results you want proper out of the field, there are a great deal of accessibility options and {hardware} equipment that may make them good. If good glasses like the Android XR ones I tried at Google I/O 2025 are a future smartphone alternative, that is an issue.
One thing you put on in your face must be way more private to you than a cellphone you stash away in your pocket or bag. Good glasses must match your private type whereas additionally feeling snug, accommodating the assorted face and head shapes on the market.
For prescription glasses-wearers, there are extra concerns. You want to have the ability to match all kinds of prescription lenses inside good frames at an affordable value.
To date, there is not a single pair of smart glasses and even one VR/XR headset that matches the invoice.
Meta appears to have gotten closest with the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, providing the expertise in a handful of Ray-Ban types. They’re accessible in traditional Wayfarer frames or an elegant Skyler look, plus a couple of others. Nevertheless, Meta did not make the good glasses accessible for low-vision customers. The prescription lens vary for Ray-Ban Meta is merely -6.00 to +4.00 complete energy, which leaves lots of people out.
Final yr, I wrote that whereas I liked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, I’d never wear them again. It wasn’t as a result of they weren’t helpful or too expensive — it was as a result of my new eyewear prescription now falls exterior Meta’s extraordinarily restricted vary.
Smaller manufacturers appeared to have solved this drawback already. Solos’ AirGo 3 good glasses help an unlimited prescription energy vary of -15.00 to +10.00 when utilizing skinny lenses. There is not any excuse for Meta providing such restricted help for prescription lenses when different corporations, like Solos, have figured it out.
That is an accessibility drawback, plain and easy — not everybody can or needs to put on contacts, and glasses-wearers should expertise good glasses and Android XR, too.
I am hopeful that Google’s method to Android XR glasses is the one to resolve this accessibility challenge as soon as and for all. It isn’t making an attempt to make good glasses all by itself, neither is it proscribing the corporate to a single eyewear associate. Whereas Meta selected to work with EssilorLuxottica — a legacy eyewear and optical model managing common names like Ray-Ban, Oakley, and LensCrafters — Google picked two new-age companions in Warby Parker and Light Monster.
Each manufacturers are comparatively new within the eyewear house, no less than by comparability to EssilorLuxottica, however they have been abundantly profitable. Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are extraordinarily common amongst youthful audiences and have new, hip types.
I’ve little doubt that Google’s upcoming Android XR glasses shall be better-looking than Ray-Ban Metas, as a result of the latter prohibit Meta’s improvement to the older type of Wayfarer frames. In the meantime, Google has the potential to make good glasses expertise that’s frame-agnostic. In different phrases, it could design good {hardware} that may match into quite a lot of frames and types, so there’s one thing for everybody.
I emphasize the phrase potential as a result of there is no assure that Google does not simply observe in Meta’s footsteps. It might choose one or two frames from Light Monster and Warby Parker to Google-ify and name it a day. I am actually hopeful that does not occur as a result of Google has a novel alternative to do one thing that is by no means been accomplished earlier than within the good glasses house.
It could actually leverage partnerships with Light Monster and Warby Parker to make good glasses which can be fashionable, snug, and help a variety of prescription varieties for the lots, not simply the choose few who occur to have the ability to use Ray-Ban Metas.
