Best smart glasses 2025

When you hear the term "best smart glasses," it's entirely likely that your definition is very different from someone else's. That's because "smart glasses" is an umbrella term that contains many different types of products, each of which conveniently rests on your nose.

So, which type is the right type for you? That entirely depends on what you want from the glasses on your face. I'll break them down into two main categories so you can quickly find what you want.

XR glasses, which stand for eXtended Reality, put a screen in front of your face, giving you a private display that also doubles as a neck saver on long trips. These are usually a little bigger than standard glasses and are not intended for everyday wear. Rather, they're meant for sitting at a table, in an airplane seat, or anywhere else you might want to mount a giant monitor but otherwise can't.

AI glasses, on the other hand, are intended for everyday wear and often use AI, cameras, or both to enhance daily life. Whether that's taking hands-free, first-person pictures or asking an AI assistant for directions to the nearest cafe, these glasses look like a normal pair of frames with a battery that'll need a charge up every few hours.

Whatever you're looking for, we've got a great list of must-have smart glasses for you.

Written by

Written by

Nick Sutrich

Nick started with DOS and NES and uses those fond memories of floppy disks and cartridges to fuel his opinions on modern tech. Whether it's VR, smart home gadgets, or something else that beeps and boops, he's been writing about it since 2011. Reach him on X, Threads, Bluesky, or Instagram @Gwanatu.

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Best AI glasses at a glance

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What to expect in 2025

While the best smart glasses available today offer great experiences, there's always something new on the horizon. Full-fledged smartphone replacements like Meta Orion are still a few years out, but there are a few new pairs of smart glasses coming this year that you can look forward to.

• Meta Hypernova are likely to be unveiled at Meta Connect 2025 on September 17. These glasses can be thought of as "Meta Orion-lite" and are supposed to ship with a display in one lens as well as a gesture bracelet that you wear for floating touch input. This makes Meta Hypernova a bit like a smartwatch for your face, including notifications from your phone, turn-by-turn directions, and even support for apps like WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger.
• The third-gen Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses are also rumored to debut at Meta Connect 2025. Meta is expected to break these into two categories this time: one that's designed primarily as sunglasses and another that's designed primarily as prescription glasses. That should give prescription wearers a much wider lens selection than the current RBM glasses.
• The Android XR platform is making its debut later this year with several new glasses that will be running on the platform. We got hands-on time with Google's upcoming Android XR glasses, and companies like Xreal are working on Android XR-powered glasses that'll likely blow away their current products.

Best overall XR

If any one pair of XR glasses wins the "best display glasses" award, it's Xreal One. Xreal's custom X1 chip sits inside every pair of Xreal One glasses, giving them the ability to anchor that virtual display in place as if it were a real monitor. While some other glasses have tried this in the past, they always required some additional software to be installed on your phone or PC for it to work, and generally didn't do the job very well.

This capability makes it feel like Xreal One glasses magically make a monitor appear in front of you. You can even put the glasses down, go make a snack, and come back to find the monitor is right where you left it. No weird resetting the position, reconfiguring the settings, or any of that nonsense. It just works, and that's what makes these so brilliant.

These are also the first pair of Xreal glasses that I've been able to use without a headache thanks to a few new features. First, they get rid of PWM dimming in favor of DC-dimmed electronics to help reduce flickering. The anchor features do use black frame insertion, which mirrors the same design on VR headsets, but that can be easily disabled in the on-glasses settings menu if it bothers you.

It's also plug-and-play with systems like the Steam Deck, making them a great way to save your neck on long trips. If you just want a great pair of smart glasses with the best plug-and-play features, Xreal One is the go-to pair. The biggest downside is that some people can be bothered by the "wavy" effect the lenses can produce, especially when reading text, although I've personally never found this to be bothersome or uncomfortable.

Xreal One Pro fixes that wavy effect because it uses a new kind of prism-based optic engine, but at $150 more than Xreal One, I'm not sure the new visuals will be worth it to most people.

Best value XR

If you've never owned a pair of smart display XR glasses before and aren't sure about spending $500 on your first pair, RayNeo Air 3S is the place to start. They offer a pair of crisp micro-OLED screens with the best eye care solution in the industry. No other pair of smart display glasses offers DC-dimming and 3840Hz PWM dimming options, ensuring that even the most sensitive users should be able to wear these without discomfort.

Not only that, but user reviews have shown that these offer a clearer picture than Xreal One even though they're half the price. There's still a bit of edge fringing on the display when hooking up to a laptop since there are no spatial anchoring features, though, so keep that in mind. This has long been an issue with smart display glasses but it's getting better with each iteration. RayNeo Air 3S improves this over the Air 2S, even if the effect isn't gone.

Since there are no spatial anchoring features, the display will follow your vision at all times. That means there's no motion smoothing for when you're in a bumpy airplane or when you move your head around. This won't bother everyone, but it's a negative point that Xreal One's spatial positioning technology solves. They are plug-and-play, though, so they'll immediately work with most smartphones, laptops, and devices like the Steam Deck, but you'll need an adapter for devices like the Nintendo Switch.

Best XR ecosystem

When I think about all the amazing products Viture makes, I get really excited. As a gadget geek, there's something special about a company that makes a whole ecosystem of products that work with each other, and Viture is the king of XR glasses ecosystems.

The Viture Luma Pro glasses themselves are quite capable, sporting one of the brightest, clearest micro-OLED displays of any smart display glasses product. They also have the clearest view of the screen, with virtually no edge fringing, as some other XR glasses suffer from. They are plug-and-play, so plugging them into a phone, laptop, or Steam Deck will immediately turn them on and enable the giant virtual monitor.

The Luma line ships with a built-in camera for spatial anchoring, but Viture hasn't updated the glasses to support 3DoF out of the box yet. Until then, you'll want to pick up some accessories that heighten its already impressive visual capabilities. The Viture Pro Neckband is like a small computer built into a necklace that plugs into Viture Pro glasses, giving you instant access to cloud services like GeForce Now and remote PlayStation 5 gameplay support.

Nintendo Switch and Switch 2 owners should pick up the Viture Mobile Dock, which packs a 10,000mAh battery inside and tricks your Switch into thinking it's docked to a TV. This gives you the full 1080p resolution of a docked Nintendo Switch, all on the giant virtual OLED inside Viture Pro, and even unlocks better performance on Switch 2 that's available when docked. This dock also doubles as a giant battery, which can be used for other portable consoles like the Steam Deck, or even just to charge your phone on the go.

Viture has a partnership with popular controller manufacturer 8BitDo and not only has a special branded Bluetooth controller, but also has a new VITURE x 8BitDo Ultimate Mobile Controller, as well. This new controller plugs into your phone and allows you to get the instant feedback of a wired controller without all the neck pain that comes from looking down at your games for a long time, since you can plug your Viture Pro glasses right into the controller.

Best overall AI

Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses were hyped up a lot and, surprisingly, mostly met the lofty expectations people have come to expect from Meta smart glasses. These feature unique Oakley HSTN style frames and half a dozen different colors, with support for sunglasses, transitions, and prescription lenses.

But the real reasons to choose these glasses over Ray-Ban Metas are the battery life and camera quality. My Oakley Meta HSTN battery review showed that these can capture around 60% more photos and video on a single charge than Ray-Ban Metas. Plus, an extra hour of music listening and a bit more livestreaming make them a more capable option.

The camera quality is surprisingly similar to Ray-Ban Metas despite the huge jump from 1080p to 3K on the spec sheet, but I quickly learned that Meta isn't using this resolution bump to get better quality. Rather, since Oakley Meta HSTN are athlete-focused smart glasses, they use that extra resolution to give the glasses a massive improvement in video stabilization. To me, it's the most impressive part of the glasses!

Like Ray-Ban Metas, Oakley Meta HSTN ships with a charging case that'll keep your glasses' battery topped up for days at a time on a single charge. This works like an earbuds case and has a larger capacity than Ray-Ban Meta's similar charging case. They also support all the great Meta AI features of RBM's, so you won't have to miss out on all the fun. Notice a trend? Yep, these are like super-charged RBM's, and that's a great thing.

Best style AI

The name Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses has become synonymous with the smart glasses category, and for good reason. What started out as a solid pair of camera glasses took a transformative turn when Meta AI made its debut on the frames. Now, that camera isn't just for taking great hands-free photos and video on the go. It's also for letting your personal AI assistant get a look at the world around you.

Meta AI will let you hear or see people's Spanish, French, or Italian words in English (or any combination of supported languages). You can use it to feed live video into the Meta AI engine, asking it questions in real-time as you move around. It can scan QR codes and give you a link on your phone — something that's weirdly handy if you've ever had a QR code on your phone's screen and have no idea how to scan it. It can even identify music with native Shazam integration.

But let's not forget about the glasses' base capabilities, either. They work well as an action camera, letting you take hands-free videos while riding your bike, snow sledding, skateboarding, or anything else that doesn't involve submersion in water. The audio recording quality is fantastic and even includes surround sound, which is trippy as heck the first time you replay a video while wearing the glasses. Taking a call using them is also incredibly handy, especially if you're already wearing them all day long.

These don't have a display in the lenses, but they also don't have the best battery life in the world, either. Realistically, you're looking at around 4 hours of normal use before they need to be charged. Thankfully, the case works just like a Bluetooth earbuds case, charging them anytime the glasses are docked inside. Since these are glasses, you can customize the lenses many different ways, including prescription and transitions lenses.

Best modular AI

Solos AirGo V is the latest pair of smart glasses from Solos, sporting the camera-forward design of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses without all the Meta controversy. Like the company's previous pair of smart glasses, AirGo 3, the AirGo V come with native ChatGPT 4o integration, so you can ask the world's favorite intelligent AI model anything you'd like.

The cameras on the front don't deliver the camera quality of Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, as they're primarily designed to be used for ChatGPT integration. That means you can ask ChatGPT about anything you see, and the glasses' cameras will snap a photo for ChatGPT to use. That also includes realtime language translation using the built-in microphones and speakers.

Personally, I prefer the physical button camera controls from Ray-Ban Meta Smart glasses, but some may like the gesture-based taps on the arms of these glasses. Speaking of the arms, they feature a unique modular design that makes it easy to swap out frames at any time. This can come in clutch if you're going somewhere and don't want to have a camera on your face, or you just want to swap out the look.

The arms also feature a unique pair of "whisper" speakers that can audibly read your texts and calendar reminders so you can stay off your phone more. These are designed to be more private than some other smart glasses' speakers, as they're designed in a way that keeps the audio pointed toward your ears rather than generically downward.