What you need to know
- Brilliant Labs first pair of smart glasses, Frame, launches for $349 in April.
- These glasses weigh only 39g and include a 3,000 nit single-eye display with custom prescription optics.
- A multimodal AI is built in and connects to a front-facing spatial camera to enable LLM-powered machine vision.
A new pair of smart glasses is about to show up on the market, and they're so good-looking that they've attracted the funding of John Hanke, the CEO of Niantic. That's the company behind popular AR games like Pokemon Go, Monster Hunter Now, and Pikmin Bloom. Brilliant Labs' Frame packs impressive technology into a pair of 39g glasses, which is the same weight as the average pair of prescription glasses.
The Frame is described as a pair of AI Glasses because it packs multimodal AI inside of its svelte design, giving you an AI assistant that's available all day long. A 0.23-inch Sony MicroOLED display can be found inside one of the lenses, emitting 3,000 nits of brightness. Brilliant Labs tells me it doesn't use PWM dimming on the display, either, meaning PWM-sensitive folks should have no trouble using it.
The single display is similar to Brilliant Labs' first product, Monocle, which was recently showcased by AR "mad scientist" Lucas Rizzotto.
Frame is powered by a pair of batteries located at the end of the temple arms, and Frame comes in several different colors and styles. Brilliant Labs hasn't provided battery life estimates at this time but sells a separate fast-charging battery pack called Mister Power that can "get it across the finish line."
A front-facing spatial camera is housed in the nose bridge along with a 6DoF IMU sensor and an integrated microphone, ensuring the onboard GPT4-powered AI can see and hear the world around you.
Brilliant Labs tells me its AI, called Noa, uses Perplexity's LLM, which references recent web data. Many LLMs like ChatGPT often reference information from several years ago, making Noa and its Perplexity integration unique.
Brilliant Labs says that Noa can deliver actionable, useful information as you look around, automatically delivering results without needing to be asked. Examples include giving price comparison data on products you're holding, comparing real estate values of houses as you walk the neighborhood, or displaying reviews for restaurants as you walk around town.
As we've seen from summarizing the Galaxy S24, Noa can also summarize the page of a book you're looking at by providing visual bullet points on the display. It can also be used for real-time translation, performing visual searches of places or things, and just about anything else you can think to ask it. A built-in Knowledge Graph ensures that common commands can deliver responses near-instantly.
The frame can be preordered today for $349 from the Brilliant website and is scheduled to ship in April. Customers who preorder get free access to AI services with a "daily query cap," but the cap number hasn't been provided just yet. A paid tier will be announced soon, similar to Google Gemini.
