Google teases AI glasses

The demo was amazing. But will Google ship them this year?

I predicted Sunday on This Week in Tech that Google would announce consumer AI glasses at Google I/O today. I was wrong. But they did tease them.

During a video demonstration of Project Astra, where visual AI identifies and remembers objects in the room and performs other neat tricks via a Pixel phone, the woman demonstrating picks up AI glasses and continues with her Astra session through the glasses, rather than the phone.

The video gives fragmentary glimpses of the glasses, including a picture-in-picture look at the narrator wearing them. I took a screenshot and enhanced it with an AI upscaler to arrive at this result:

The video appears to demonstrate that Project Astra features (coming to Gemini later this year, Google says) are light years ahead of Ray-Ban Meta’s multimodal feature, which snaps a picture then returns general information about the image. Astra is capturing video over time, which the AI can process in real time or refer back to. It feels like the AI is watching, thinking and remembering — which, of course, it isn’t.

The prototype glasses are interesting. Besides looking like the kind of heavy black glasses Jeff Goldblum would wear, they aren’t just audio. They seem to be projecting images to the wearer, as with Google Glass. The demo video shows a “processing” graphic (indicating that it’s working on the query) and basically subtitles for the spoken results appear on the video, which presumably appear in the glasses. So it may be words only, plus status graphics, and nothing else.

The glasses look similar to Google's translation glasses, demonstrated at Google I/O two years ago. Those glasses showed subtitles in your own language to whatever others were saying, regardless of their language. Then, in 2023, Google did what Google does best, and canceled the project. My guess is that they simply repurposed the prototype hardware for Project Astra development.

One possibility is that Google will release glasses when Astra features come to Gemini “later this year.” Another is that they’ll release glasses next year or later. But whether Google does release AI glasses this year or doesn’t, the category is set to take off. AI glasses will take the world by storm — with or without Google.

---

Shameless Self-Promotion

• A glimpse at the powerful future of information

• Why you’ll soon have a digital clone of your own

• Researchers develop malicious AI ‘worm’ targeting generative AI systems

• Read ELGAN.COM for more!

• Love food and travel? Check out our Gastronomad blog!

---

My Location: Penedès, Spain

(Why Mike is always traveling.)