Former Apple exec introduces new AI-powered glasses

A promising tech startup founded by a former Apple employee is bringing a new augmented reality (AR) glasses product to market. 

Sinapore-based Brilliant labs on Thursday announced its new product, Frame, a pair of lightweight AR glasses promising to give the wearer “AI superpowers” through the company’s always-online voice assistant, “Noa.” The startup was founded by Bobak Tavangar, a former program lead at Apple, and is backed by Niantic CEO John Hanke, whose company built the augmented reality platform that powers games like Pokémon GO, Axios reported. 

“Frame is designed to be worn as a pair of glasses with a suite of AI capabilities out of the box,” a product description on Brilliant Labs’ website states.

A concept video describes numerous features of the glasses, including mealtime visual analysis of whatever the wearer is looking at. Frame is also able to translate signs written in different languages, search the web based on visual and voice prompts and project images to a screen that sits right on the user’s face. 

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Brilliant Labs has integrated several AI models to power Frame’s features, including conversational web search powered by Perplexity AI; Stability AI’s text-to-image model Stable Diffusion; GPT4 from OpenAI; and speech recognition from Whisper, according to TechCrunch.

A tourist in a foreign country might use Frame to translate signs and find directions, for example. Or a shopper might see a pair of shoes in a store, do a web search for the same brand and compare prices. 

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The glasses are designed to fit most people and weigh about 40 grams, or a little more than 1.4 ounces. They are designed to be worn all day long and may be ordered with prescription lenses. 

Frame glasses will retail for $349 and can be pre-ordered on Brilliant Labs’ website, with shipping to begin in April, according to Axios.

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The product will compete with other wearable devices powered by AI technology, including Humane’s AI Pin and Rabbit’s R1. 

Frame is the second AR device developed by Brilliant Labs, following Monocle, a programmable single-lens AR device that is popular for being open-source.

Last week, Apple introduced its own AR device, the Vision Pro, which CEO Tim Cook has touted as the “most advanced consumer electronics device ever created.” 

The bulky headset, which retails at a whopping $3,499.99, “seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world and unlocks powerful spatial experiences in visionOS, controlled by the most natural and intuitive inputs possible – a user’s eyes, hands and voice,” according to Apple. 

Fox Business’ Aislinn Murphy contributed to this report.