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Watch Out Ray-Ban! A New Challenger is About to Revolutionize the Smart Glasses Game!
Solos, the maker of the AirGo smart glasses, looks at what Ray-Ban Meta is doing and wants a piece of that action. Out today, the Solos AirGo Vision has a front camera embedded in the front of the frames, in the corner, just like the Ray-Ban models. And it’s primed for in-the-moment access to visual search, augmented reality and other AI-powered interaction.
The company offers only broad examples of what you can do with a camera on your face. AirGo Vision can tell you what its lenses ‘see’ for ‘extensive visual search information’ and ‘other cool features’ like summarising what you are browsing, purchasing, eating (its term) and looking at (for glasses-as-navigators) and cooking (its term) – all through the domain-specific LLMs of ChatGPT-40. (AirGos are the first smart glasses with such capacity.) It uses its own proprietary LLMs, but thanks to what the firm calls its ‘open architecture’, you can swap to Google Gemini and the aforementioned Anthropic Claude’s conversational AI models, too.
It tells you you can use voice to fire off a photo using the Vision’s camera, but not to shoot video. Note the difference with the AirGo Vision images. Not only is the camera built into the arm rather than the frame itself (where the lens sits), that too can be swapped out, as you can see from the AirGo Vision images above. Part of AirGo’s magic is that these are modular smart glasses; you can buy different front panels, because the tech is in the AirGo’s arms.
Another feature that hefting Ray-Ban Meta’s tech-and-nose gear confirms is its familiarity: the frame houses an LED notification light much like those futuristic pedal bikes, which will blink when messages arrive in your phone, and go aflashing the world that your phone is taking your picture. The AirGo Vision will ship later this year for an undisclosed price. Around the same time, Solos will ship three styles of its AirGo smart glasses, without the camera, but with the LED notification light. The company is using the format to build a business catering specifically to police, road crews, or the hearing-impaired, so the cost is $250, and you can buy just the frame and arms for a pair of glasses you already own. Those will come out in July.
This is an update to the AirGo Vision and an LED frame add‑on option just announced for the new model Solos. The new LED frame option comes shortly after Live See software is made available for all AirGo models, also via a software update.
