In my last newsletter, I mentioned to you the Alibaba N1 Pro smartglasses that have just been launched in China. I think these glasses have a couple of features that deserve more attention than a simple excerpt, so I decided to write a short article about them. Follow me: I promise you it is going to be interesting.
Alibaba smartglasses
I guess you all know Alibaba, the Chinese tech giant. The company (or, better, the behemoth) handles many of the most commonly used services in China, such as Alipay for payments and Taobao for buying goods (a sort of Chinese Amazon). But it also has a cloud infrastructure it offers as a service (a sort of Chinese AWS) and also quite popular open AI models: the Qwen family. And recently it also forayed into the smartglasses sector. When I was in Hangzhou, I was able to go hands-on with one of its glasses, and I found it quite good. The style was not as good as Ray-Ban’s, but it had some interesting features, like a display with a very high luminance, or the battery that was easily detachable and swappable.
Well, in a recent event in Hangzhou, the company announced a new series of glasses: the N1.
Alibaba N1 glasses
While the glasses I tried had a monochrome display, the just-announced Alibaba N1 glasses do not feature any display. They are a sort of competitor to the Ray-Ban Meta. You can already guess the use cases: phone calls, live translations, music listening, and AI assistance.
What is interesting is that the advertised features for these glasses are definitely superior to Meta. The camera has 50MP (Ray-Ban Meta has only 12), and can shoot 4K videos. The battery lasts up to 9 hours of continuous music streaming or 25 hours in standby (Ray-Ban Meta only offers 6 hours of music). Of course, features must be tried to be judged, and unluckily I have not had access to these glasses yet. But my friends at VR AR World did, and in their hands-on impression, they reported the pictures were pretty good even at night.
N1 Glasses are also integrated with all the Alibaba services: this may not look that relevant here, but in China, this is super important, because Alibaba services are very popular there. You can, for instance, pay in shops with Alipay by just looking at QR Codes with your glasses. Or you can speak with the AI on the glasses to ask to buy something on Taobao.
These features are definitely nice, but look like an incremental improvement on current technology. Let’s start now to speak about the two things I definitely found exciting on the higher-end device of the N-series: the Qwen N1 Pro.
Integrated eye tracking
Qwen N1 Pro glasses feature a tiny 1.7mm camera per eye that performs eye tracking, with an accuracy error that is claimed to be less than one degree. Thanks to this module, the glasses can truly see what you are looking at and not just infer what you are looking at from the head pose. So when you are querying the AI assistant on the glasses, the glasses know exactly what you are talking about and can provide an accurate answer depending on that.
I think this could be a game changer for AI context on glasses, especially for some applications concerning productivity or even for enterprise uses like training and maintenance. In industrial training, for instance, the glasses may ensure that you are actually having a look at the indicators you should look at to ensure the safety of the machine you are operating. But also in real life, the glasses may catch your interest in a certain article because you are keeping looking at it and give you more information about it. I think eye tracking on smartglasses and AR glasses has even more potential than eye tracking in VR glasses. Of course, Alibaba should allow developers to create applications for its glasses to open up all these use cases (currently it is not), but the potential is there.
Reading the hands-on article of VR AR World, I was able to discover that this eye tracking feature works quite well. It still makes some tracking mistakes, but most of the time, it is able to actually understand what you are looking at even when the elements are close to each other.
Eye tracking may also have other use cases, like authentication. In the case of N1 Pro glasses, it can be used to perform iris authentication to authorize you to make a payment with AliPay on the glasses. People stealing your glasses won’t be able to use them for payments.
I’m actually a big fan of the idea of eye tracking on glasses. And I’m happy that it is coming: Alibaba has just added it, and for sure other Chinese companies will take inspiration from it. But also an American company like Raven Resonance is doing the same. The only thing that concerns me about eye tracking on smartglasses is privacy. If a company can see whatever I’m looking at, it can literally learn everything about me, because my eyes are naturally attracted by the elements that interest me. There is no way I could fake that. That’s why I’m personally fascinated by its use cases, but I’m also scared by the data harvesting that some companies may make with it. In China, there is less attention towards privacy, so I think Alibaba won’t have much trouble, but here in the West there could be concerns.
Integrated health sensors
Many people compare smartglasses a lot with smartwatches: smartglasses are seen a bit like smartwatches attached to the head. Smartwatches have found their use case in fitness and wellness, but smartglasses can not because they lack any kind of health sensor.
Well, guess what? Qwen N1 Pro glasses actually implement it. In the nose bridge, there is a sensor that allows the glasses to measure your temperature, heart rate, and other information. I don’t know how accurate the information from this sensor is, but I find it definitely interesting that now smartglasses can also double down as a wellness device. I definitely see the value of it: for instance, if you use glasses when you are working, they could track when you are getting stressed.
Price and availability
Qwen N1 Pro is going to be available in China for 3499 yuan, which is approximately $490, but they are discounted to 2600 yuan at launch (circa $390). The non-Pro version, which doesn’t feature eye tracking, instead costs 2999 yuan (circa $450) and also has a discounted launch price. They offer more than Ray-Ban Meta but are also more expensive.
It is not clear if they’ll ever be available outside of China, but I guess probably not, because they are very tightly coupled with Alibaba services, which have not much appeal in the West.
Final impressions
I will share a full opinion about the Qwen N1 Pro from Alibaba only after I’ve been able to try it, hopefully during my next trip to China. For now, I can only say that they seem like a cool gadget: the camera and the battery have high specifications. And eye tracking together with health monitoring are definitely innovative features for the field. I can’t wait for them to be copied also by some device available here in the West. I already envision some interesting use cases for them… and you?
(Header image by Alibaba)