If smart eyewear is your thing, the VolkanoX Hey Cyan AI Glasses make a compelling case for your budget bucks, especially if you're starting out. Provided you know what you're getting into. They're a comfortable pair and won't hurt your wallet quite like something from Meta's catalogue would. But a glaring privacy flaw does make them difficult to recommend without reservations.
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Design
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Camera
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AI
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Value
South Africans have long been denied the questionable pleasures that the popular Meta Glasses afford buyers. No longer. VolkanoX has introduced the Hey Cyan AI Glasses to the country, featuring a price of R1,300. That’s actually somewhat affordable — assuming you’ve already fronted the price of a smartphone it’ll hook up to.
Floats like a heavy feather
Whether you’re shelling out for something expensive with the Meta logo or something more attainable like the Hey Cyan specs — hefty arms and thick frames are unavoidable. These… surprised us. Clocking in at a little under 41g, they were just light enough to forget that we were wearing ’em in the long run. That illusion doesn’t last forever. It doesn’t take long for the all-plastic build and internals to quickly warm your face on a hot day.
That’s not some major revelation. Smart specs rarely ever dabble in more premium materials, because doing so typically means raising not only the price, but the weight too. Volkano’s Hey Cyan has struck a good balance here, providing specs we genuinely wouldn’t mind being caught out in public wearing. With the recording light off, of course.
Still, there’s no denying that the camera, LEDs, and buttons won’t attract at least a few raised eyebrows. Two buttons sit atop the right arm and manage most of the functions. That does mean you’ll need to learn the ropes — like long-pressing the back button to begin an audio recording, for instance. The accompanying Hey Cyan app spells it out for you on opening, and a quick refresher is available if you ever need it. Inside the right arm is the speaker, which offers easy swipe controls to quickly skip tracks, turn up the volume — that sort of thing.
Charging is handled via a proprietary connection that docks with the tip of one of those arms. It’s far from being a hassle, but we can’t pretend a generic USB-C port would’ve made life easier. We suppose this way, Hey Cyan can hold onto that IP65 rating. Wireless charging is off the table entirely at this price range.
Look sharp, kid
Okay, so Hey Cyan has infiltrated the glasses market by imitating what most specs do naturally. What makes these particularly special is the 8MP shooter that’ll capture images and 1080p video on the fly. For the most part, it succeeds. Hey Cyan never claimed that the resultant images and videos would be great. We got the best shots while noodling around with the camera in the daytime, but even then, substantial detail was absent.
The Hey Cyan glasses will do their best camera work indoors, with a mixture of natural and artificial light. Head out to the garden as we did, and you’ll notice a definite overbrightened look, like someone turned a filter all the way up. Head back inside, and colours tend to look more natural, though there’s certainly still a slight sheen to everything that we didn’t enjoy.
Nighttime shooting is out of the question. Without a source of light for the sensor to cling to, you’ll struggle to make out just about anything. That disappointment extends to the 1080p recording without enough real-world ray tracing present. Almost any smartphone you whip out will perform better under these conditions.
That might be disappointing to the would-be content creators looking for a hands-free solution to their next Instagram Reel. But for the people who want to simply snap something of interest to look back on later, these will do just fine. Ditto for those who want an open-ear set of cans to blast music — or calls — right into their ears.
We’d be cautious about outsourcing your tunes to Hey Cyan’s glasses, though. While they handle voice calls rather well (we could hear what the other was saying at all times, anyway), they lose a lot in the overall mix. You’ll also be tempted to bump that volume way up, and risk annoying those sitting semi-close to you.
Almost as important as being able to record is how long these will record for. Keep your ambitions modest. If you’re occasionally snapping a picture or taking a call, they’ll go for seven hours. Give it something more strenuous to do, like recording long-form videos, and these will speedrun depletion in a matter of hours.
Passes the in-spec-tion?
Underneath all that hardware is a half-decent chatbot just waiting to be called into action. We admit to feeling a little silly summoning it out in public with its “Hey Cyan” wake word, but it does at least enable true hands-free usage. Beyond just following orders, though, the model can be tasked with assessing certain shots and referring back to them later. We found it especially handy when we came across long bits of text we didn’t have time to delve into.
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Head into the Hey Cyan app, and you’ll be able to converse with the chatbot, à la ChatGPT. The experience is familiar to anyone who’s used a chatbot before. It’s worth noting that shots captured with the intent of being run through the model will take a nosedive in quality, so don’t give it anything too pretty you’d like to hang onto.
Here’s where things get a tad uncomfortable. The Hey Cyan glasses, while fitted with LED indicators to let those around you know they’re being recorded, are pretty easy to circumvent. We stuck a bit of tape to the bugger, and the glasses continued recording, unbeknownst to those around us. We don’t say this to promote being a creep, but to point out a glaring flaw that will only make smart glasses even more unwelcome among polite society.
VolkanoX Hey Cyan AI Glasses verdict
Major privacy concerns aside, the Hey Cyan AI Glasses proved to be a surprisingly comfortable and affordable entry into the blossoming world of smart eyewear. At R1,300, they offer a decent enough selection of features and compromises to justify the price. Camera quality is strictly average, battery life takes a bit of a beating during extended recording sessions, and the audio just isn’t good enough to replace a dedicated pair of earphones. The easy recording light bypass also leaves a rather sour taste in the mouth. Still, if you’re curious about smart glasses but don’t have Meta money just lying around, the VolkanoX Hey Cyan AI Glasses make a reasonably compelling case.
