Half-baked AR glasses, but a step in the right direction
AR smart glasses like the Viture Pro ($459.99) use bulky prisms that enable big, colorful, high-resolution projections, so you can’t really wear them and safely walk around. The Even Realities G1 ($599), on the other hand, uses a waveguide projection system that’s lighter and completely transparent. It looks like an ordinary pair of glasses with transparent lenses, but it can show notifications and perform other useful functions. Its transcription and teleprompter features are easy to use and can be helpful if you’re hard of hearing or need to give presentations. That said, the glasses exhibited some wonky connection issues in testing, and their language translation and navigation guidance features aren’t reliable. For now, we can’t confidently recommend any waveguide-equipped smart glasses, but if you want a pair of AR video glasses to enjoy while sitting down, the Viture Pro is our Editors‘ Choice.Design: A Different Kind of Smart Glasses
Over the last few years, I’ve tested many pairs of smart glasses with displays and found plenty that are useful as wearable screens while sitting down and stationary. These video-focused AR glasses provide a personal head-mounted display that is great for watching shows, playing games, and getting work done, but due to the bulky prisms inside, you can’t actually see through them well enough to walk around safely with them on. Proper mobile smart glasses need transparent lenses and unobtrusive displays.
Available in oval or rectangular lens shapes in brown, gray, or olive green, the G1 is incredibly thin and light by any measure of smart glasses. The frame is magnesium alloy with a coating the company describes as sandstone that feels smooth and cool. The temples are titanium with silicone on the inner surfaces. The lenses are almost completely clear, offering 98% light transmission. They feature UV protection and blue light reduction, though the latter seems subtle as there’s almost no perceivable tint to the lenses at all.
While the G1 doesn’t have a formal IP rating for water and dust resistance, Even says it should be able to handle splashes and light rain.
Unless you look very closely at the lenses, the only indications that the G1 is a pair of smart glasses are the blocky capsules on the ends of the temples. These hold some of the electronics, including touch-sensitive surfaces on the outside. Otherwise, the only hints of the G1’s nature are the rectangular waveguides in the lenses, which are only visible to others from certain angles and can be mistaken for bifocals. There are no cameras, LEDs, or even charging connectors.
The base model without vision correction costs $599, or you can get the G1 with prescription single-vision lenses for an additional $150. Note that G1 glasses with prescription lenses are not returnable. Even also offers custom UltraFit lenses in both progressive and single-vision that are tailored to your facial measurements, but you’ll have to go to one of the company’s partner opticians for them, and in North America, only two stores are currently listed.
No tints are available, but you can get a clip-on sunglasses accessory for $100 extra. It’s a hefty price for a completely standard sunshade, especially since you need to manually install it with four small hooks that slide over the corners of the frame. Once clipped on, the piece stays securely in place, but it’s wiggly until you get all hooks into the right positions. It’s borderline necessary if you want to use the glasses outdoors in the daytime, though, since the projected display isn’t bright enough to overcome much sunlight on completely transparent lenses.
For this review, Even sent me the brown rectangular pair with lenses in my prescription, along with the sunshade. The G1 is as comfortable to wear as my usual glasses, and its prescription lenses work perfectly to sharpen my eyesight.Waveguide Projection: What It Is and How It Works
The G1’s display appears as a clear overlay in a rectangle in the upper half of your view. It is monochrome green and has a 640-by-200-pixel resolution, a 20Hz refresh rate, a 1,000-nit peak brightness, and a 25-degree field of view. The Viture Pro, for comparison, has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, a 4,000-nit peak brightness, and a much larger, vision-covering 46-degree field of view.
A waveguide projection system drives the G1’s display, shooting light straight into the lenses where it shows a picture across a specially textured surface. This is a significantly different technology from video-focused smart glasses that use bulky multi-lens prism designs, like the Viture Pro. Waveguide projection allows for a lightweight and unobtrusive design and lets you see straight through the lenses so you can safely and comfortably walk around while wearing them. The trade-off is a much lower resolution, a smaller field of view, and very limited color compared with prism projection systems. In other words, the G1 is only useful for showing information and not watching any media.
Monochrome green already gives the G1’s display a retro flavor, but the low resolution really seals it in. It mostly shows text and simple icons, with the exception of a map view that, as I explain below, isn’t exactly useful. The readout is visually closer to an LED clock radio than a smart display and is only slightly more flexible than a purely alphanumeric output.
Waveguide projection displays are very finicky when it comes to the viewing angle, and you’ll probably have to play with the glasses‘ positioning on your nose to see everything. When wearing the G1 high on the bridge of my nose, the lower half of the projection dims into nothing. To get the whole picture, I have to push the glasses down to the center of the bridge.
The 1,000-nit peak brightness is fine for most indoor and nighttime use and even in daylight if you can look at a relatively dark background. Since it’s a green projection across an almost completely transparent view, any bright light or well-lit light background can easily overcome the display. The clip-on sunglasses accessory alleviates this problem and makes the display much easier to read outdoors. Interface: Dashboard View and Widgets
By default, you won’t actually see any projection when you put the G1 on.
