Halliday’s latest smart glasses feature a much-improved display

I first slipped connected Halliday’s original smart glasses astatine CES 2025. I was not a fan. The glasses had a tiny, movable show model embedded into the framework that was incredibly finicky to see, and my 30-minute demo near maine pinch achy eyeballs. It was an absorbing conception pinch unspeakable execution, particularly compared to the several different smart glasses connected the show floor. So I was skeptical erstwhile a fewer weeks ago, Halliday reached retired to opportunity its 2nd effort astatine smart glasses was much better.

Well, having tried the Halliday Gen 2, I’m happy to study these are amended glasses. That concealed show model is gone, replaced by much accepted but discreet waveguides. They’re not for illustration the Meta Display’s nigh-invisible screens. You tin still spot the reflection if angled conscionable right, but they’re considerably easier to see. And wrong of a single-lens display, the Gen 2 has 1 for each eye, giving you a overmuch larger surface to look at. Spec-wise, the Gen 2’s displays are monochrome green, pinch a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits and 600 by 300 pixel solution per eye.

On my face, the Gen 2 has a nondescript creation but is very lightweight compared to different show glasses I’ve tried. The show was besides easy visible wrong a acheronian bar, though I didn’t get a chance to spot really it’d fare successful nonstop sunlight. The four-mic array was capable to prime up commands contempt the ambient noise, and Halliday told maine that it gets astir 12 hours of emblematic use. That’s partially because these aren’t camera glasses. The removal of the camera was a deliberate choice, some for privateness and to widen artillery life. That’s because these are much truthful meant to beryllium a instrumentality for activity meetings.

With the Gen 2, Halliday is launching a characteristic called Meeting Flow. It’s meant to thief you travel on successful a conversation, utilizing AI to aboveground discourse aliases facts without needing to look astatine your laptop aliases phone. I’ve seen this successful different smart glasses to varying degrees of success. (Mostly non-success.) More absorbing are the alleged Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check features. The thought is to supply real-time updates astir what decisions person been made successful a meeting, what items request pursuing up on, and a visualization of a meeting’s wide speech flow. For example, Thread Tracker mightiness show that a squad gathering started disconnected talking astir fund allocations, earlier moving connected to imaginable caller hires and timelines for those hires. Decision Confirmation mightiness show that the gathering concluded that each caller hires should beryllium vanished by a circumstantial date. Lastly, Commitment Check verifies if action items person been assigned (and to whom) pinch a clear deadline. The glasses will besides supply post-meeting transcripts and summaries.

I saw a little glimpse of what this could look for illustration astatine my demo, albeit a merchandise question and reply is little conducive to these kinds of features than a emblematic readying meeting. That said, the glasses besides support much general-use AI features for illustration captioning, real-time translations for complete 45 languages, the expertise to return telephone calls, and teleprompters/notecards for nationalist speakers. Users tin besides make usage of the Halliday AI adjunct for sound control.

Overall, this is simply a overmuch much tightly focused imagination for a brace of smart glasses than Halliday’s original glasses. That said, we’ll person to spot if the AI features are each that useful. So far, I’ve had small occurrence pinch AI wearables successfully intuiting what I really request surfaced successful a conversation, aliases deriving the correct conclusions for to-do items. And astatine $599, the Gen 2 comes pinch a beautiful steep value tag for the mean person. That’s not including immoderate other costs for medicine lenses. (Halliday claims it’ll beryllium capable to grip my prescription, which is -10 successful 1 oculus and -8.75 successful the different pinch monster astigmatism. We shall see!)

The Halliday Gen 2 are disposable for preorder starting coming pinch a $10 deposit and a consequent $100 discount connected the last price. The glasses are expected to vessel successful September.