Smart glasses and smart rings are two of the biggest current wearable tech trends, so it makes sense for there to be various new examples of both at CES 2025. What new product would be complete without a big dollop of AI inside?
Newcomer Halliday has unexpectedly brought all three of these trends together into one fascinating product for the technology trade show, and Digital Trends had a conversation with the company’s co-founder, Carter Hou, to find out more.
Like nothing we’ve seen before
In a departure from what we saw in 2024, Halliday is not putting a camera in its smart glasses. Instead, it is focusing its hardware efforts on a display and then adding a smart ring to control it all. It’s also going in a new direction with the software, promising an AI assistant that reacts to what’s going on around us rather than waiting for a prompt before speaking up.
“We want to build smart glasses people would wear,” Hou told Digital Trends. “They must be very light, under 40 grams, so you can wear them every day and not feel fatigue, and they should have a very-long-lasting battery. They must also have a display, as this transmits information to you 20 times faster than audio, is more discreet, and more efficient. If you want to have a real smart experience, there must be a display on the glasses.”
However, putting a display in a pair of smart glasses is challenging. Waveguide technology — one of the more common options for adding a display to a lens — isn’t very efficient, suffers from light leakage, and also causes problems for those who also require prescription lenses. As such, the company decided not to use it. Halliday’s solution is to incorporate a tiny “optical module” in the upper part of the inner frame, which “beams light right into your eyes,” Hou said.
Hou explained how the optical module shows the equivalent of a 3.5-inch screen and is brighter and usable in more environments than a waveguide-based display. It’s also more private and less intrusive during a conversation, as the other person cannot see it working. To overcome problems like orientation and focusing, Halliday’s display — which it calls the DigiWindow — can be moved horizontally across the frame and twisted to bring the screen into focus.
Why Halliday’s glasses don’t have a camera
Having a display on a pair of smart glasses immediately evokes Google Glass and the usefulness of its external display, but the Ray-Ban Meta’s camera is a lot of fun to use and introduces AI-based features like visual search. So, why has Halliday left the camera out?
“Cameras come with privacy issues and at the cost of battery life,” Hou explained. Not having a camera streamlines the design of the frames, too, with Halliday opting for a classic (and quite Wayfarer-like) design that weighs just 35 grams. The company’s background is in contact lenses and eyewear, so it has considerable experience in the field. It will sell the AI Glasses with the option of adding prescription lenses.
Hou expects battery life to be between eight and 12 hours on a single charge, and explained the glasses will be recharged using a USB-C connection on the end of the arm for convenience. But what about controlling the smart glasses? There’s no head tracking like Google Glass, but there is a single physical button and a touch-sensitive panel. However, the primary way to control the AI Glasses is with the included smart ring.
Yes, you read that correctly. Halliday’s glasses come with a smart ring where swipes and taps on the trackpad-like surface let you interact with the display and the glasses’ functionality without touching the frames. It’s definitely unusual, combining two of the top wearable tech trends of the last year into a single product. Plus, it’s obviously discreet. Hou said that at this time, the smart ring does not have any additional functionality, such as health and fitness tracking, outside of controlling the glasses.
A really unique take on AI
If the smart ring control system was unexpected, Halliday’s approach to AI is also different from many others. It calls its AI “proactive,” and it’s likely to be one of the more controversial aspects of the product, particularly as it has not included a camera and stated privacy as one of the reasons why.
“Our proactive AI agent listens to conversations around you, understands them, and provides information [on the screen] whenever it is necessary. The AI itself will judge when it is the right time to speak up. For example, if we are talking about a theory or concept and you ask me a question, it will just answer it for me. It can facilitate conversations and keep them going, it can be used to detect factual errors during a business meeting, and it can be used on a date if a topic you don’t know anything about comes up. In an interview if you are asked a question you do not know the answer to, it’s going to help you with the solution.”
The surreptitious recording of conversations and “cheating” through the use of AI will undoubtedly (and rightly) raise concerns about ethics and privacy, perhaps even more so than if Halliday’s glasses had a camera. Hou defended the feature when asked about this, saying it wasn’t much different from recording an audio memo on a phone, and said it’s optional to have the AI feature in its always-listening mode. He also spoke about the associated costs involved with using AI to record and monitor entire conversations all day, every day, making it unlikely to be a constantly used feature. He also admitted there may be policy concerns in some regions.
Halliday AI Glasses price and availability
Halliday will first sell its AI Glasses through a Kickstarter campaign but said this was more for order management than project funding and expects the product to be released around March 2025. It will cost around $400, but there will be several early bird deals, including the chance to get prescription lenses, which are included in the price. Huo did indicate a subscription package for using the AI would likely be introduced, but no decisions had been made about how it would work or how much it would cost at the time we spoke.
The smart ring is part of the package, and there will be a plan in place where owners can buy a replacement if it gets lost. Halliday is still working out whether it will supply a physical ring-sizing kit so you can order the right size or provide instructions on how to measure your finger through its accompanying app to avoid sending anything out.
Hou showed us a prototype of the glasses and noted that the nose pads are attached to flexible metal posts so they can be shaped to fit your nose. The arms have a spring action so they will adapt to different head shapes and sizes. While only one frame design is available now, the frames will come in three different finishes.
The smart glasses of the future?
Halliday’s AI smartglasses certainly do something different from the rash of incoming Ray-Ban Meta clones, threatening to dilute the current excitement around smart eyewear. To use a smart ring as a method of control is as interesting as it is over-complicated, while the company’s background in traditional eyewear gives it an insight into design and fitment many tech-first brands simply won’t have.
The company’s AI goals are ambitious, but the proactive functionality may end up being quite problematic, and it wasn’t entirely clear exactly how this would even all work in real life, from the inevitable latency issues to the potentially massive costs. The other features are more standard, such as AI translation, navigation, notes, and memo options. The glasses will show notifications on the screen, and there will be an option to send quick replies. Another interesting feature is the chance to use the screen as a teleprompter.
An always-listening AI delivering secret conversational prompts and checking facts (who will fact check the AI?) during a chat could mar Halliday’s real breakthrough — bringing a discreet but useful screen back to smart eyewear and packaging it up in a sensible design that won’t make you look like a sci-fi obsessed geek when wearing them. Take the proactive AI away, and Halliday’s AI Glasses are still just as intriguing, and we’re very keen to put them on and see the screen for ourselves.