The rise of smart glasses has been a trickle, starting in earnest from Meta’s Ray-Ban partnership and expanding to encompass all sorts of devices. Lenovo’s Visual AI Glasses V1 are just the latest smart eyewear launched in the past few years, but one particular factor sets them apart.
The Chinese brand has left out the camera, choosing instead to dedicate space (and brain power) to artificial intelligence functions and the projected display needed to make the most of that AI. The lightweight wearable is only announced for China at the moment, at a positively affordable R10,000 (¥4,000), but they’re interesting enough that we wish they were sold over here too.
Just AI Glasses, please
The Visual AI Glasses V1 look remarkably like a standard pair of glasses, albeit a pair set in a frame intended for polarised lenses. The bows are a touch thicker than normal, making up the bulk of the 38-gram weight. The display/lenses are 1.8mm thick and feature microLED tech to project augmented reality (AR) info in front of a wearer’s eyes.
Speakers and microphones are included, but the camera is notably absent. Presumably, the V1 glasses aren’t too interested in what’s going on around them, relying on the wearer to determine what they want. Live translations (spoken, presumably, since there’s no electric eye peering out), teleprompter functions, and navigation are all options. Whether the latter will take things to Amazon’s extremes isn’t known yet, but these are commercial glasses so… probably not.
Bluetooth 5.4 and a 164mAh battery promise between eight and ten hours of use (while translating, which is one long conversation), and the glasses claim a charge time of 40 minutes from dead flat. Even the lack of a camera could be seen as a positive. There’s no need to worry about surreptitious recording when someone’s wearing a set of these specs.
The problem is that these smart glasses run Lenovo’s in-house AI, which could have pros and cons. The underlying software is probably optimised for the AI Glasses’ hardware, but the available data pool will be less extensive than, say, OpenAI or Google’s models. Not that it matters much to us, either way. The V1’s 9 November launch will take place in China, with information about their arrival in other locations distressingly absent.
