Smartglasses represent a new opportunity for devs, but are unripe

As a developer, I’m closely watching the success of smart glasses with great interest because they represent a huge opportunity. But at the same time, I’ve serious doubts about how this opportunity can actually be profitable for me, and for us developers and creators in general. Let me tell you why.

The success of smartglasses

I know it, you know it: Meta is selling a lot of smartglasses. Millions of them. In a leaked memo, Meta and Luxottica said they wanted to increase production to 20-30M units per year. These are huge numbers in the XR field: the Quest 2, the most successful headset ever, sold like 25M units in its lifetime, while here we are talking about the same volume in a single year.

That’s why all companies jumped on this bandwagon: Samsung is releasing its glasses this fall; Apple is probably coming next year; Chinese companies like Huawei, Alibaba, TCL RayNeo already launched their models; open-source alternatives like Mentra are already available. It is the only sector in XR where there is some genuine hype.

And this is happening for a few good reasons. While XR headsets have to be explained to people, everyone knows the value of glasses. Millions of people already need glasses and sunglasses, and if they can choose between standard glasses or slightly more expensive smartglasses, some of them will pick the second choice. Add to it the fact that Luxottica has a gigantic distribution network, so the glasses are not only sold in online shops for techies, but in all the glasses shops of the Western world, and then you understand why the sales are going so well.

An opportunity for us developers

A new platform means a new market: a new market to which we developers can provide value with our products (at least until AI substitutes us all, but that’s a topic for another day). And the interesting thing is that it is a totally new market: while in VR, if I want to publish, for instance, a social VR app, I have to challenge the market leaders like VRChat; on glasses, there are currently no market leaders. There are some people making some experiments, but we are basically in the early days of the Oculus DK1: just a few indie experiments, but nothing that has already taken the lead. Plus, there are still a lot of things for which there are no applications yet.

And even more, it is a new market with millions of users, and counting. Every year, millions of glasses are being sold. So there are millions of new potential customers every quarter. The numbers are strong enough to create a company making good business. It is a niche that may be entering the mainstream.

The cool business kids in town would say it is a place for a “blue ocean strategy”. It is a new field where there are opportunities for everyone to do business. In my opinion, it is definitely a sector we should consider building something upon.

So where are the millionaires?

via GIPHY

Smartglasses are a huge opportunity… but I would say it is still a pretty unripe opportunity. You can see that by the fact that, notwithstanding the many smartglasses that have been sold, I’ve never heard about a single company that is making a lot of money out of them. With the exception of the companies that sell the hardware, of course.

Paradoxically, even if VR headsets are selling less than smartglasses, there are more studios making money with them than with glasses. At least in the consumer sector. But why? The reason is that there are various problems haunting glasses, and I’ll try to describe them in the next section.

The problems of smartglasses for us creators

The best use cases are taken

If you start thinking about smartglasses and their applications, you may immediately think about use cases like taking photos, having real-time translation, taking notes, and using navigation. Well, all these use cases have already been taken by hardware manufacturers like Meta or Google. When people buy the glasses, these apps are already provided. So this leaves no room for custom providers to create similar solutions.

And things are not getting better. A few months ago, I was thinking that maybe smartglasses could be used to evaluate the calories of a dish you are going to eat. One month later, Meta announced exactly the same thing. It’s hard to create something if the platform holders are already covering the most relevant use cases themselves.

AI is taken, too

These glasses are ideal to create AI assistants. But the companies proposing them are already shipping them with their own assistant. Samsung glasses will have Gemini, and Meta has Muse AI. And there is no way for a developer to create an AI assistant better than what these tech behemoths are able to build with their own infinite money.

The hardware is very limited

Apart from the obvious use cases, thinking about other ones is pretty complicated because these devices are very limited. The most sold models are audio-only Ray-Ban Meta glasses. You don’t have a display, just a camera, a microphone, and a speaker. What can you create with them? Not many things. I tried to think about it, and it’s really complicated to find an original use case that is not already covered by the platform providers.

Meta Ray-Ban Display offers you a display, but it is small and monocular, so it’s good for a short glance, but not for staring at content. The Google prototype for smartglasses I tried at AWE had similar constraints. Its possibilities are limited too.

The fact that the limitations of the hardware are a huge bottleneck can be seen by the explosion of prototypes that happened with the release of the SDK for the Meta Ray-Ban Display. Even just a tiny, limited display was enough for many creators to be able to do many more prototypes than what they could have done when they had only access to a speaker and a microphone. If a tiny display could create this explosion, imagine what we can have when we have more features.

Of course, AR glasses are the end game. And in fact, many more applications are possible on AR glasses like SPECS.

SDKs are rough

SDKs for smartglasses are very limited. Meta, the market leader, released the first SDK for its glasses when it was still very “early access”, and now it is publishing new updates quite often. But it is still very limited: for instance, if you create a web app for Meta Ray-Ban Display, you can’t access the camera, yet.

Ah, and some glasses don’t have an SDK yet and are just closed platforms. For instance, in China I tried the Huawei glasses, and I loved them, but it is not possible to develop any application for them, yet.

We need time for SDKs to improve.

Platforms are still silos

Do you remember when we VR developers had to create a build of our game for Oculus, one for SteamVR, one for Pico… and so on? With smartglasses, we are back at that phase. There is no “OpenXR” of smartglasses, so you basically have to create a new app (or at least a new frontend) for every platform you want to target.

There are platforms that want to target multiple glasses, like Android XR. And there are open platforms like Mentra OS with the dream of targeting all possible glasses with a single app. But at the moment, we are still in a “far west” situation.

There are almost no app stores

Imagine that you have overcome all the above difficulties and finally created your killer app for smartglasses. Where are you going to publish it? Most glasses don’t have a store. Meta has just created a sort of “prototypical store” for the Meta Ray-Ban Display and showcased it last month at Connect. But it’s really in the early stages.

Then some glasses still require you to launch a standard phone app: if you want to build for Ray-Ban Meta, for instance, you can’t have an app running natively on the glasses. You have to publish a standard Android app on the Play Store and a standard iPhone app on the App Store. But these apps will be diluted among the millions of apps on these gigantic stores, and it will be impossible for your smartglasses users to find them, unless they are explicitly looking for it.

MentraOS is probably the one offering the best solution, because it already offers a decently made mini app store. Rokid is going in that direction too, as far as AI agents are concerned. But the others (Meta included) are very well behind.

The hype may not end well

This is a graph I often show in my presentations:

It was the predicted sales of Google Glass when I started with XR, around 2014. These were predicted to sell millions of units and eventually enter the mainstream. What happened is that they proved to be only good for Robert Scoble to have a shower, and eventually everyone abandoned them.

The fact that glasses are in hype doesn’t mean that they will succeed. They are selling well now, but they will have to face a lot of roadblocks, with one of them being social acceptance. What is happening now with the “pervert glasses” affair and the glasses being blocked in some public places is an example of things that may slow down the sale of glasses and eventually kill them.

Another problem may be comfort: smartglasses are heavier and bigger than standard glasses, so people may not be happy wearing them for many hours a day. Also, the use cases have not been proven. As far as I know, most people use these products mostly to shoot photos and videos. So they are more “glasses with a camera” than “smart glasses”. It still has to be proven that people want to launch “apps” on them.

So how to make money with smartglasses?

Because of all the above problems, it is very complicated to create serious applications that truly provide value with smartglasses. That’s why, in the various reels proposed by companies, we mostly see these things:

• Obvious use cases already covered by the manufacturers (pictures, translation, etc.)
• Mini applications and experiments
• B2B use cases

Mini applications are fine for likes on LinkedIn, but they are pretty bad for business. I’ve heard plenty of people telling me “oh, I created the miniapp with the live agenda of this event”, and that’s nice… but how do you create a business out of it? I mean, I like the enthusiasm, and I like experimentation, but I’m in a phase in my career where I’m more looking for serious opportunities than just “having fun”. Someone told me that maybe the future is just an ecosystem of microapps that have a very specific utility in just one place (e.g., you enter AWE, and the microapp with its agenda pops in your glasses, a bit like what RP1 is proposing). The problem is that this a future where only the platform holder makes good money, and the others starve, providing free or almost-free microapps, so I don’t want to believe in this. I want to see more serious applications, offering daily utility and creating retention.

I think that it seriously makes more sense to keep experimenting with smartglasses (or their emulators) and, in the meantime, wait for the time to be more ripe. I still believe in their potential, and I have a couple of them at home. But I think times are a bit longer than I would like them to be. I guess it may happen a bit like smartwatches, another type of device plagued by having a small screen: they took some time before finding their best use cases, which were mostly related to fitness, health, and wellbeing.

Of course, all this reasoning is related to consumer applications. On the enterprise side, I already see some potential with having a dedicated AI assistant running on-premises to help workers in factories. Companies most probably don’t want to give all their data to Gemini or Meta, so they would like to use a dedicated AI system running on their servers. Some glasses like Vive Eagle or Mentra already allow for this to be possible. Some enterprise solutions like NVIDIA’s “XR AI” already facilitate this a lot.

Apps for enterprise may not be super-original or sexy, but they shouldn’t be. Enterprise may be where some of the money is now, and in fact Google Glass itself in the end found some use in warehouse management (e.g. to scan barcodes). So, like in many things XR, I wonder if now the money is mostly on the enterprise side instead of the consumer side of things. (And by the way, if you need help on this side, contact me, and I can help you with my super development skills).

Other B2B sectors may regard research, e.g., experimenting with special use cases inside universities; or training of robots with the data collected by the glasses (Meta Project Aria is very good in this sense); or accessibility: these glasses could be good to create experiences for people with vision or hearing impairments, for instance.

Final considerations

I keep thinking that smartglasses are a great opportunity, but at the same time I still see many challenges before we’ll have a proper healthy ecosystem of creators. The recipe for now is to keep experimenting, keep thinking about new ideas, maybe publish some miniapps, and in the meantime keep pushing the manufacturers to improve their ecosystems and maybe also create some standards (hey, Khronos Group, I would love it if you could do something about this… :P). I bet sometimes new opportunities will arise, even if I think that the true breakthrough will come only with true AR glasses.

I’m also sure that sooner or later someone will come up with some amazing idea for glasses, will publish it, and make a big success. And watching it, I’ll think “How come I didn’t think about it before?” A bit like it happened when I saw the genius Body Proxy apps from Tender Claws.

At least these are my thoughts. What are yours? Have you already thought about the killer app for smartglasses? Let me know in the comments or on my social media channels!