Google’s unveiling of a new line of AI-fueled smart glasses built on the Android XR platform was only one of dozens of announcements at Google I/O this year. Even so, one facet in particular caught my eye as more important than it might have seemed to a casual viewer.
While the idea of wearing AI-powered lenses that can whisper directions into your ears while projecting your to-do list onto a mountain vista is exciting, it’s how you’ll look while you use them that grabbed my attention. Specifically, Google’s partnership with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to design their new smart glasses.
The spectre of Google Glass and the shadow cast by the so-called Glassholes weraring them went unmentioned, but it’s not hard to see the partnerships as part of a deliberate strategy to avoid repeating the mistakes made a decade ago. Wearing Google Glass might have said, “I’m wearing the future,” but it also hinted, “I might be filming you without your consent.” No one will think that Google didn’t consider the fashion aspect of smart glasses this time. Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration is based on a similar impulse.
If you want people to wear computers on their faces, you have to make them look good. Warby Parker and Gentle Monster are known for creating glasses that appeal to millennials and Gen Z, both in look and price.
“Warby Parker is an incredible brand, and they’ve been really innovative not only with the designs that they have but also with their consumer retail experience. So we’re thrilled to be partnered with them,” said Sameer Samat, president of Google’s Android Ecosystem, in an interview with Bloomberg. “I think between Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, they’re going to be great designs. First and foremost, people want to wear these and feel proud to wear them.”
Smart fashion
Wearables are not mini smartphones, and treating them that way has proven to be a mistake. Just because you want to scroll through AR-enhanced dog videos doesn’t mean you don’t want to look good simultaneously.
Plus, smart glasses may be the best way to integrate generative AI like Google Gemini into hardware. Compared to the struggles of the Humane AI Pin, the Rabbit R1, and the Plaud.ai NotePin, smart glasses feel like a much safer bet.
We already live in a world saturated with wearable tech. Smartwatches are ubiquitous, and wireless earbuds also have microphones and biometric sensors. Glasses occupy a lot of your face’s real estate, though. They’re a way people identify you far more than your watch. Augmented reality devices sitting on your nose need to be appealing, no matter which side of the lenses you look at.
Combine that with what the smart glasses offer wearers, and you have a much stronger product. They don’t have to do everything, just enough to justify wearing them. The better they look, the less justification you need for the tech features.
Teaming up with two companies that actually understand design shows that Google understands that. Google isn’t pretending to be a fashion house. They’re outsourcing style strategies to people who know what they’re doing. Google seems to have learned that if smart glasses are going to work as a product, they need to blend in with other glasses, not proclaim to the world that someone is wearing them.
How much they cost will matter, as setting smart glasses prices to match high-end smartphones will slow adoption. But if Google leverages Warby Parker and Gentle Monster’s direct-to-consumer experience to keep prices reasonable, they might entice a lot more people, and possibly undercut their rivals. People are used to spending a few hundred dollars on prescription glasses a reasonably sized extra charge for AI will be just another perk, like polarized prescription sunglasses.
Success here might also ripple out to smaller, but fashionable eyewear brands. Your favorite boutique frame designer might eventually offer ‘smart’ as a category, like they do with transition lenses today. Google is making a bet that people will choose to wear technology if it looks like something they would choose to wear anyway, and a bet on people wanting to look good is about as safe a bet I can imagine.
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erichs211@gmail.com (Eric Hal Schwartz)
