RayNeo iO Smart Glasses hands-on impressions

Today, RayNeo has just launched RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, its new model of camera-free smart glasses. I had the opportunity to go hands-on with them, and in this article, I’ll share my first impressions. In the next days, I’ll keep using these smart glasses, and then I will write an exhaustive review about them, going deeper, especially for what concerns the use cases. Does it sound cool to you? Then let’s get started!

[Disclaimer: RayNeo provided me with a unit of smart glasses to write this review]

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses

RayNeo, a subsidiary of the tech giant TCL, has been one of the most active companies in the smartglasses sector in the last couple of years. I’ve already reviewed on this blog the RayNeo X3 Pro, which are probably the smartglasses with the best display I’ve ever tried (but it comes at a price). The company actually produces different types of devices, ranging from media-consumption glasses to audio smart glasses à la Ray-Ban Meta, not to mention smart glasses with a display. It literally has smart glasses for all tastes.

With this new product, RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, RayNeo surely wants to appeal to all those people who are not comfortable with having a camera on their face. The glasses feature a display but not a camera, and this makes sure that they are not only very lightweight, but also privacy-oriented. RayNeo iO Smart Glasses (RayNeo is going to kill me if I don’t write the name in full length all the time, but I already have cramps in my fingers because of that) act as a companion that can make you smarter and more productive thanks to AI. If you are familiar with the Even Realities glasses, these ones fit in a similar category.

But are they good? Well, today I’ll give you my initial impressions about how they perform, and then probably next week, I’ll give you a more thorough judgment. Keep reading; it is going to be interesting!

(By the way, you’ll notice some photos and videos in this article have been shot in an “old-school” environment. I’m currently at the house of my grandma in Southern Italy, so I decided on purpose to shoot some pictures in front of some very-grandma-looking wallpapers or table covers. I wanted to really create a stark contrast between the super high technology offered by RayNeo and the very old stuff here!)

Unboxing

I pretty much enjoyed unboxing the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses. The box has an elegant gray color, and inside, all the elements are arranged in a pretty tidy way. The case containing the glasses is also nice. You can see my full unboxing in the video below:

Specifications

Here are some specs of the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, courtesy of RayNeo:

• Weight: 33g
• Display:
  • Firefly Nano Optical Engine
  • Micro LED + Diffractive Waveguide
  • Monochrome green
  • 1200 nits
• Display Area:
  • Transparency: 97%
  • FOV: 23.5°
• Audio:
  • Array 4 Mic + 1 Bone Conduction Microphones
• Interactions:
  • Smart Crown
  • Voice Control
  • Head Gesture
• Battery:
  • Capacity: 240mAh
  • Typical duration：48h
  • Standby duration (Worn): 63h
  • Standby duration (Folded): 250h
  • Continuous Translation duration: 6.2h
  • Continuous Teleprompter duration: 6.6h

Design

The glasses are thin as advertised. They almost look like regular glasses. Let me show you some pictures of them from all points of view.

The most important thing to notice is that there are no cameras on these glasses. So these glasses don’t risk to freak the people around you. I will give you more considerations about this later on.

Regarding the fashionability, RayNeo iO Smart Glasses have an essential design, not something that has been created by a fashion expert. At least on me, they don’t look very cool. I mean, they don’t even look bad: people around me told me I look “ok” with them. I made my Chinese assistant try them, and she definitely looked better, so I guess the fit depends a lot on the face.

Comfort

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are thin and lightweight: they only weigh 33 grams. RayNeo did an incredible job in trying to make these glasses as comfortable as possible. And when you wear them, you can feel that they are very light.

But notwithstanding this, when I tested long-term wearability by wearing the glasses for something like 90 minutes straight, I felt some discomfort, and I was relieved by removing them. The big problem for me was that big protrusion at the end of the legs of the frames.

It’s not exactly clear to me why they have been made this way, probably to make sure that the glasses do not slip and stay attached to the head even when you move it. But these big things exercise some pressure in the area between my ears and my skull, and while in the short term it is not a big deal, in the long term, I feel some strain in that area. I also felt some pressure on the top of my nose when I was wearing the glasses. For this reason, when I removed the glasses, I actually felt some relief. So I had mixed feelings related to the comfort of this device: I loved the weight and the size, but I still had some discomfort.

I need to keep testing the glasses comfort-wise, and I will update you in my next article. I will try to tweak the glasses a bit to improve the comfort and see if I find a good fit. These are glasses meant as a day-long companion, so it is important they can be comfortable to wear for many hours.

Display

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses feature a dual monochrome display. The FOV is just above 23°, but it is well enough for showing some notifications on the screen. Text is very readable, and the brightness is definitely good. If you put the brightness at its maximum, 1200 nits, you can even have some outdoor readability. I tried looking at the sky on a sunny day with them, and I could still perceive some of the writing. The lenses are also very transparent, so this doesn’t darken the world around you. I’ve literally almost no complaints about the display: as a display to show textual notifications, it is very good. TCL proves again to be a great company when it comes to making displays.

The only complaint I have is about where the display is. These glasses have the display in the upper part of your vision, which is a bit weird because our eyes are usually comfortable looking in front of them or slightly below them. The good thing about this decision is that this means that even when there is some notification, it doesn’t occlude your natural field of view; it is absolutely not obtrusive. The bad news is that when I tried to look at the display for a prolonged time (e.g., for the teleprompter), I started feeling some slight eye strain. And the reason is that eyes are not very comfortable constantly looking up. So this choice is fine for notifications you have to briefly look at, but not fine for prolonged reads. You can move the display area a bit down via the companion app, but then you risk having the writings in front of your eyes, which may occlude your view of the world.

The display has no privacy feature. From the outside, everyone can see you’re using smart glasses. Even more, they can even read the text that you have in front of your eyes.

Audio

I usually write in these reviews that “I’m not an audio expert, so I can just comment that audio works, but I can not tell you much about the quality”. In this case, it will be different because the glasses don’t feature any speaker. They don’t speak; they just show stuff on the screen. I guess this choice has been made to keep the price and the weight low, but I’m honestly a bit puzzled by that. Speakers can be useful, especially when interacting with the AI assistant: having only written feedback seemed a bit limiting to me. Also, this means that you can’t have phone calls through the smartglasses.

The headset features a good array of microphones, instead, that can hear not only you, but also the people around you. From my tests, the mics worked pretty well: the glasses have always understood what I was saying.

Battery

The battery is definitely a superpower of this device. The company claims that for normal usage, the battery can last up to 2 days. For continuous use of translation, it lasts more than 6 hours. It is quite a lot, so RayNeo did a great job in this sense.

For sure, the fact that there are no cameras and speakers helps a lot in reducing the battery consumption. But RayNeo also made sure that the glasses save as much battery as they can. For instance, the notifications stay on the screen just a few seconds, and then they go away: this has the double effect of not cluttering the view of the user and at the same time saving on battery.

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses do not feature a USB-C port. They have two pins under the lens bridge, and there you attach a special charging adapter that has the USB-C port so that you can charge them. Attaching this adapter is a bit clunky.

Interactions

You can interact with the RayNeo iO Smart Glasses in three ways:

• The crown: there is a little crown close to your right temple. You can rotate the crown to switch between items in a list or a menu; you can click it to confirm the current element, and you can also double-click it to open the AI assistant. I personally liked this choice of the crown: I found it easier to use than the usual swipe on the leg of the glasses.

• Voice control: these glasses are very focused on voice interactions. When you invoke the AI, you can also ask it by voice to open the app that you want
• Head gesture: when there is a system notification, you can nod with your head to approve it, or move the head left-to-right in disappointment to reject it. It’s a new, interesting way of interacting with smart glasses.

The display of the glasses also goes in stand by after a few seconds (usually 15s) if you don’t interact with them. But if you look up with your head, the display turns on automatically again. It’s cool that you can turn on the display without having to move your hands.

In general, I appreciated the way of interacting with these glasses.

Companion app

There is a companion RayNeo AI app that you have to install on your phone to use the glasses. The companion app is very similar to other companion apps of other smartglasses. Through it, you can:

• Configure your glasses (e.g., change the brightness, the language, etc.)
• Launch some applications
• Read the documentation and some tutorials about the glasses.

The companion app is pretty well made and has a lot of options inside. I think it’s important to install it, because it’s sometimes easier to launch and configure the apps through the app than with the native interface of the glasses.

Applications and software experience

I will delve into more details about the software experience with these glasses in my future article, after I’ll be able to spend more time with them. For now, let me give a brief overview of it.

When you launch the glasses, you are presented with the dashboard, which shows some widgets that you configure via the app. Widgets can be things like the current time, the weather, and the stock market.

You can open the main menu by clicking on the crown, and scroll through the list of apps by rotating the crown itself. These are some of the available experiences:

• Voice memo: you can record some audio notes, and then also let AI transcribe and summarize them for you
• Live Captions: you can see on your screen the transcription of what the people in front of you are saying. It can operate in many different languages and also provide live translation
• Teleprompter: it shows you a text that you can read out loud and automatically scrolls it for you to read

• Life Log: it keeps recording what you are doing, so that to provide you a summary of what you did during the day
• Live Cues: keeps listening to the current conversation and provides you, in front of your eyes, answers to the questions it detects. So, if while you speak with a friend, someone asks “where is Italy?” the glasses may provide the answer straight in front of your eyes. This is a nice example of the integration of AI into smartglasses to make people look smarter

• AI Assistant: it answers all your questions. It is also able to retrieve updated information, like what the weather is today.

My short experience with these apps has been mostly hit-or-miss. Live Captions didn’t work very well in a conversation in Italian with my mother, and it felt better when I was speaking in English, or my assistant was speaking in Chinese. But even in these languages, sometimes it missed a sentence or something like that. Live Cues (which is in beta) did not always detect when a question was asked. So, things mostly worked, but there is some work to do on the accuracy side. I have to admit that I was operating in an area with bad Wi-Fi, so I want to check if things are better when I get back to my office.

I’m also very confused by the Life Log feature. It definitely makes sense, but I wonder how it can work without a camera. If the glasses don’t see, how can they make a log of what I’m doing in every moment of the day? I don’t think that just audio is enough. Like now, I’m writing this blog article, but I’m not screaming these words to let the glasses understand them… so probably the glasses would think that I’m doing nothing.

Privacy features

The glasses don’t have a camera, and this is a great advantage to guarantee the privacy of the user, and also of the people around the user.

Or at least, this is what it seems at first thought. But the fact that the glasses have features like Life Log that keep analyzing with AI all the audio around you doesn’t seem to me very privacy-friendly, either. RayNeo claims to have a lot of privacy certifications like GDPR, but still, I guess the people around you should know that you’re potentially recording them. This shows us that “privacy” is a concept that is a bit more complex than just talking about a camera installed on your face.

RayNeo thought about this and added a privacy LED that turns on when you are recording any audio, but the LED is at the end of the frames, close to the ears of the user. Because of its position and luminosity, I can guarantee you that no one is ever going to notice that.

Price and availability

RayNeo iO Smart Glasses are available for purchase starting today. The price is $499 with the standard case, or $549 with the charging case. At launch, the glasses have a $50 discount.

General impressions

I say I need more time with RayNeo iO Smart Glasses, because I’ve still not finalized my opinion about them. It is for sure a good product: the glasses are thin and lightweight, the screen is readable, the battery lasts long, there are a lot of AI integrations, and the crown offers a very efficient interaction. So I can definitely see the potential.

But there are still a couple of things that I want to investigate. One is for sure the use case. These glasses have no camera and no speakers, so all the most popular use cases for glasses can’t be used here. I want to understand better if glasses that are microphone-only can truly be helpful for productivity and efficiency as the company advertises. The second is understanding better the performance: if the glasses are all focused on listening, I think that listening should work flawlessly. In my early tests, this was not always the case, so I want to keep using them to have a better understanding of their reliability.

Today I can only say to you that these glasses are a well-made device. In the next article, I will try to answer the only question that truly matters: are RayNeo iO Smart Glasses worth the $500 that you are going to spend on them?