These Frame smart glasses promise ‘AI superpowers’ for $349

There’s a new pair of smart spectacles in town — and this time, it’s the $349 Frame glasses said to give you multimodal “AI superpowers.” The open-source eyewear comes from a startup called Brilliant Labs, which touts Frame as a way to get AI translations, web search, and visual analysis right in front of your eyes.

As shown in a video posted by Brilliant Labs, you can use your voice to ask the glasses to do things like identify a landmark you’re looking at, search the web for a particular pair of sneakers you’re seeing, or even look up nutrition information for the food you’re about to eat. The information appears as an overlay that shows up directly on the lens.

Frame comes in three colors you can preorder now: black, gray, and clear. There’s also an option to add a prescription lens, but this bumps the price up to $448. Frame starts shipping on April 15th.

Smart glasses aren’t a new concept, but none of them have really taken off. We’ve already seen several attempts at smart eyewear, like North’s Focals glasses, Bose’s now-discontinued audio augmented-reality (AR) sunglasses, and, most recently, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which come with AI features that are still in beta. These particular glasses from Brilliant Labs seem even more exciting, as they should be completely open source and hackable, giving users even more freedom when compared to what we’ve seen so far.

Frame pairs with Brilliant Labs’ app, called Noa. The app contains an AI assistant that uses OpenAI for visual analysis, Whisper for translation, and Perplexity for web search. In an interview with Venture Beat, Brilliant Labs says its Noa AI “learns and adapts to both the user and the tasks it receives.”

Although you can use Noa for free, it’s “subject to a daily cap.” That’s why the startup is planning to offer a paid tier through Noa, but there’s still no information on how much it might cost. You won’t have to pay to use the hardware by itself, though, as Brilliant Labs notes on its Discord channel that there’s “no paywall or subscription” and that you can freely use the eyewear with other apps.

Brilliant Labs outlines Frame’s specs on its Discord channel. The glasses feature a 640 x 400 pixel color micro OLED that projects light through a prism in front of users’ eyes. It offers a roughly 20-degree diagonal field of view, which is on the small side for mixed or augmented-reality glasses, especially compared with something like the 52 degrees you’d get with Xreal’s new Air 2 Ultra design. It means you’ll only see text or images within a small box.

Frame also comes with a 1280 x 720 camera, microphone, and a 222mAh battery. It runs a Lua-based custom operating system that’s “fully open source with very few dependencies,” and is powered by a nRF52840 Cortex-M4F CPU. Some of these specs, such as the display, are the same as what Brilliant Labs uses in its other wearable, called Monocle, which it describes as “a pocket-sized AR device for the imaginative hacker.”

The glasses also come with a silly Mister Power charger (which gives the glasses a “nose” when you plug it in) that offers fast charging and “all-day battery life.” It’s too early to tell how Frame might stack up to other smart spectacles, like Meta’s $299 Ray-Ban glasses or the troubled Google Glass endeavor. But at less than 40 grams, they’ll certainly feel lighter on your face than Apple’s over 600-gram Vision Pro.