Brilliant Labs Unveils Frame, Smart Glasses Delivering "AI Superpowers"
Building on its earlier Monocle, the Frame takes the form of a more traditional pair of glasses — but with a feed to OpenAI and others.
Wearables startup Brilliant Labs has launched a pair of smart glasses, simply dubbed Frame, which claim to deliver "a suite of AI capabilities out of the box" — and, like its previous Monocle, the software is "fully open-source."
"What if your glasses gave you AI superpowers," the company asks, rhetorically, in support of its latest wearable gadget. "[Frame offers] visual analysis of the world around you, powered by OpenAI. Translate what you see and hear, powered by Whisper. Search the live web for what you see, powered by Perplexity. Hack, build, and modify — Frame is open to the boldest ideas."
This isn't the first augmented reality wearable from Brilliant Labs, though it's undeniably the most mainstream. A year ago the company announced the Monocle, a hackable head-up display designed to be clipped to the wearer's existing glasses — or simply held in front of an eye. "It connects to your mobile phone over Bluetooth," the company explained at the time, "and includes a few handy sensors such as touch buttons, camera, and microphone," all running from an on-board field-programmable gate array (FPGA).
Unlike the recently-launched Apple Vision Pro, which is a fully-enclosed virtual reality headset with camera pass-through capabilities, the Frame offers a single head-up display over one eye — with optional prescription lens inserts available over both eyes, so they can replace a user's regular glasses. As a result, they're considerably lighter at just 40g (around 1.4oz), and can deliver "all-day battery life" with top-ups available from a bundled stand and charger dubbed Mister Power.
The artificial intelligence functionality, meanwhile, doesn't happen on-device; instead, it's farmed out to external services from companies like OpenAI through a companion mobile app dubbed Noa. For early adopters, Brilliant Labs says, this will be made available free of charge subject to daily usage caps; a paid tier will follow for heavier users, as an as-yet unannounced price point.
Brilliant Labs is taking pre-orders for Frame at $418.80 with plain lenses or $536.60 with prescription lenses, with the devices expected to ship in mid-April. The company's source code, meanwhile, has been published to GitHub under open-source licenses — though while it includes the firmware running on the Monocle and its Noa companion apps, no source code specific to the Frame hardware had been uploaded at the time of writing.