I Hated Smart Glasses, but Google's Android XR Let Me See a New Future

For 5 minutes on Tuesday, I felt like Benji in Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation. But instead of wearing smart glasses at the Vienna State Opera and hearing Tom Cruise's voice, I was standing in a 5-by-5-foot wooden shed at the Google's I/O developer conference with Gemini AI in my ear. I got to test out a pair of Android XR glasses that look like something Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds would wear. In the right lens, there's tiny white text displaying the time and weather: 2:24 p.m., 73 degrees. If this were all that smart glasses could do, I'd be happy. But that was just the home screen. Next, I used the prototype frames to take a photo and view a full-color preview, right on one of the lenses. It was wild to simultaneously see a picture and then the actual world through it. The futuristic frames are a very early prototype of the Android XR glasses that Google is making in partnership with Samsung and Qualcomm. In nearly every way, these frames look like normal prescripti ... Read full article.