I’ve tested my fair share of smart glasses over the past five years, and while they do a variety of things, they all have one thing in common: they’re bulky and unusual-looking enough that they attract curious stares in public.
And so the newest pair I’m testing, named Frame, gets one thing right: it is sleek enough that it looks normal enough. Of course, if you come up close, you’d likely still see there’s an unusual distorted strip in the right lens, but from arm’s length, Frame looks like the same type of hipster glasses Steve Jobs and John Lennon used to wear.
I wore Frame for the past few weeks in Los Angeles, Milan and Hong Kong and — as far as I know — no one in public did a second take. Frame looked normal enough.
But the glasses are far from normal. Frame represents perhaps the next step in personal computing. It’s a set of smart glasses that runs multimodal AI, including ChatGPT, Perplexity and Whisper.
That unusual strip across the right lens I mentioned earlier is a tiny prism housing a MicroOLED screen that projects texts in front of the right eye, sort of like a heads-up display.
Frame features a single forward-facing camera located in the front center of the glasses, which is used to recognize visuals. In the above, I asked Frame to identify the scene I’m looking at, and using Frame’s built-in AI assistant Noa, she was able to describe the scene.
I can ask Noa to do more complex tasks, like solve this math equation.
Frame cannot work as a standalone piece of eyewear — it needs to be connected to a smartphone with access to the internet, so sometimes, if the phone’s cell reception is weak, Noa can take a while to respond. But for the most part, I’d say Noa can respond to my verbal commands within 20 seconds. To see Noa in action, see the video below for several examples.
Frame is developed by Brilliant Labs, a Hong Kong-founded, Singapore-based startup headed by Bobak Tavangar, an ex-Apple program lead. Essentially, Brilliant Labs has been together since 2019, and their vision is to build AI smart glasses for the masses.
To that end, Brilliant Labs has made Frame completely open sourced: everything from the code base to hardware schematics are open to its developer community, which has over 8,000 members already.
The idea is that Frame can continue to improve as the AI improves, and developers build applications and features for the glasses.
Right now, Frame can do the aforementioned identify scenes, solve math problems, and also translate one language to another in either written or verbal form. This means I can point Frame towards, say, a Japanese sentence, and ask Noa to translate it to English. Or I can ask Frame to listen to someone speaking Chinese, and translate it to English. Frame can also scour the internet for real-time information, like I can ask “who won the Lakers game,” and Noa would have the most recent score.
Noa, the digital assistant, is not smart enough to understand context, but has some sass to her too. In one test (which can be seen in the video above), I asked Noa if I can wear a pair of Nike sandals to play basketball. She responded, “sure, if you want to sprain an ankle in style.” I then pointed Frame at a proper pair of Nike basketball shoes and asked Noa again, she responded “these are more suited for basketball.”
It’s not all perfect. As mentioned, Noa can be slow to respond sometimes, and every now and then she will completely misread a scene or text. But I’d say the percentage of these major errors are under 10%.
Battery life is also hit and miss, with the Frame sometimes lasting about an entire 5-6 hours outside, while other times I found it out of juice after two hours of use. It depends on cellular connectivity and how often I ask Frame to do complicated tasks like recognize and analyze scenes.
Frame is on sale now. Priced at $350, it is likely priced too high for the average consumer, but I think anyone interested in smart glasses, AR eyewear, or AI machines, will find these very interesting and useful.
Many tech companies believe the smartphone is slowly on the way out, that in another 10 years or so, our personal computing device that’s always with us will be worn on our face or wrist. Frame is far from being a mainstream product, but it is a first glimpse at what’s to come.
