I’ve Got a Desk Full of Smart Glasses and Still Nothing Interesting to Do With Them

I’m currently wearing a pair of Even Realities G2 smart glasses. Two more pairs from Rokid sit on my desk. The Meta Ray-Ban Display is charging nearby alongside its Neural Wristband. In my closet, six pairs of $50 smart sunnies from an overzealous Walmart rep gather dust next to Xreal, RayNeo, Lucyd, and an old Razer Anzu. Later, I’m calling my optician to see if the new Ray-Ban Meta Optics can handle my tricky prescription.

I am drowning in smart eyewear. And more is on the way.

But here’s the thing: despite having all these gadgets strapped to my face at various points over the past few weeks, I still can’t find a compelling reason to wear any of them regularly. The hardware is getting better—lighter, more stylish, longer battery life. The displays are brighter, the audio is clearer. Yet the fundamental question remains: what am I supposed to actually do with these things?

Notifications on my glasses? I already ignore them on my phone. Turn-by-turn navigation? My phone does that fine, and I don’t need a floating arrow in my peripheral vision to tell me where to go. Camera glasses for hands-free photos? Sure, that’s neat for a day, but then you realize you’re just taking slightly worse versions of the photos you’d take with your phone.

The Even Realities G2 is probably the most polished of the bunch. They look like normal glasses, the display is crisp, and the battery actually lasts a full day. But the software is barebones—a few widgets, some basic notifications, and a half-baked AI assistant that struggles with anything beyond setting a timer. Rokid’s offerings are more ambitious with their AR capabilities, but they’re bulkier and the app ecosystem is a ghost town. The Meta Ray-Ban Display combo is the most integrated, especially with the wristband, but it’s also the most expensive and still feels like a prototype for developers, not a finished product for buyers.

What frustrates me most is the lack of imagination from the companies building these things. Everyone is copying the same playbook: put a small display in the corner, add a camera, throw in some AI, and call it a day. Nobody is asking whether that actually improves your life. The best use case I’ve found so far is discreetly checking the time during boring meetings. That’s not exactly a revolution.

I get it—this is early days. Smartphones were clumsy and pointless for a while too. But the difference is that even the earliest smartphones could do something useful: make calls, send texts, play music. Smart glasses are still struggling to find their equivalent of the SMS or the MP3 player. Until someone builds an application that genuinely changes how we interact with the world—not just a smaller screen strapped to our face—I’ll keep testing them, but I won’t be buying.

For now, the smartest thing about most smart glasses is the price tag.