With various combinations of cameras, displays, and sensors built into their frames, smart glasses can offer augmented reality (AR) views, AI assistants, and Instagrammable snapshots right on your face. I’ve been covering smart glasses since they first hit the market and have seen them evolve from basic phone-tethered wearable displays into wireless mixed-reality marvels. They’re still developing, and glasses that can unobtrusively show a map of your surroundings and translate languages are inching forward, even if they aren’t yet polished enough for us to recommend buying. As for models we do recommend, both the Viture Pro and the XReal One earned our Editors’ Choice award, and serve as your own personal big screen for work and entertainment. You can read about all of the best smart glasses below, followed by everything you need to know to find the right pair for you.
Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks
- Bright and colorful picture
- Relatively wide field of view
- Doesn’t require prescription lens inserts
- Dimming privacy lenses
- Mixed reality features are underdeveloped
We’re still far from fully functional, self-contained augmented reality glasses that can scan your surroundings and provide live updates and contextual information based on what you’re looking at, but the Viture Pro XR Glasses let you at least enjoy a big, bright display projected in front of your eyes. Essentially, these glasses serve as a portable USB monitor. Plug them into any compatible device and see a 1080p picture for gaming or getting work done. It’s also the brightest set of smart glasses on this list, able to put out 1,000 nits when most others max out at 600.
If you’re simply looking for a pair of smart glasses that replicate the experience of looking at a large monitor, the Viture Pro XR is one of our top picks.
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Viture Pro XR Glasses Review
- Built-in menu system
- Native motion-tracking support
- Sharp, vivid picture
- Wide field of view
- Dimmable lenses
- Requires prescription inserts for nearsighted users
The XReal One pushes the category forward with a built-in menu system and head-tracking features. Its virtual screen can follow your gaze like the other AR smart glasses on this list, or it can stay anchored in one spot as you move your head around like your own personal movie theatre. We’ve seen this feature on VR headsets, but this kind of immersive virtual theater view simply hasn’t been part of AR smart glasses outside of some very rough early implementations. The built-in menu lets you tweak this view, with different choices for the size of the virtual screen and its distance from you.
This is one of the most polished pairs of AR smart glasses we’ve seen yet, and its head-tracking mode puts it ahead of competitors in terms of the overall experience.
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XReal One Review
- Bright picture
- Wide field of view
- Focus adjustment dials
- Comfortable
- Limited augmented reality
- Slightly goofy looking
The Rokid Max is one of our favorite pairs of AR glasses for two reasons. First, they have the widest field of view we’ve seen at 50 degrees, which means they offer the largest picture available. Second, they have separate focus adjustments for each eye just like the Viture smart glasses, so you can get a crisp picture even if you’re nearsighted without buying additional prescription lens inserts. They also have the widest field of view of all of the smart glasses on this list.
These glasses serve as a great personal display for anyone, so long as you own a supported device (or the appropriate HDMI, Lightning, or non-DP USB-C adapter) and you’re not self-conscious about the design.
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Rokid Max Review
- Adjustable tint
- Good audio quality
- Light and comfortable
- Limited controls
- Mirrored lens makes tint adjustments hard to notice from the outside
- Frame can sometimes squeak
- Not available with prescription lenses
Chamelo makes glasses with adjustable lenses that you can dim or lighten as you want, and the Music Shield is its most sporty option. The big, flaming orange one-piece mirrored lens can be made transparent enough to use comfortably indoors or dark enough to protect your eyes on sunny days—and you can switch back and forth with a simple swipe. These glasses can also play audio from your phone, and they sound better than most competing models. They still don’t beat a decent pair of true wireless earphones in terms of audio quality, but we like the combination of features they offer.
The Music Shield glasses are ostensibly for active users. Their IPX4 rating means they are sweat-resistant, so you should be able to wear them for a jog in most weather. They’re a good choice if you want to listen to music or make calls on the go while still taking in the sounds of your environment.
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Chamelo Music Shield Review
- Greatly improved camera quality from last gen
- Stylish design
- Responsive, intuitive controls
- Clear sound quality
- Built-in voice assistant
- Difficult to frame shots
- No advanced camera features
- Limited bass, lots of audio leakage
Social media means sharing your point of view, and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses let you do just that. These glasses have a 12MP camera to take photos, record video, or even live stream from your perspective. You can pop whatever you see right up on Instagram, or save it to your phone and upload it to your social network of choice. You can also make calls and listen to music on them.
This is a fun pair of smart glasses for anyone obsessed with sharing their experiences on social media, as long as you’re aware of their limitations. Their 12MP camera is a big upgrade from the last generation’s 5MP sensors, but these glasses still can’t compete with even a midrange smartphone camera in terms of picture quality, and their video clips top out at 60 seconds. Be aware that they exhibit the typical sound quality issues of almost all audio glasses, and their built-in Meta voice assistant is much more limited than Amazon’s Alexa.
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Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses Review
- Look and feel just like regular glasses
- Built-in hands-free Alexa
- Well-balanced mids and highs
- Nonexistent bass response
- Case doesn’t support charging
- Expensive
Audio glasses effectively fit headphones into their frame, aiming tiny drivers to project sound at your ears without actually fitting anything into or over them. Combined with beamforming microphones, they let you make phone calls and control voice assistants entirely through your glasses. The Echo Frames are Amazon’s take on the category, and as you might expect from the name, they let you use Alexa. The microphones are crisp, too, though it’s a shame the audio quality isn’t that good.
There’s a simple acoustic reality (or an engineering challenge, if you’re more optimistic) that a tiny driver with a significant air gap between it and the ear cannot produce anything resembling bass, producing sound that’s bright and hollow. The Echo Frames don’t break the mold, but for voice-related tasks that don’t need bass, like making calls or using Alexa, they work quite well. As a more style-minded option, Amazon also offers the special edition Carrera Smart Glasses with the same features and electronics as the Echo Frames, with sunglass or blue-light-filtering lenses. Just keep in mind that the Echo Buds With ANC also offer hands-free Alexa, along with active noise cancellation and much better sound quality, for about half the price of the Echo Frames.
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Amazon Echo Frames (3rd Gen) Review
- Quick lens color changes
- Stylish, well-made frames
- 100% UVA/UVB protection
- Available with prescription lenses
- Expensive
- Rimless design isn’t for everyone
Chamelo’s Aura glasses don’t have speakers, a camera, or a display. You can’t even control them with your phone. What they do have is a set of electrochromic films that let you change the tints from almost clear to red, blue, or purple with a tap.
These are fashion glasses first and foremost, and fashion can be expensive. If you like the eye-catching, color-changing look and they aren’t out of your budget, check the Chamelo Aura out.
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Chamelo Aura Review
- Stylish, durable design
- More than 12 hours of battery life per charge
- Affordable
- Unintuitive ChatGPT controls
- ChatGPT integration not available on Android
- Flat, leaky audio quality
The Nautica Smart Eyewear Powered by Lucyd feature built-in microphones and speakers that let you listen to music, take calls, and talk to your phone’s digital assistant. They have a more rugged build, longer battery life, and cost less than the Echo Frames, but what really sets them apart from the competition is ChatGPT integration. When paired with an iOS device, you can use the glasses to invoke the AI for answers through the built-in speakers and via text in the Lucyd app.
If you like the idea of wearing ChatGPT on your face, go with the Nautica Smart Eyewear Powered by Lucyd over the Echo Frames. ChatGPT integration only works on iOS as of this writing (sorry, Android users), and it’s clunky enough that you’re usually better off accessing the AI through your phone. Moreover, Nautica’s speakers suffer from the same limitations as most other audio glasses, so those concerned with sound quality should skip both and opt for a pair of earphones such as the Echo Buds.
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Nautica Smart Eyewear Powered by Lucyd Review
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Buying Guide: The Best Smart Glasses for 2025
What Are Smart Glasses?
Smart glasses include any eyewear that contains electronic components and can do anything beyond correcting your vision or protecting your eyes. As you can imagine, that covers a wide array of devices that can do completely different things.
We can sort smart glasses down to a few specific types, with some overlap between them. Audio smart glasses have speakers built into the frame, allowing them to function as headphones. Augmented reality smart glasses use tiny projectors and lenses to display a picture as if there were a screen in front of your eyes. Social media-focused smart glasses feature built-in cameras to let you capture photos and videos, and even live stream.
Viture Pro XR (Credit: Will Greenwald)
There are some rarer types of smart glasses as well, like Chamelo’s Music Shield and Dusk glasses. They use liquid crystal lenses to provide an adjustable tint, switching from transparent to sunglasses with a tap or through an app. Some AR glasses, like the Viture Pro and the XReal Air 2 Pro, use similar technology with less precise control. Their displays make them bulkier and less suitable for casually walking around.
While they have strong connections to computers and video games, blue-light-blocking glasses aren’t actually smart glasses. They don’t have any electronics inside and simply rely on lens coatings to reduce the amount of blue light exposure to reduce eye strain. They can be soothing but are not smart in the vein we’re talking about here.
The Best Smart Glasses for Music and Calls
Audio tech is arguably the backbone of all smart glasses because it’s available on most models. Audio-equipped smart glasses are headphones in glasses form, usually with small earphone-like drivers built into the temples that are angled to project sound into your ears. Paired with beam-forming microphones, they not only let you listen to music, but also make phone calls and use voice assistants.
This is how the Echo Frames project sound (Credit: Amazon)
Their sound quality is limited due to the nature of acoustics and how sound travels, which is why we’ve yet to find any solely audio-focused smart glasses all that compelling. Because there’s a significant air gap between the drivers and the ears, bass is virtually nonexistent for these glasses. The mids and highs might come through well enough, but as we witnessed on the Bose Frames Tempo and the Razer Anzu, you don’t get much in the way of lower frequencies. You also don’t get much privacy because sound can leak.
Given how expensive most smart glasses are, we prefer when they offer useful features beyond just audio. If audio is your main concern, you’re better off with a pair of true wireless earphones and a regular pair of glasses.
The Best Camera-Equipped Smart Glasses
Social media is all about sharing, and for most shutterbugs, that means keeping your phone out with the camera app open. Camera smart glasses let you shoot, record, and stream whatever you see and hear without grabbing your phone. The idea first hit with the oddball Snapchat Spectacles, which went through three iterations but are currently dormant. Meta has picked up the slack, first with the Facebook and Instagram-friendly Facebook Ray-Ban Stories, and now with the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.
Photo taken with Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)
These glasses have audio and video features, so you can use them as headphones. However, it’s the camera aspect that really makes them appealing.
The Best AR Glasses
Augmented reality is a technology that can project images over your surroundings, letting you see computer-generated information overlaid in the real world, like a personal hologram. It’s a promising, futuristic concept that is still in development and requires a multitude of components like micro-displays, motion sensors, cameras, and processors to all work together. We’ve seen AR work in limited cases on phone screens in everything from Google Lens to Pokémon Go, and we’ve seen ambitious head-mounted displays like the Microsoft HoloLens offer early implementations of the full AR experience.
Most AR and XR (extended reality, mixed reality, or anything in the blurry ground between AR and VR) glasses are something of a misnomer. They use tiny projectors and lenses to display a picture in front of you, and (usually with the help of some shaky mobile apps or optional accessories), they can even use built-in motion sensors to fix a screen in a physical location relative to you that stays put even if you move your head.
Here’s the caveat: You can’t really walk around with them. The projection systems are ostensibly transparent, but the glasses are bulky enough, and the big, bright, colorful projections are distracting. The cable running to your preferred device doesn’t make it any easier to move around, either. They’re best for using while sitting down to watch a video or get some work done.
They’re useful if you can become accustomed to them. They work just like USB-C monitors, so you can plug them into almost any laptop, some Android phones, the iPhone 15, and (with an adapter) most devices that can output video over HDMI.
Recommended by Our Editors
Waveguide AR Glasses
There’s another sub-category of smart glasses that are both wireless and fully transparent, so you can use them on the go. These glasses use waveguides etched into the lenses themselves to show information over a completely clear view. They’re not really consumer-ready, though. Waveguide projection systems typically have a much more limited field of view and lower resolution than the displays on media-focused video smart glasses such as the Viture Pro XR and the XReal One, and the software to drive them is far from polished.
Even Realities G1 (Credit: Will Greenwald)
We’ve tested two pairs so far, the Even Realities G1 and the Vuzix Z100, and while intriguing, they’re both hindered by several major limitations, particularly their low resolution and rough, inconsistent software. Simply put, they aren’t very useful beyond providing pop-up views of phone notifications and displaying very flawed live captioning of speech. Neither have cameras, so they can’t scan your environment and provide true augmented reality based on what you’re looking at. There’s a lot of promise for smart glasses of this type, but they need a few more iterations before we can recommend them for purchase.
Vuzix Z100 (Credit: Will Greenwald)
These types of smart glasses are picking up steam in professional settings, though, and Vuzix has established itself as a manufacturer of wearable displays for commercial, educational, and industrial users. Those devices have limited software suites, usually developed or augmented by the client organization rather than the manufacturer (as evidenced by the Z100’s feature-light app and front-and-center API access for developers).
Best for True AR: VR Headsets
We’re still far away from AR smart glasses that can, say, recognize a cafe you’re staring at and pop up its customer reviews. In the meantime, if you’d like a taste of true AR with apps and games you can actually use, the Meta Quest 3 is your best bet. It’s a fully enclosed VR headset (meaning you shouldn’t try to use it in public), but its color pass-through cameras let you see the real world well enough to toss images and 3D models around a room. The Meta Quest 3S is a more budget-friendly option to consider and also has color pass-through cameras, but its display isn’t as sharp. For more, check out our comparison of the Meta Quest 3 versus 3S.
Meta Quest 3S and 3 (Credit: Will Greenwald)
Apple doesn’t make smart glasses, but its Vision Pro is the most advanced AR/VR headset available, with support for eye-tracking, hand-tracking, voice control, and seamless mobile app integration, all in one streamlined package. Like the Meta Quest 3 and 3S, though, you shouldn’t wear it outside of the house, and at $3,499, the Vision Pro is out of reach for most people.
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