Samsung’s Ray-Ban smartglass killer may be arriving sooner than you think

Everyone wants a piece of the smart glasses pie. With Meta moving full steam ahead, launching three new pairs of Smart glasses All at once at its Connect conference this year (incl Ray-Ban monitor with screen), and other big-name competitors are following suit. Apple, for example, is said to be Trying to speed up your first pair of smart glasses By shifting resources from Vision Pro a team. To give you an idea of ​​the urgency of this pivot, Apple is reportedly de-prioritizing developing a cheaper, lighter version that people might actually buy, to follow up on said smart glasses.

Now, it looks like another smartphone giant has been swept up in this push, and the result could be Samsung-made smart glasses hitting shelves sooner than you think. According to a report from Financial news And in South Korea, we could see “Project Haean,” augmented reality (AR-powered) glasses rumored to be made by Samsung, early next year. It’s hard to say how much stock to put into this rumor without any official timeline from Samsung, but if you’ll allow me to speculate for a moment, it seems very possible.

On top of the obvious trend towards smart glasses, there is also strong evidence that both Google and Samsung are investing heavily in augmented reality. This year at I/O, Google showed off a preview of its XR Glasses, which have a similar feature set to Meta’s Ray-Ban Display. While there’s no telling when these glasses might see the light of day, it’s clear that this isn’t a fancy prototype. Gizmodo Senior Editor, Consumer Technology, Raymond Wong, You should try the XR glasses A bit, and even though the demo only ran for a total of 90 seconds, it was real at least in the sense that Google was letting people try it out.

That’s all to say that new devices are clearly in the works, and while Samsung hasn’t gone so far as to announce anything official (it certainly hasn’t given demos in a public setting), we’ve been getting some strong hints. At the I/O keynote in May, for example, GM for Android Shahram Al-Azadi said“We’re taking our partnership with Samsung to the next level by extending Android Well, well, look at that; Samsung and Google are sitting in the tree..

It’s not a clear yes or no, of course, but it’s not; no No either. Regardless of how (or when) this happens, I’m personally looking forward to Samsung entering the fray. Even more than Google, Samsung has an opportunity to make smart glasses that actually look useful. Given its widespread presence in phones and other devices, it could provide tighter integration between mobile devices and smart glasses than Meta could ever dream of, and that’s huge for delivering a high-quality smart glasses experience right now, since they still rely on phones for all their heavy computing.

In the US, Samsung may not have the same ecosystem weight at Apple’s level, but it’s still a huge player and will be the largest (sorry, Meta) smart glasses with a display have seen to date. Personally, my body (or face, I guess) is ready for the diverse, non-meta-dominated field of smart glasses that many of us have been waiting for.