Over the past couple of years, I have tried my fair share of smart glasses. And in that span, the industry matured dramatically. What started as Bluetooth-enabled glasses, which merely served as glorified speakers, has now reached a stage where they are equipped with screens.
Screens are the differentiating factor. On the one hand, we have brands such as Xreal and Viture that fit two display units that offer a massive canvas for work and play. Then we have labels like Even Realities and Meta, which are offering glasses with an indivisible display.
RayNeo has done both, and its latest glasses could very well be its most ambitious attempt yet. Say hello to the RayNeo X3 Pro, a pair of smart glasses that look like your average pair of prescription-style glasses, but also throw a pair of screens and cameras into the mix.
After pushing them for weeks, I think I have found the Goldilocks kit for smart glasses. They do just the right amount of on-face computing, without any overt software limitations or setting overwhelming goalposts. They just might work for you, as well, if you know the carrots-and-sticks situation that comes with being an early adopter.
Getting the basics right
Imagine looking at a poster of a film, and asking, “Tell me more about the director of this film,” and you get the answer in your ear. And to go with it, you see a wall of text, almost like the end-credits scene of a film, with all the details you asked for.
Maybe you’re walking around in a market and need some help with navigation. But instead of pulling out your phone, you just narrate the destination, and you see a map view appear in front of your eyes, with a step-by-step guide in tow.
You can manage calls on this invisible screen. See app notifications. Click pictures. Capture videos. Listen to music. Swipe through your notes. And a lot more. You get the drill. It’s like putting an Android phone on your face. But in this case, the whole action unfolds on a 43-inch screen at a perceived two-meter distance from your eyes.
The neat part is that the screen doesn’t block your view of the world. And you can go on with your daily chores uninterrupted. I sat in front of a Mac all day, and was still able to manage my on-glass interactions without having to look elsewhere to avoid the visual clutter.
It’s all pretty convenient. And trust me, it actually is. But the biggest reason I mustered the courage to wear these glasses in public places is that they don’t look dorky. I asked a few friends on a video call, and in real-world meetings if they noticed anything odd.
Only two of them pointed out the two camera lenses on the front, sitting right above the nose. A few of them remarked that they are thick, but still look chic. I’ll take that as a healthy progress towards normalizing smartglasses. They still can’t blend in fully, but RayNeo has come the closest to that styling dream.
One of the biggest hurdles with wearing smart glasses is that they sit a little too high, or protrude forward. Then, we have the sheer size, which makes even adult faces look tiny. Let’s not forget the bulk problem, while at it. At 76 grams, the RayNeo smart glasses didn’t hurt my skull. Plus, the black paintjob and sturdy aerospace-grade materials take away from the fragility concerns.
The touch controls have been deployed to the left and right arms. There’s a bit of a learning curve involved here, but the tap and two-axis swipe gestures work pretty well. A thoughtful touch is the dotted texture on the touch-sensitive area, which makes it easier to find the right spot, instead of fumbling with tactical guesswork.
The basic touch and voice-based interactions work smoothly until you run into cosmetic challenges. If you have long hair, you have to constantly move the locks away before you can go ahead with touch or swipe gestures. Additionally, if you’re wearing a beanie or a winter cap, you will constantly find yourself lifting the hem to find the touch-sensitive arm area.
How did they work for me?
I don’t always want an immersive secondary screen in front of my eyes, unless I need deep work done and really need a proper external display. They blocks the world view merely an inch away from my eyeballs, the sensory overload is too much. The sensory overload is just too much. This is where see-through screens come to the rescue.
Technically, what you get on the RayNeo X3 Pro smart glasses nanolithography etched waveguide and a microLED screen integrated right within the transparent glass lens. The resolution is pretty modest at 640 x 480 pixels, but it’s enough for even images and videos due to the proximity.
The display is driven by a tiny waveguide, but its brightness output is terrific. It usually shows visual content at 3,500 nits (brighter than the iPhone 17 Pro), but can go all the way up to 6,000 nits. In a nutshell, even if it’s a sunny day, you won’t have any trouble with content legibility.
Whether it’s text, map overlay, or just looking at the camera album, you won’t be complaining on this form factor. If you want to watch a YouTube video or swipe through TikTok, these glasses offer enough visual fidelity for a comfortable watching experience.
The calling experience isn’t bad, and neither is the speaker assembly. I handled plenty of voice calls, and never heard a complaint about audio clarity or muffling. I asked a handful of people if they noticed anything odd, but they all told me that everything sounded normal, even when the temple area was covered with a beanie at all times.
But it’s really the AI that elevates the RayNeo X3 Pro from display glasses to an AI-native computer for your face. The onboard AI, which can be summoned with a tap or voice command, is built atop Gemini.
You can just chat your way through it, asking for information. And it’s pretty useful. While writing an article about the risks of self-driving cars, I asked about the latest stats on mishaps, ongoing investigations, and what research says about their error rates compared to human drivers.
I didn’t have to open any other tab on my MacBook Air looking for that information. I simply had it in front of my eyes, presented on the built-in display. I can think of a dozen scenarios where Gemini can prove to be a handy source of information in real-time — without interrupting whatever it is that you are doing.
But the most powerful side of Gemini on the RayNeo smartglasses is the multi-modal chops. Thanks to the onboard 12-megapixel cameras, you can simply look at anything and ask the AI about it. Looking at a food picture and asking Gemini to find the recipe and show nutritional breakdown, digging into the history of a monument by looking at it, getting help shopping, and a lot more.
It’s like having a second brain, ready to spill the entire world’s knowledge in your ears (and in front of your eyes) at all times. I also love the AI recorder feature, which can transcribe conversations with roughly 90-95% accuracy in the English language. The on-screen translation feature also comes in handy.
It feeds the translated audio, and you can also see the text version tagging along. There’s also a teleprompter mode, which should come in handy for content creators. But I found it pretty useful for team meetings, presentations, and online teaching, as well.
What’s not so good?
What you can already accomplish on the RayNeo X3 Pro is way more than any other smart glasses on the market. The Meta Ray-Ban Display offers a similar convenience, but it only has one display, and the operating system is locked closely to Meta’s own social experiences.
The RayNeo smart glasses are built atop the Android foundations. The setup and linking process is fairly seamless. And the Gemini-driven software experiences are fairly rewarding. But you can’t dig directly into a full-fledged Android experience out of the box.
The full Android experience is locked to the Creator Mode for developers, where they can leverage the Android ARDK to experience the mobile OS in an augmented reality view. An average user can’t directly import the apps installed on their paired phone. And it’s not straightforward sideloading either.
You have to install the Android ADB kit on a PC, and then manually move the app packages. And even before that, you will need to enable the app lab system on the glasses and enable the ADB mode from within the Settings app. The whole process is pretty technical, and it kept failing for me.
It’s not just the process itself, but the technical workarounds required to get it working that will test your patience. For an average user who has never handled ADB commands, it’s a daunting task and not recommended at all.
It’s particularly frustrating because Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 SoC can handle Android apps, or at least a few of them, with ease. I wish RayNeo offered an easier way to install at least a select few apps directly from the linked phone, or offered a route to mirror them on the built-in display.
I am hoping that the company offers an experimental app that can make the app installation process more seamless. The developer community, on the other hand, has had better luck. And some of them even ran PC emulation apps on the RayNeo X3 Pro.
A case of deep unrealized potential.
With display-intensive tasks, the battery life tanks and won’t last beyond two hours. On the positive side, the small-sized battery also means it can be topped up rather quickly. Thankfully, there is no heating, so I was able to use them comfortably while connected to a charging cable.
There are a few other hiccups, as well. The visual translation system, where the camera has to scan a real-world item, often fails when it’s scanning text content on a display. I often noticed that the camera view is too far from the target content, and there’s no digital zoom-in feature that could make the text more legible.
The translation accuracy with Asian languages, especially Korean, is also hit-or-miss. Then there’s the issue with command override. On a few occasions, when I summoned the AI assistant during music playback, it was either active in silent mode without receiving any input, or simply disconnected from the AI voice interaction.
Thankfully, these are all issues that can be solved with OTA updates. Right now, the biggest hurdle is the app installation process. If RayNeo can solve it, these glasses would be an absolute no-brainer for any enthusiast, even at their $1,299 (discounted to $1,099) asking price.
The RayNeo X3 Pro can already do a lot more than the $799 Meta Ray-Ban Display, thanks to its Android foundation. But it will truly reach product maturity and justify its asking price if users are able to fully exploit what these smart glasses can technically handle.
For now, if you have no qualms about the hit on your wallet, these glasses offer the first true glimpse of a future where computers shift from our palms to our faces. On a more pragmatic note, though, wait for the software situation to ease up, or another generation where the sticker price has reached a more palatable point.
