Have you ever been in a hotel room and couldn't leave because you couldn't find your key card? What if the AI assistant in your glasses could help you find them because it remembers where you last placed it? Whether this sounds creepy or not, it's certainly a new kind of superpower, and it's being made possible by an upcoming pair of Android XR smart glasses.
At TED 2025 (via Good Good Good), Google's head of augmented reality and extended reality, Shahram Izadi, debuted a pair of smart glasses that can do just this. We've seen these glasses hinted at before during Google I/O, but this is the first time they were shown off live on stage.
The glasses are powered by Android XR, Google's latest branch of Android that promises to make eXtended Reality (XR) — the overarching term that includes Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) — as prolific as Wear OS or Android Auto devices. It's possible these are Samsung HAEAN smart glasses, but Google representatives didn't give a product name at the presentation.
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During the presentation, Google product manager Nishtha Bhatia asked Gemini where she had left her hotel room key card, to which the AI promptly responded, "The hotel key card is to the left of the music record" on the shelf behind her. It's not known how long these glasses will be able to record footage during the day or how far this memory feature can go, but it's a killer app for both AI and smart glasses, to say the least.
The implications of virtual memory can be extraordinarily far-reaching. I think of my own grandparents who suffered from dementia and couldn't remember simple things throughout the day. Glasses like these would profoundly impact their lives, helping to significantly improve their quality of life had they been around to see this.
Previously, Google showed off this "superpower" during Google I/O 2024 while running an early version of Project Astra on a phone. You can view the original Project Astra demonstration, including the memory feature at timestamp 1:20 in the video below.
Izadi said "These glasses work with your phone, streaming back and forth, allowing the glasses to be very lightweight and access all of your phone apps," meaning the upcoming smart glasses project from Google will almost certainly only feature light onboard processing to ensure battery longevity. Project Astra is launching publicly soon and will likely continue to run on your phone while a pair of smart glasses film the world around you.
The glasses shown at TED 2025 included a display in at least one of the lenses, although that particular functionality was only shown off briefly for a live translation demo where words were displayed on the lenses. We learned back in August 2023 that Google was working on several different pairs of smart glasses, including a pair with a single display and another pair with two displays — one in each lens.
This all comes as news surrounding next-generation smart glasses has been heating up. Meta is said to be debuting a next-gen Ray-Ban branded pair of smart glasses with a single display this year, including a wristband that allows phoneless interaction with what you see on the glasses display.
We haven't heard of Google working on a similar wristband, which means the company will likely rely heavily on Gemini to control most of the interaction. I saw Project Astra firsthand at Google I/O last year and came away impressed with the AI's capabilities to understand spatial relationships and interpret what it sees through a camera.
Google will be using this exact functionality in their smart glasses when they debut, although it's not known if this particular pair will be part of the 2025 Android XR lineup or if we'll need to wait for next year to see them hit shelves.
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