Google today announced that it is working with eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to bring the first Android XR smartglasses to market. The move mirrors Meta’s early partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the dominant eyewear maker that’s behind Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses.

While no productized Android XR smartglasses have been announced, Google said today it is working with eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster on the first generation of products. Android XR smartglasses will prominently feature Google’s Gemini AI, and some will include on-board displays for visual output.

Image courtesy Google

Warby Parker is a well known American eyewear brand, founded in 2010, which has pioneered a lower cost, direct-to-consumer glasses business. Gentle Monster, founded in 2011, is a well known South Korean eyewear brand, and has a similar approach as Warby Parker.

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While influential, both eyewear makers pale in comparison to EssilorLuxottica, the massive eyewear and lens conglomerate behind brands like Ray-Ban and Oakley.

EssilorLuxottica and Meta partnered several years ago around their smartglasses ambitions. Things seem to be going well for the partnership as the duo has launched several iterations of the Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses featuring classic Ray-Ban designs.

Ray-Ban Meta Glasses, Image courtesy Meta, EssilorLuxottica

Google is now taking the same tact by partnering with two well known glasses-makers to ensure that it has strong brand and fashion credibility behind its upcoming Android XR smartglasses.

The company’s first pair of smartglasses, Google Glass, launched way back in 2012. Although they were impressively compact for their time (especially considering the inclusion of a display), the asymmetrical design of the bulky display optics was seen as socially off-putting—just a bit too weird to pass as regular glasses.

That sent Google (and others) back to the drawing board for years, waiting until the tech could advance enough to make smartglasses that looked more socially acceptable.

It’s unclear when the first Android XR smartglasses will launch, or what they might cost, but Google also said today that developers will be able to start developing for Android XR smartglasses later this year.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."

  • Curious to see what they will come up with!

  • ApocalypseShadow

    I disagree. I hope it does well so that there's competition on the market. Having one option will just make the industry stagnant like the stand alone VR market.

    Google, Apple, X Real, etc, all need to do well to bring better products and lower prices instead of monopolization of the market.

    Google has made PLENTY of mistakes and dumb decisions. But they still should have the chance to do better. The one thing they have done right that Facebook still is way behind is with their OS. I really don't like any one of them when it comes to privacy. But Google's OS and services connected to it can't be denied.

    Yeah. They shouldn't have abandoned their glasses push or their Daydream push. But from where I sit, Google is ahead with their OS. While Facebook is ahead when it comes to hardware and releasing it on the market. But it's anyone's game to win.

    • Jonathan Winters III

      Good point re: competitiveness.

  • ZarathustraDK

    It's an odd market. Glasses-wearers, sure, I can see them picking up something like this. But the rest of us less ocular-challenged people, they're trying to make us wear glasses in public as a fashion-choice or gadget-choice basically, sort of like walking around with your arm in a cast even though your arm isn't broken, but the flip-side the cast can run Doom and post to Instagram.

    The closest thing to "I'm gonna get a pair" I can get is with the Babelfish-potential for instant translation, both auditory and visual, but even so, it'd still only be something I'd bring on a vacation to a foreign country.

    • XRC

      The curious thing is that about 4 billion people require ocular correction (including 70% of American adults, more than half of which are women).

      Once "enhanced" heads-up hands free smartphone functionality is available in a slightly heavier but comfortable glasses form factor, mass market adoption would follow soon behind.

      • Foreign Devil

        Most of us already got laser eye corrections done though. I"m reluctant to go back to wearing glasses after having got laser eye surgery done in my late teens and never worn glasses since.

      • Jonathan Winters III

        Yes but the majority of glass wearers are around 50 and up – not the ideal market.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        It's also interesting that wearing glasses is seen as too uncomfortable by those not used to it, while having to carry around a 150g+ smartphone that blocks one of your hands for holding it and fully takes up your vision, as you cannot focus on something else at the same time, is considered acceptable. It's actually illegal to text and drive everywhere because smartphones are so intrusive, but people just got used to them and don't even notice the inherent ergonomic problems anymore.

        Give it a decade of successful smart glasses, and people will consider it completely normal to wears XR devices on their head/face. And will instead lament how horrible inconvenient smartphones were, and how lucky we are to finally have a hands-free, non-obstructive alternative.

        • XRC

          We've had a large number of cellphone robberies in London, often grab and go by thieves on electric bikes; victims are absorbed in their smartphone oblivious to their surroundings.

          It's amusing seeing people stop in the street, tapping away, head down, return past them from the store 10 minutes later? they are still there tapping away.

          cycling past large queues of cars it's often every other driver tapping or looking at their phone, often whilst traffic is slowly moving

          • Christian Schildwaechter

            Texting while walking is apparently called twalking, the standard mode of locomotion for smombies (smartphone zombies). As they couldn't wait for smart glasses to go mainstream, the administration of Seoul started adding ground level traffic lights for pedestrians several years ago, because too many people wouldn't see the regular ones, as this required lifting their heads instead of staring at their phones. By 2022, they had already installed more than 1200 of these, intending to add more.

            “In March 2019, the South Korean government also implemented an alert system which sends a notification to phones if walkers are about to step into traffic,” the Daily Mail reported.

            No idea how they implemented that, but apparently this wasn't enough, hence the ground traffic lights.
            https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/88bdfa4b4a3b17ca495977722969689b3f09903222ee6b87d12c5fc7e77a5f13.jpg

    • Now I Can See

      Technology is funny like that. I originally thought the airpod was ridiculous, but a lot of people wear those all day now. I could definitely see a future where glasses with a HUD replaces the smartphone. How fast that'll happen is anyone's guess.

    • BonWOLF

      …..and that's why Sunglasses never took off! ")

  • Kevin Smith

    The Me Too-ness of who actually
    Google had Google Glass before Facebook had Ray Ban glass, Google had solo Daydream VR glass like Lenovo Mirage Solo before Apple had Vision Pro.
    Google struggled because they enter those market before the market was ready. And now it's perfect time to return.

    • Mandub

      Google also had a partnership with the Ray-Ban maker in 2014, before Meta.

    • Ondrej

      Google Glass is a good example, but Daydream is not as that was a copy of Oculus/Samsung GearVR and an extension of Cardboard, which was a copy of Luckey's FOV2GO.

      • Christian Schildwaechter

        Luckey worked at Mark Bolas' MxR (Mixed Reality Lab) at USC as a lab assistant when they released FOV2GO as a USD 5 VR viewer in 2012, leveraging the iPhone 4's "retina" display. At 960*640 it was the first hires phone display, giving you 480*640 per eye in VR. Bolas has been working in VR since the late 1980s and co-founded Fakespace in 1988 to explore VR, so it isn't exactly Luckey's FOV2GO.

        David Nelson, MxR, about Palmer Luckey:

        He’s come a long way since 2010 when I was his supervisor and we were hot gluing foam-core virtual reality viewers together in the Mixed Reality Lab’s prototyping room at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies. Back then, we were working on bringing these novel viewers (the brainchild of then lab director, Mark Bolas, and admittedly the inspiration for Google’s Cardboard viewers released nearly two years later). […]

        I remember when Palmer first came to visit the lab, Mark (Bolas) was impressed by this young VR enthusiast’s knowledge of the history of VR hardware. Showing him around the lab, Mark opened up a plastic tub and was surprised when Palmer accurately identified some ancient VR artifacts that were made when he was likely only a toddler. Yes, we hired him on the spot.

        And while VR has changed a lot since the very early days, some things are still the same. From Mark Bolas' 1988/89 thesis "Design and Virtual Environments", (partly) supervised by Scott Fisher from NASA Ames Research Center, one of the few organizations already using/exploring VR back then:

        Display and Interaction Devices:

        In order to become widely accepted, VR hardware needs to be comfortable, easy to use and accessible. Most VR displays ignore this requirement. The typical head-mounted display is heavy, and based on low resolution technology. This has caused much criticism of VR systems. Users complain that they cannot clearly see their work, and that they are encumbered by the weight and form factor of claustrophobic head-mounted displays.

        This was 37 years ago, but you could post the same today, and it would still be true.