Is anybody making smart glasses that are just a display? For me, the rest of the feature set verges on being anti-features. I'd much rather a very rudimentary display that my phone or another device could send relatively low bandwidth data to over bluetooth or some other protocol and build from there.
Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.
It would be difficult to do head tracking without a camera and having it fixed in your view would limit what you could do with it and be distracting I think (depends on the use case/person though)
Not to toot my own horn, but I've been fiddling with a now-discontinued, very cheap pair of display smart glasses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45087803
You can send low-resolution images to them via Bluetooth. I just figured out how to read button presses. There are speakers and a mic, but I haven't figured out how to use them yet (they don't show up as regular audio devices on Linux).
You'd need to write custom stuff to generate the images, but with a little imagemagick scripting I've had some pretty usable results.
Note that Solos smart glass from one of other comments might be on eBay for $49 each, but they used to be $499 new. Even Realities G1 is $599. Vufine was way cheaper at $199, but it was wired only and it came with no software whatsoever.
Smart glasses inevitably cost in those ranges because the exotic displays used on them are costly to make and/or operate. Inkjet OLED on silicon or reflexive monochrome LCD with RGB sequential front lighting combined with a prism system or things of that nature.
IOW, those excessive feature sets isn't drawn from product concepts or user stories, they're drawn backwards from cumulative parts and engineering costs to justify MSRP. Same reasons as why almost all EVs are marketed as premium products, they can't make them cheaply so they're adding extra glitters in paint to justify price tags.
If anyone could make displays smaller than a pinky fingernail at $5 that can be driven with an Arduino... then there would be lots of smart glasses that are just Bluetooth picture frames.
Both of these companies make exactly that. I have Rokid Max, can't comment on the quality for the Xreal
I think most of Xreal's offerings are just a display you plug into a phone or laptop.
The "Even Realities G1" and "Vuzix Z100" options listed in the compatibility doc look interesting.
https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/blob/main/glass...
Not quite "smart glasses", but if you want "glasses that are just a display", the Lenovo Legion Glasses are pretty good and they look like normal aviators at first glance.
I have a pair and I've been experimenting a bit.
For iOS you can mirror display or use Stage Manager. For Android, at least with Samsung, DEX is pretty decent.
For audio, they're decent too, I like the convenience and comfort. The audio has good fidelity, but depth is mediocre (better than phone speakers though).
FWIW I say DEX is decent, having much of the same gripes as I do with Stage Manager. Dual screen, resizing windows, and full screen support is still a mixed bag on all mobile devices. It can be very frustrating at times. Application support on iOS and Android is about the same, which is disappointing. Supposedly iOS 26 fixes some of this, but I haven't tried the beta.
Yeah, same here—just give me a clean display and Bluetooth. No cameras, mics, or speakers needed!
https://store.vufine.com/ I think vufine might be what you are looking for, I don't know much about them as well, also found it here on Hacker News.
It’s wired and very finicky. Basically a 10 year old solution to this problem. I have on in my collection. It’s cool but not really useful or in same tier as the other products being mentioned.’
Glasses with a camera should be legislated away with specific narrow exceptions for e.g. safety in certain industrial tasks.
Reframe this to accommodate for the prevalence and general expectations of where cameras exist.
Many people walk around with a mobile device out, essentially carrying a device with (increasingly) close to a 360 camera view. Cameras are ubiquitous and targeting one niche device is a waste of time and effort.
Sounds like a lobbyist pitch from Big Camera Glasses
Here's the deal, you don't need any of this.
I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.
Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).
So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.
I was about to make the exact same comment. But then I remembered that there are billions of people who buy products advertised on Facebook and TikTok because it's "cool" and "fun". So what do I know about the future of smart glasses OS? Probably nothing.
This comment reminds me of a simple `esp32` project I saw recently that lets you send your LLM requests via SMS. It basically offloads everything. Particularly useful when you don't have a decent data connection, but can still send SMS.
edit: found it https://www.reddit.com/r/arduino/comments/1n7r3vl/a_textbot_...
How open-source are these glasses really? Are all software components compilable from source, or do they just publish an SDK Espressif-style?
It's all open-source:
Not really, despite the repo being named MentraOS, this repo seems to include only some mobile apps (that either run on a phone or on the glasses), some server code, and some SDKs. Mentra glasses are likely running on a fork of AOSP, which is not in this repo.
AOSP (or even a minimal fork) is way too heavy to be running on the glasses. It looks like the firmware is quite minimal and the "OS" is the app.
https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/tree/main/mcu_c...
Mentra Live runs AOSP similar to the other AI glasses on the market (Ray-Ban, Xiaomi AI Glasses, RayNeo V3 AI Glasses, etc). It's heavy, but allows us to ship fast. You'll find this code in `asg_client` folder.
We're also working on a pair of HUD glasses that will release in 2026 using an NRF5340 MCU. The code for this is being developed in the `mcu_client` folder.
It looks like it really is open source. Even the "cloud" components appear to be open source, and are in this repo.
Good to see someone jump on these early with FOSS. Seems pretty early days for the this OS and the tech though. No device has full support yet. I'm still not convinced smart glasses are going to have any staying power either.
I would save your excitement. It's likely the same old playbook that every PE backed startup uses
> Devs get to write 1 app that runs on any pair of smart glases.
Except it seems they only run on Mentra glasses. Not Meta Ray-Bans, Echo Frames, or any of the many other existing smart glasses platforms.
Hey, thanks for commenting, but this isn't true. You can check out our glasses compatibility list here:
https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/blob/main/glass...
We're also looking to support the Brilliant Labs Halo glasses once they release later this year.
Regarding Ray-Bans: We'd love to support those, but the Ray-Bans are extremely locked down. Nobody has found a jailbreak yet. We're always open to support more glasses provided they're all-day wearable and have an SDK.
Store requiring an account, and apps actually running on their servers.
This is definitely not the smart glasses operating system to converge on.
If there's anything worthwhile in it I'd advise interested people in forking it, and turning it into an actually open open-source operating system.
Hey thanks for commenting. Developers host their own apps - they don't run on our servers. See:
https://docs.mentra.glass/ubuntu-deployment
https://docs.mentra.glass/railway-deployment
In your opinion, what do you think should change to make this an "actual" open source OS?
I just found out about them and it seems super good. I wonder why Meta doesn't support such a thing called "Meta Glasses Application Store"
because developers would immediately make ick apps that violate privacy or do black mirror type things that would kill any momentum
Meta is already doing that and they want all the cake for themselves
I'm more than happy to develop my own apps, but it doesn't appear that they support any one product with all the features yet.
Related. Others?
Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906442 - May 2025 (25 comments)
this doesn't include AR right? it can't overlay stuff on what i'm seeing? if not, then it's pretty useless
I'm with you. Augmented Reality is what I'm looking for. I've been dreaming about it for decades.
Live translation is something I've been dreaming about since Google Glass. I just want translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions, and ad blocking.
Even Realities G1 glasses, which support Mentra, will do the first 2. The 3rd is partial, not quite turn by turn, but you can see a map around you with them on
The idea of ad blocking with smart glasses kind of freaks me out. I'll take additive but I don't want subtractive reality where parts of the world are being hidden from me.
> and ad blocking
The possibility of shooting ads directly into the retina is probably the main driving force behind smart glasses.
And ultimate attention analysis
So without their cloud service no apps.
Wouldn‘t call that an OS.
Ridiculous.
Based on everything ive been able to infer and the comments on this thread, perhaps safe yo classify this under the FauxSS rather than FOSS
MentraOS is a cloud OS (there doesn't exist a good way to build this on the edge, we've tried). Users don't need our cloud service, however, as it can be self-hosted:
https://github.com/Mentra-Community/MentraOS/tree/main/cloud
If there's no good way to run applications on your smart glasses, they don't seem to be too smart...
Ah. I was about to ask if it is private and if the AI can run on-device, but I guess this comments answers all my questions in the negative. Too bad.
Just as its name indicates, it’s one of the same that comes up every month and produces undesirable waste at the end of the cycle
Love this bit from mentra's careers page, https://mentra.glass/pages/careers
This is not the place for
* Prioritize work-life balanceI love how direct Chinese language/culture is. (At least from my perspective.)
They're not Chinese
> We're a squad of hardcore builders between San Francisco and Shenzhen working 996 to build the next personal computer. We're upgrading human intelligence with high bandwidth interfaces. We're transhumanist hackers. And we're not just here for a job. We're here for a mission.
Being upfront about 996 (and jira hatred further down the page) is wild. I sort of love it.
If smart glasses can’t self-adjust vision or flag cataracts, they’re missing the point. This is not being discussed.