You can’t really talk about smart glasses without bringing up Meta. HTC, the company behind 2010-era virtual reality headsets and a failed smartphone business, seems quite eager to tackle that comparison directly.
In September, HTC started selling its $499 Vive Eagle smart glasses in the US. The Eagles have lots of the same features as other glasses on the market—cameras for capturing photos and video, speakers in the frames for music playback and calls, an embedded AI agent you can ask questions of and even get recipes from by taking pictures of stuff in your fridge.
But HTC also wants to steer clear of the ongoing debate about privacy in camera-equipped smart glasses. Meta has been dogged by controversy for its smart glasses, with people worried about the company’s interest in enabling face-recognition features, and calling the people who wear them creepy. HTC is aware of that discourse and thinks it is completely possible to make smart glasses that aren’t a privacy nightmare.
“It's not just about protecting the consumer, but it's also about protecting people around the consumer,” Dan McDowell, HTC Vive’s head of enterprise sales, tells WIRED. “People can usher in, I think, what are really tremendous experiences with a new layer of confidence and protection.”
I’ve been wandering around with the glasses for a couple of weeks, and so far they meet my expectations for what smart glasses have become. They protect my eyes from the sun. They snap good photos and videos. You can record and transcribe voice notes. The music playback has decent sound quality. (I’ll always prefer a solid pair of headphones if I’m actually trying to listen to music, but the speakers work just fine.) They come in two styles—one with square Wayfarer-esque lenses and the other more rounded.
Courtesy of HTC
The Vive Eagle glasses can get 4.5 hours of battery life on continuous music playback. They can last 36 hours on standby. HTC also sells a companion clip-on battery pack called Power Boost that costs $49. It clips right onto the frame and is noticeable but not as obnoxious as you might think.
Don’t forget the AI assistant, Vive AI, which can utilize OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. It doesn’t require a login, so users are “de-identified” in a way that keeps the services from retaining personal information. (That also means, by default, you won’t be able to enjoy many of the personalization features these chatbots offer by gleaning information from your emails and messages.) The glasses come with Vive’s AI Plus, free for the first two years. After that, users must pay a monthly $2.50 subscription fee.
Right by the cameras is a bright indicator light. If you cover the light, it won’t record. If someone around you says stop recording, that will stop the recording. Video footage you capture is encrypted and stored on the glasses—it’s not automatically sent to the phone or cloud. If you want to import photos or videos, you have to do it manually in the app.
Meta has faced scrutiny over the indicator light before, as some users have blocked the LED with stickers or broken into the hardware to turn it off. Meta has responded with software updates that disable the camera if someone tampers with the indicator light, along with other privacy-focused measures.
I ask McDowell how HTC, and really any smart glasses maker, can get past the “trust me, bro”–style privacy promises companies tend to make.
“We're not a social media company,” McDowell says. “There's no benefit to me to have any of your info. We don't train our AI model or any third-party AI models with any of the information that is used on the glasses.”
The real problem may be that with cameras on the frames, smart glasses are hard to distinguish between brands. The Vive Eagles look a lot like Meta glasses, and people worried about those privacy issues may not know that the Eagles are different and not tied to Mark Zuckerberg’s company. I’ve had friends see me wearing them and ask if they’re smart glasses. Yeah, I replied, but not the ones they’re thinking of. That didn’t seem to dispel any of their suspicions.
The hope, at least how HTC frames it, is that more players with better privacy practices will help shift cultural disdain for smart glasses. A bunch of other companies are going cameraless, like Even Realities, Viture, and Halliday. Others are building theirs with privacy shields or focusing on virtual displays instead of capturing the world around you. That said, no one has captured the market quite like Meta.
“We'd like to make sure that our technology adapts to society's expectations, not the other way around,” McDowell says. “I hope that everybody that's making products like these takes steps in the right direction.”