The Best Smart Glasses to Augment Your Reality

This number one question that I get about smart glasses is “Why does anyone even want a pair ?” This question was a lot harder to answer before the popularity of the Meta Ray-Ban Wayfarers clarified the answer for me. A pair of smart glasses can translate text and speech or help you navigate to a destination. They can play music or let you answer calls or texts hands-free. They’re basically Bluetooth headsets that make you look fabulous at the same time.

Once you’ve stepped up in functionality (and, usually, price), a virtual screen (or several) can make working in public or while traveling so much easier. You don’t have to lug around a portable monitor or hunch over a tiny 13-inch laptop screen. I can watch a movie on a plane without squinting at a phone or work in my backyard while my kids play in the house after school. Smart glasses aren’t for everyone, but if you prize flexibility and portability, they might be for you.

Smart glasses exist on a continuum of simple to complicated. Like a wearable face computer, they can have a wide variety of price points and specs to accommodate the different types of onboard tech.

Some smart glasses can accommodate prescriptions. But not all models do. The Ray-Ban Meta Scriber Optics ($499) are the company’s first pair that is optimized for prescription lenses. Others, like the Viture Beast, require an additional prescription insert that you pop inside the frames. Most come with nose pads or diopter dials so you can dial in the fit for the most clarity.

The most basic smart glasses are electrochromic (automatically darkening) sunglasses. These are for all the people who want control of their glasses dimming. They’re marketed as smart glasses, but they probably don’t have any other tech in them.

Smart glasses can have speakers or a camera. The next step up are smart glasses— like the Ray-Ban Metas—that act as sunglasses, headphones, or a wearable smart assistant. The built-in camera means the AI assistant may also be able to see what you see and help with translations or directions.

Next up are smart glasses with portable screens. These have inset displays or projectors that only the wearer can see. You might see this display as a floating window, or lit-up text as a heads-up display (HUD) layered on top of whatever else you can see through your glasses. Most include speakers for audio and simply plug into the USB-C port on your phone or laptop to mirror the screen.

At the top end of the spectrum are AR smart glasses, sometimes described as XR glasses. XR (extended reality) is an umbrella term covering VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality). XR and AR glasses almost always have a screen component that can show you information like real-time translations of a person you’re talking to or arrow overlays to give you directions. There’s often an AI component, where you can ask the glasses about the things you see.

HUD stands for heads-up display. This refers to the text or screen of information overlaid upon—but not obscuring—view of the world. It usually appears around the periphery of your field of view, like in video games. Simple HUDs might display the time or mirror notifications from your phone, with more advanced versions capable of translating text on signs or identifying places around you.

DoF stands for degrees of freedom. At least three degrees of freedom are essential for the tracking that enables spatial computing. With 3 DoF, you can fix virtual screens in specific places so they stay put as you turn or tilt your head, instead of moving with you. This may help you avoid experiencing motion sickness. This is also what enables you to look around in virtual environments. With 6 DoF, you can move your entire body around in virtual environments and interact with virtual objects.

FoV stands for field of view, and most smart glasses today have a very limited one, around 50 degrees or less. That isn’t great when compared to a fully immersive VR headset like the Meta Quest 3 (8/10, WIRED Review), which as a 110-degree field of view. Because of this limitation, the virtual displays in smart glasses are often blurry or feel cut off around the edges, sometimes called fringing.

You wear smart glasses on your face, so they have to feel comfortable. Keep in mind that the more tech is packed into your glasses, the bigger and heavier they’ll be. With that in mind, you might want to opt for more or fewer features. Most glasses are adjustable; they might come with interchangeable nose pads and maybe diopter dials to adjust focus. You can often tweak things like interpupillary distance (IPD) in the software. It’s worth spending some time fiddling around to find the right settings. Also, keep in mind that if you’re using glasses that have to be plugged in, you’ll have a wire or battery running behind your ear.

Compatibility is another minefield with smart glasses, so before you buy a pair, confirm that they support your preferred devices. Some devices, like your iPhone or handheld gaming console, require an additional adapter or dock. The range of available features and how well everything works is also variable. For example, many streaming movies aren’t available in 3D mode because of DRM issues with glasses software.

Controls can be tricky with most smart glasses, including small buttons on the stems. Connected devices, like smartphones, that mirror the screen to the glasses require a separate Bluetooth controller for gaming or navigating because the phone screen is turned off when they are connected. Some smart glasses have apps that offer trackpad and pointer controls. More advanced smart glasses with outward-facing cameras can track your hands.

It’s normal to see someone raising their phone and recording a video outside these days, but many people really do not like how easy it’s become to record so discreetly with smart glasses. Combined with the fact that many of these smart glasses feature AI capabilities that can recognize objects and faces, they’re a real surveillance risk. Much of this responsibility is being passed on to you and how you use the glasses, so be aware of local recording and privacy laws.

It’s also worth noting that smart glasses and their companion apps often ask for access to a lot of your data, including messages, photos, and other sensitive information that you might rather keep private. Check out the privacy policies and consider whether they need all the permissions they are requesting.

While prototype facial computers date back as far as the late ’60s, it was Google Glass that popularized the idea of smart glasses. First released as a developer kit, Google Glass is more than a decade old. They gave rise to a serious privacy debate but were also beloved by early adopting “Glassholes.” After failing to take off as a consumer product, Google Glass pivoted into factories and warehouses, highlighting the potential of augmented reality in the workplace.

The first wave of augmented reality glasses looked bad and largely flopped. They were chunky and heavy, were light on features, and made wearers look like cyborg extras from a sci-fi B-movie. The first pair I tried from Vuzix made me question the entire category. There was a lot of hype about augmented reality, but most of these chunky glasses offered relatively low-resolution displays superimposed over your field of view. For smart glasses to truly blend the real world in front of you with the virtual world, they would need cameras, processing power, and some very smart software.

Many players, big and small, have tried and failed to make an impact in this space. The early excitement generated by companies like Magic Leap evaporated amid clunky hardware at high prices. The trouble with some of the most ambitious examples thus far, like Microsoft HoloLens 2 or Apple’s Vision Pro, is that they are relatively big and heavy and, more importantly, horribly expensive. The most successful smart glasses so far are far more focused, less ambitious, and cheaper, though they also fall well short of the original vision.

There’s currently a palpable sense that smart glasses are right on the brink of breaking through. Google’s Android XR opens up the space for developers to make the killer apps needed to drive adoption, and it has begun showing off new AI-powered smart glasses and a mixed-reality headset developed with Samsung. Xreal is also working on some new Android XR glasses dubbed Project Aura that are expected to arrive later in 2026. Many other smart glasses are in development, like Meta’s Artemis glasses, new Snap Spectacles, and Emteq’s inward-looking smart glasses.—Simon Hill

Smart glasses aren’t cheap. The category is still new, and the newer models are better, by leaps and bounds, than even last year’s models. As soon as we finish testing one product, there’s already another model with better features available. Just invest in a pair if it has features you’ll be able to use right out of the box, and don’t get upset if the tech gets eclipsed in a few months. However, there are a lot of smart glasses coming out in 2026, including Apple’s, so it might be worth waiting to see if there’s a clear winner.