Lightweight but with a limited vision field

One of the biggest I/O disclosure is that the company officially returned to the mixed reality game with its own The first model xr smart glasses. Years have passed since we have seen anything big from the search giant at the front of the AR/VR/XR, but with a group of hardware partners to go with its XR platform, it seems that it is finally changing.

After the keyword, Google gave me a very short show for the first model device that we saw on the stage. I got just a few minutes with the device, so my impressions are very limited, unfortunately, but I immediately liked the lighting of glasses with Meta’s Orion And Snap’s Rewarded reality glasses. Although both are completely chunky, the first model of Google was lightweight and felt like an ordinary pair of glasses. The tires were a little thicker than usually worn, but not much.

At the same time, there are some noticeable differences between Google XR glasses and what we saw from Meta and Snap. The Google device has a screen only on one side – the correct lens, you can see it in the picture at the top of this article – so the visual “retail” visual images are more than completely immersive. I noticed during the Google show on the stage at I/O that the field of vision seemed narrow and I can confirm that it seems much limited by the Snap 46 degrees vision field. (Google refused to share details about the extent of view of the field of vision on the initial model.)

Instead, the screen felt a little paralysis for the front width of a foldable phone. You can use it to take a quick look at the time, notifications and small extracts of information from your applications, such as the music you listen to.

GEMINI aims to play a major role in the Android XR ecosystem, and Google will come through a few illustrations of the artificial intelligence assistant that works on smart glasses. I can look at a book or some art on the wall and ask Gemini questions about what I was looking for. I felt very paralyzed with the multimedia capabilities that we saw with Project Astra and other places.

There were some errors, even in carefully sleeping experimental offer. In one case, Gmini started telling me what I was looking before I finished my question, which followed it, a embarrassing moment as we stopped each other.

One of the most interesting cases of use was Google that Google shows is Google Maps in glasses. You can get a view of the next turn, such as Google’s enhanced walking directions, and look down to see a small section of the map on the ground. However, when I asked Gemini how much time it would take to San Francisco from my site, he was not able to provide an answer. (He actually said something like “output the tool”, and the experimental show has ended very quickly.)

I really liked how Google benefited from the camera on the glasses. When I took a picture, a picture of the image appeared immediately on the screen so that I could see how it turned out. I am really able to do so because framing images from a camera on smart glasses is not intuitive because the final image can vary depending on the place where the lens is placed. I often wished for this when taking pictures using the smart Ray-Ban Meta glasses, so it was really great to see a version of this in reality.

Frankly, I still have a lot of questions about Google’s vision of XR and what is the ultimately gymnasium smart glasses. As with many other mixed reality shows I have seen, it is clear that it is still in very early days. Google was keen to emphasize that this is the first model devices that aim to show what Android XR is capable of it, and not the device that planned for sale anytime soon. Therefore, any smart glasses we get from Google or their own devices partners can look completely different.

What a few minutes with Android XR managed to show is how Google thinks about combining artificial intelligence and mixed reality together. It is not completely different from Meta, which sees smart glasses a key to relying on the long term of AI’s assistant as well. But now that Gemini has reached every Google product, the company has a very solid foundation to complete this.