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I've been wearing Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses a lot over the past year. I use them to easily record POV video of my experiences at theme parks like Epic Universe, using tech like the Nintendo Switch 2 and everywhere else. They're great, but the battery runs out fast, and the cameras could be better.
That might be changing soon. Qualcomm just announced its newest chip for smart glasses, which will roll out in products starting next year. It promises more power efficiency, support for better cameras and even AI that'll work offline on glasses without a cloud connection.
The new AR1 Plus Gen 1 chip is an upgrade from chips on smaller smart glasses like Meta Ray-Bans. It's not meant for higher-end AR glasses that project 3D images, but it could very well show up on the types of display-enabled glasses that Google recently showed off at its developer conference and on Meta's next generation of Ray-Bans.
I spoke to Qualcomm's head of XR, Ziad Asghar, about the news and what it'll mean for glasses you could be buying soon.
A smaller chip allows a bigger battery
The Meta Ray-Bans I wear these days already look like real glasses, just slightly chunky ones. Asghar emphasizes that the new chip is 20% smaller. That's going to help future smart glasses look even more like regular glasses, with thinner frames, for example.
"If I've got to make it fit on the side of the glass," Asghar told me about the chip, "I need to get that dimension really small."
A tinier chip also leaves more room to pack in battery capacity. The power efficiency of the new chip will actually be around 5% better despite its smaller size. That doesn't sound like much, but Asghar also sees a future shift to more off-glasses processing on phones that will also help battery life. At the moment, devices like Meta Ray-Bans use cloud processing for AI.
Qualcomm's new chip could make the next wave of glasses smaller.
QualcommRoom for more AI, even offline
"What's truly different now is AI," Asghar says about the current state of smart glasses. "I keep saying this, but I truly believe it, that it's going to help XR use cases probably more than any other space."
One of the new tricks Qualcomm's new chip can do is on-device AI running small language models, letting it do more offline things with voice commands. Qualcomm's showing off some of these demos at the Augmented World Expo conference in Long Beach, California, I'm attending, so I'll share thoughts on how it works soon.
Meta Ray-Bans can use voice commands to take photos and while offline, but the bag of voice tricks for future glasses could be even more expanded. Think fitness, music playback and more.
"This device has a character as a standalone device as well. This is not just always linked or tethered to another device or tethered to the cloud. And I think that will open up quite a lot of scenarios," says Asghar.
Better cameras for low light, motion
Meta Ray-Bans take better photos and videos than you might expect, but the video quality is wide-angle and still sometimes jittery when I'm moving. Asghar says the new chips will improve camera and image stabilization.
"Let's say you're sitting in a restaurant at night, in dim light, and I have a menu in front of me that I want to translate. That's what we're working on, how to improve the low-light capability." Asghar also says camera stabilization will be better for videos and photos.
I ask about whether zoom features could come to glasses like these, which would likely require in-glasses displays, something these chips support. Asghar points to digital cropping as an option, and even possibly eye-tracking-based zoom control in the future.
The Samsung Galaxy Ring doesn't work with glasses yet, but Qualcomm's demos of rings and glasses suggest it will eventually.
Lexy Savvides/CNETPlaying better with wearable rings, external pucks
Smart glasses are headed toward a deeper relationship with our phones and other wearables, and Qualcomm's already a player in all those spaces: it's also one of the key partners with Google's Android XR. Asghar sees watches as being a part of a wearable halo of gear that'll all work with glasses soon enough, but he sees even more potential in smaller wearables like rings today.
"You could essentially use a ring, and you could use it very discreetly," he says. Your hand could be down, and nobody knows," Asghar says. Qualcomm's demos at AWE show off a Bluetooth smart ring for gesture controls with glasses, hinting at decisions that could be coming soon from other partners.
Upcoming glasses could use their own processing pucks. Xreal is adopting a puck for its first experimental Android XR device, Project Aura, and Meta's already demo done for its concept Orion glasses. Part of the appeal of that puck is that it could allow glasses to more easily work around the limits of phones and their OSes (basically, Android and iOS) right now.
"The great thing about glasses is it gives our cloud players the path to be able to bring their AI and LLMs and agents to consumers," Asghar says. "Not every cloud player has smartphone assets."
Pucks could be a sign that while Android XR has now been announced as a future bridge to AR and VR devices, Google's still going to need some time to figure out how the phone-to-glasses link actually works. Apple, meanwhile, hasn't enabled any integrated smart glasses support for iOS at all, at least beyond individual apps like Meta's that are walled off from Siri and deeper phone access.
Battery life remains an issue
I can't get through more than half a day of Ray-Bans use at best before I need a recharge. Asghar admits that glasses have a battery life problem at the moment but says some solutions could pop up. This new chip may not boost battery life that much, but more on-phone processing or connected pucks might help.
"Today, the battery mostly resides on just one side. And we know that people are looking at basically doubling up the battery, having a dual-cell battery on both of the glasses legs to increase the capacity," he says. "Or maybe they can come up with an interesting design that allows a replaceable battery."
What about things that aren't even glasses?
AI leader OpenAI bought Jony Ive's hardware company, which is working on some sort of AI device that might be pendant-based instead of sitting on your face, or could sit on a desk. It's entirely possible that more camera-based AI wearables like the failed Humane AI Pin will be coming too. Asghar acknowledges that Qualcomm's processors could end up in devices other than glasses.
"This is the great part, right?" he told me. "People are gonna really experiment with form factors. You don't get this opportunity very often. The smartphone is pretty settled. This [XR] space is not settled. An AI agent device can be smart glasses. It can also be something on your body."
But Asghar knows whatever comes has to raise the bar better than AI device failures of the past. "There have been pretty significant failures. People do have very high expectations from products like this. They need to run, and they need to run very well." And hopefully last longer than a few hours on a charge.
