During the period of Google I/O2024, the company sneaked out the glasses along with Project Astra, a fresh approach to on-demand AI assistance for navigating the tasks it encounters on a specific day. Google didn't do it until it announced the revival of Google Glass, but the teaser shows that such devices are probably working. 

Gadgets stuffed with AI agents have a good way, not a moment. Back-to-back letdowns from the wearable human-like AI pins and the pocketable rabbit R1 box reveal that design plays a major role in the practicality of AI hardware in everyday life. The projection of your hand is whimsical and no one wants to carry around another device of the same size as their smartphone.

The only form factor that makes sense for now is being carefully and comfortably worn on the face, as we have seen from the growing success of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses. Even before the recently launched meta AI massive update, the glasses are versatile, making them one of the few products I take anywhere.1 1. Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses comes with headphones, camera and AI butler.That's exactly why they're great and why Google should follow Meta's lead.

While there are several alternative ChatGPT-powered smart glasses on the market, the Google version that adapts impressive Gemini AI capabilities for things like object identification and other camera-based prompts would be major.

The Google demo provides some examples that Project Astra can achieve by simply analyzing what the camera sees in real-time, recreating the core of how Gemini is transforming Google search results in favor of relevance. 

Glasses can help you ask homework questions in real time while looking at equations, identifying landmarks, and answering questions about points of interest. 

Project Astra will first appear on the phone in the form of Gemini Live, but I think the glasses with Gemini Live are not too far away. Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses has cleared the essential first step of proving that an eye-level camera and an ear-level microphone are the most natural way to interact with all kinds of "look at tell me" AI tools. 

Given the option, my gut, Smart Glass adopters tend to choose Google over Meta as the manufacturer, based on the history of each company providing information Do you never choose a product from a company whose name is literally used as a verb in search? 

There's not much else to say about Google smart glasses at the moment, and certainly not beyond speculation. That said, I would be nervous if I was meta.