The smart-glasses vocabulary

Three degrees of freedom (orientation only), used by cheap viewers and lightweight smart glasses.

Six degrees of freedom (position + orientation), required for room-scale XR and persistent AR anchors.

Smart glasses whose main feature is an always-available multimodal AI assistant (vision + voice), as in Ray-Ban Meta.

Low-power audio buffer constantly waiting for the wake word, a privacy tradeoff every AI glasses maker faces.

Google's XR-specific Android variant launched in 2025 for the Samsung Galaxy headset and partner glasses.

Thin film on outer lenses that cuts reflections, critical for see-through AR readability outdoors.

Apple's $3,499 MR headset launched 2024, the reference platform for spatial computing.

Smart glasses with a see-through display overlaying digital content onto the real world.

Glasses with speakers and a mic but no display, focused on calls, music and voice AI (Bose Frames, Lucyd, Solos AirGo).

An AR display design using a beam splitter and curved mirror, common in XREAL, Rokid Max and Viture glasses.

Low-energy Bluetooth profile with the LC3 codec, the default audio link in 2026 smart glasses.

Open-source HUD glasses with an AI assistant and tinted prescription lenses.

HUD glasses that display live speech-to-text in front of you, marketed to deaf and hard-of-hearing users.

A small wearable battery+SoC that offloads heavy compute from the glasses, used by Meta Orion and Magic Leap 2.

Any sensor measuring distance per pixel (LiDAR, ToF, structured light), feeds occlusion and hand tracking.

A waveguide that uses microscopic surface gratings to bend light into the eye, used by HoloLens, Magic Leap and Meta Orion.

Computer vision research field on first-person video, the academic name for what Aria and Ray-Ban Meta capture.

Meta research framework training humanoid robots from first-person video captured by Project Aria glasses.

Lens that darkens on demand under electric current, used by Even Realities and Lumus to dim AR glasses outdoors.

Electromyography band reading nerve signals at the wrist, Meta's input device for Orion and the Ray-Ban Meta successor.

World's largest eyewear group (Ray-Ban, Oakley, Persol), Meta's hardware partner and a Smart Glasses Daily fixture.

Minimalist HUD glasses with a single green monocular display, time, notifications and turn-by-turn nav only.

Cameras inside the headset that follow your gaze, enabling foveated rendering, gaze-based UI and avatar eyes.

The 3D volume where your pupil must sit to see the full AR image, smaller eyeboxes break immersion when glasses shift.

The angular size of the displayed image, measured in degrees, the single number that decides how immersive AR glasses feel.

Synonym for POV filming, also the data format powering ego-centric AI training datasets.

Rendering only the area you are looking at in full resolution to save GPU, requires eye-tracking.

Look at a target, pinch to select, the dominant XR interaction pattern after Vision Pro.

Project DigiWindow glasses with a near-eye micro-OLED projector aimed at always-on captions and notifications.

Computer vision that detects your bare-hand pose, replacing controllers in Vision Pro, Quest and Meta Orion.

Meta's Quest OS, opened to third-party headset makers including ASUS and Lenovo in 2025.

Heads-Up Display, a minimal monocular overlay (time, notifications, turn-by-turn) without full AR, used by Even Realities.

Display-bearing glasses that show only a minimal monocular overlay, no full AR. Even Realities G1 is the archetype.

Inertial Measurement Unit (gyro + accelerometer + magnetometer), the chip that knows your head is rotating before the cameras do.

Two-digit code (e.g. IP54) declaring resistance to dust and water, the spec to check before wearing AI glasses outdoors.

Interpupillary distance, the millimeters between your eye centers, headsets that mismatch your IPD cause eye strain.

Liquid Crystal on Silicon, a reflective microdisplay tech historically used in waveguide AR glasses.

Time-of-flight depth sensor used by Vision Pro and iPhone Pro to capture room geometry instantly.

Real-time speech translation displayed as captions in your glasses, the killer app showcased by Meta and XREAL.

Large Language Model, the text-generation engine (GPT, Gemini, Claude) behind AI glasses assistants.

Open-source smart glasses platform letting developers ship AugmentOS apps on cheap eyewear hardware.

Meta's full-AR glasses prototype unveiled in 2024, featuring 70deg FOV waveguides and an EMG wristband.

OLED panels at sub-inch scale used inside birdbath and VR headsets, with deep blacks and wide color but limited outdoor brightness.

Self-emissive microscopic LED pixels delivering high brightness and efficiency, the leading candidate for sunlight-readable AR glasses.

Mixed Reality headset that blends real and virtual via passthrough cameras (Vision Pro, Quest 3).

AI models that take images, audio and text together, the basis for 'look and ask' on smart glasses.

A unit of luminance, AR glasses need ~1000 nits indoors and 3000+ nits to read against sunlight.

Real objects correctly hiding virtual ones (your hand passing in front of a 3D model), depth sensors required.

AI inference running locally on the glasses or phone instead of the cloud, lower latency and better privacy.

Speakers that aim sound at your ear without sealing it, the default audio scheme for smart glasses.

Khronos cross-vendor API for XR runtimes, lets one app run on Quest, Vision Pro, SteamVR and PSVR2.

Live camera feed of the real world piped to a closed VR headset, used by Vision Pro and Quest 3 for mixed reality.

Thumb-to-finger pinch detected by cameras, Vision Pro's primary 'click' replacing controllers.

First-person video capture from glasses cameras, the dominant content format for cyclists, climbers and creators.

Custom-cut Rx lenses that clip behind the smart-glasses optics, sold by Zeiss, Hoya and EssilorLuxottica.

Meta Reality Labs research glasses used for egocentric AI datasets and robot training (EgoMimic).

Meta and EssilorLuxottica's AI glasses line (no display, camera + Meta AI), the breakout smart-glasses hit of 2024-2026.

A waveguide that uses tiny mirror arrays inside glass to redirect light, favored by Lumus and Vuzix.

Rokid's birdbath AR glasses with an onboard Android puck, popular in China.

An AR display layered onto transparent lenses so you see the real world directly, as in Meta Orion or Snap Spectacles.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping, lets a headset build a 3D map of a room while tracking its own position inside it.

Glasses that add electronics (audio, camera, AI, display) while keeping a near-normal eyewear silhouette.

Snap's 5th-gen see-through AR glasses, developer-only, shipping with Lens Studio.

Qualcomm's purpose-built chip for smart glasses, powering Ray-Ban Meta gen 2 and most AI eyewear in 2025-2026.

Qualcomm's XR headset chip, inside Quest 2/3 and most standalone VR/MR devices.

A persistent virtual object pinned to a real-world location, the foundation for shared AR experiences.

Apple's framing for the post-screen era where apps live in 3D around you, popularized by Vision Pro.

Glasses with all compute, battery and connectivity onboard, like Ray-Ban Meta and Quest 3.

TCL's AR brand shipping waveguide HUD glasses (RayNeo X3 Pro) and birdbath cinema glasses.

HUD glasses that scroll your script in front of your eye while you record video or give a talk.

Glasses that need a USB-C cable to a phone or compute puck for video and power, like XREAL One and Viture Pro.

Ultra-wideband radio used for centimeter-accurate device-to-device positioning, found in Vision Pro.

The mismatch between where your eyes converge and where they focus in stereo displays, the main cause of XR headache.

Apple's spatial OS for Vision Pro, built on iOS frameworks plus 3D scene management.

VITURE's micro-OLED birdbath glasses targeting Steam Deck and iPhone gamers.

Vision-Language Model, the multimodal cousin of an LLM that can describe what your glasses camera sees.

Fully opaque headset that replaces your view with rendered worlds (Quest, PSVR2, Pico).

The trigger phrase ('Hey Meta', 'Hey Siri') that activates the on-glasses assistant without a button press.

A thin transparent optical element that channels light from a tiny projector to your eye, the dominant display tech for see-through AR glasses.

802.11be wireless standard, fast enough for wireless PCVR streaming to lightweight AR glasses.

Extended Reality, the umbrella for AR + VR + MR.

XREAL's tethered birdbath AR glasses with onboard X1 chip, the spec to beat in cinema-on-the-go.