Generative AI could be smart glasses’ killer app and Hong Kong-founded Brilliant Labs is betting big on the trend

The AI powered Frame glasses use multiple large language models to help users in daily life, which Brilliant Labs’ CEO says is an industry game-changer

As Apple’s Vision Pro reinvigorates the market for smart eyewear, Asian companies, including China’s Xreal and RayNeo, are betting on more svelte glasses

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Brilliant Labs has announced its first pair of smart glasses, called Frame, which relies on generative artificial intelligence as its main selling point. Photo: Brilliant Labs

Published: 7:00am, 11 Feb 2024

Singapore-based smart lenses start-up Brilliant Labs has become the latest company to introduce a pair of smart glasses, as a slew of tech companies, including several in China, try to make wearing glasses “cool”.

The company’s new Frame smart glasses, announced on Friday, are imbued with a custom artificial intelligence (AI)-powered assistant called Noa, which corrals many large language models (LLMs) to find one that is the best fit for a given query. By putting this tech into slim frames that can be worn all day, Brilliant Labs, founded in Hong Kong in 2019, is jumping on the smart eyewear trend that has also drawn in several Chinese companies looking to capitalise on a market expected to boom this year thanks to the entry of Apple with its much larger Vision Pro mixed reality headset.

Brilliant Labs co-founder and CEO Bobak Tavangar believes this is the right time for smart eyewear, but not for the same reasons as Apple. As Tavangar sees it, generative AI – the tech underpinning ChatGPT and similar products – is the real game-changer that could potentially get everyone wearing a smart display on their face. He said the Frame is more akin to the Rabbit R1 – an AI powered handheld device that debuted during CES 2024 – than other augmented reality (AR) glasses on the market.

“We feel that it is analogous to multitouch for the smartphone. Until that technology and interface modality was invented, smartphones were really not a thing,” Tavangar said in an interview with the Post.

Past efforts to make AR glasses fun by putting “whales in front of your eyes and a T-Rex dancing on the table” have not panned out, he added. “It’s always lacked that existential purpose … which we believe is generative AI,” the CEO said.