If there’s one thing that’s become abundantly clear this year, it’s that smart glasses are on their way, and by “on their way,” I mean they’ve pretty much fully arrived. Meta’s Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, its first pair with a screen, are on shelves as I type these words, and rumors suggest that Samsung and Apple will soon follow. But just because smart glasses seem to be fully embarked on their journey from test labs to your eyeballs doesn’t mean everything is figured out. There are still tons of questions about how smart glasses work, one of the main questions being, how do you, uh, use them? The answer? Wearables, of course.
One of the wildest parts of the Meta Ray-Ban Display isn’t even the glasses; it’s the wristband that comes with the glasses. Meta’s Neural Band, as the company has dubbed it, is an electromyography (EMG) wristband that can read the electrical signals in your arm and fingers and then translate those signals into inputs on the device. Swipe your thumb on a clenched fist, and it navigates like a cursor in the glasses UI. Pinch your index finger and thumb together, and it’s like left-clicking on a mouse. As novel as smart glasses are, the Neural Band feels even more groundbreaking.
And while Meta’s wristband is the most notable of that crop of smart glasses-focused wearables, there are already lesser-known versions cropping up, and one of my favorites is the smart ring. Thicker AR glasses like those made by INMO are opting for a similar input method that uses a touch-sensitive smart ring that can detect thumb swipes to achieve a similar effect as Meta’s Neural Band, allowing you to navigate glasses UI with just your fingers.
While less high-profile than Meta’s wristband, researchers are already finding ways to iterate on the smart ring companion, like this version from researchers at Tokyo University called the picoRing mouse, which uses just 2% of the power of regular Bluetooth to deliver a month’s worth of battery life. There are still limitations here, obviously, since the researcher’s solution requires that the smart ring be coupled with a wristband that acts as a relay for the inputs. Needless to say, rocking two wearables is less than ideal for most people, but the message is still clear: additional hardware is the method of choice for controlling smart glasses, and it might not stop at wristbands and rings.
While rumors leading up to Meta’s annual Connect conference didn’t exactly materialize, there are credible rumblings that Meta is working on its own smartwatch. That prospect would be a bit of a snooze if it wasn’t for Meta’s keen interest in smart glasses. As lots of people have pointed out (including myself), a smartwatch feels like a viable way to control your smart glasses, and while it may not be sensitive or advanced enough to navigate smart glasses with screens in them, it could act as a controller for an entirely different crop of smart glasses without screens, like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.
Now, how a smartwatch works for controlling glasses is anyone’s guess, but that’s kind of the point. Clearly the glasses form factor is forcing wearables into uncharted territory, and wristbands and rings might just be the start. That could all change after the first company figures out hand and eye tracking in a device that small (my money is on Apple). Let’s be honest, as cool as body-reading wearables are, just being able to wave your hands or pinch your fingers to navigate like you can on Apple’s Vision Pro feels like a much more intuitive solution. But for now, it looks like wearables are doing the heavy lifting, and I for one am pretty curious to see where all that weirdness goes.