A case for smart glasses for all


Meta’s latest addition to its Ray-Ban smart glasses is the integration of an in-lens display.

Not wanting to belittle the technical ingenuity of this latest addition to the Meta Ray-Ban collaboration, it perhaps draws attention away from what has made the previous generation such a success. And there is still so much potential in having simple smart glasses to meet the needs of a large cohort of the world’s population – those people who need to wear glasses.

Last year high street optician, Optical Express, reported that over 48m people in the UK wear glasses or contact lenses and a recent YouGov survey found that three in five UK adults say they wear only glasses (60%).

Given that a significant proportion of the adult population are glasses wearers, there is an incredible market opportunity to deliver useful and potentially life-enhancing technology. This is perhaps not the primary reason why Meta, the owner of Facebook and WhatApp, has been promoting its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses. These are mainly considered smart sunglasses – fashion accessories, rather like Apple’s AirPods and Watch, which offer a camera and built in AI that communicates with the user using voice commands.

Nevertheless, Meta says its smart glasses can be customised to offer detailed responses that assist everyone. There is also the Call a Volunteer feature, which connects blind or partially sighted individuals to sighted volunteers. In partnership with Be My Eyes, the built-in AI features are used to describe surroundings and translate languages, which Meta says can be hugely beneficial to enhance volunteer support and other forms of assistance.

Beyond its use as assistive technology, a voice assistant built into a pair of glasses can provide directions or guide the wearer to find products in a supermarket or department store. In the workplace, it could be used for training and helping with the very human foible of not being able to recall someone’s name or making sense of a whole bunch of visual information. It’s easy to imagine how a little camera that sees what the wearer sees, has the potential to change how we interact in our homes, and our day-to-day lives and in the workplace.

Whether it’s from Meta or another smartglasses provider, such technology can truly be used to enhance the world’s population of glasses wearers. And it does not require advanced in-lens technology to make a very real difference to people’s lives.

Putting aside the Pandora’s Box of privacy concerns, smart glasses using relatively simple technology – an eye-level built-in camera, a microphone and a tiny speaker – built into a glasses frame, which some may consider a gimmick or a bit nerdy, has the potential to deliver significant societal benefits.