In the blink of an eye, Google teased what appears to be its next smart glasses project, one it could be building with the help of Samsung and perhaps even Qualcomm.
You could be forgiven for not waiting until the end of Google I/O's three-hour keynote to watch a Gemini AI promotional video that runs through many of the biggest announcements. It was a lot to digest, but within all the clips you could glimpse a pair of glasses that were almost unmistakably smart.
There are already rumors that Google and Samsung are working on an XR/VR headset, but smart glasses like these, which would likely be based on Qualcomm's much smaller and more efficient Snapdragon AR2 chip, also seem plausible.
In the video (see GIF below), someone grabbed a pair of chunky-looking black-rimmed glasses. While we never see them on anyone's face, what appears to be someone's point of view through the lenses follows.
The user asks what they are looking at, which appears to be a drawing on a blackboard of a pair of cats: one alive and one dead. The AI responds with voice and with a text that we can see in front of us: “Schrödinger's cat.”
Obviously, we don't know if the visual is real and if Google really intends to offer smart glasses with integrated AR displays. That's not something we're seeing from competitors like Meta (Ray-Bay Meta Wayfarers) and Amazon (Amazon Echo Frames).
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Still, Google has a rich history in AR glasses. Google Glass (RIP) featured a small front display designed to overlay your real world. The screen was too small and everyone who used it looked ridiculous, but that technology is already a decade old. It's 2024 and there are new possibilities for chips, AR, microdisplays and AI that can help drive them forward.
Of course, that's the key to Google Smart Glass's potential success: built-in Gemini AI (like Gemini Nano) that can make them much more useful than Google Glass ever was.
We know nothing more than what those few seconds of video tell us. Maybe tomorrow we'll have the full story when Google releases Google I/O Keynote: The Return.
