The best smart glasses at CES 2025 are inconspicuous

CES 2025 was the year of the smart glasses. AR / VR headsets were everywhere. Just when we thought we covered them all – check out our coverage so far on the XREAL One Pro and Chamelo – we'd come across yet another new pair of smart glasses.

Each had their own draws and features, things like AR glasses that focused on projecting your computer monitor or smartphone screen and devices made for AI transcription and translation. 

However, one thing became very clear after seeing all these smart glasses: The smart glass space finally figured out how to make smart glasses look like actual conventional glasses.

Gone are the bulky, thick frames of even just last year. Smart glasses are finally sleek and inconspicuous. We've come a long way from even the geeky design of Google Glasses. The smart glasses of today look stylish.

On top of that, these new smart glasses are focusing on more practical use cases.

Two great examples of this were the Even Realities G1 and Halliday smart glasses. Both of these products focus on practical AI features like transcription and translation built into AR functionality, even though the way they pull it off are very different.

Halliday smart glasses feature lensless display option

See that little green dot on the frame, right above the lens on the right? That's the Halliday smart glasses' screen. Credit: Mashable

Halliday, for example, has created a new type of AR smart glasses that doesn't project the augmented reality imagery from the lenses.

In fact, you can just pop out the lenses completely and go lensless and the AR functionality will still work. Halliday pulls this off by embedding a little circular screen into the frame, right above the right lens. That way, the user can just wear the glasses as normal and just take a glance over at the screen when they need to utilize the AI transcription or translation features in the screen.

A look through the Halliday smart glasses screen. Credit: Mashable

While the Halliday certainly has some issues – I personally struggled with going cross-eyed every time my right eye tried to glance up at the screen – the company has managed to pack all this AR AI smart glasses functionality into a pretty everyday looking pair of glasses.

Even Realities G1 is conventional in look only

You'd never know that the Even Realities G1 were smart glasses by the looks of them. Credit: Mashable

The Even Realities G1 may even look more like an ordinary pair of everyday glasses than even the Halliday. Unlike the Halliday, the G1 takes a more conventional smart glasses route with the AR functionality built into the lenses. Both devices were comfortable to wear but the G1 was much more comfortable to use as there was no tiny screen to focus on. The AI translations and transcriptions just naturally appear imposed over the real-world as you view through your glasses.

A look through the lens of the Even Realities G1. Credit: Mashable

One other interesting aspect of both the Even Realities G1 and the Halliday are that there is no camera on these smart glasses. This very much helps both products to look less like a tech gadget and more like conventional eyewear.

Mashable's Matt Binder wears the Even Realities G1 Credit: Mashable

It'll be interesting to see what the smart glass space looks like at, say, next year's CES. But it feels like the direction that AR glasses are going in are very much towards Even Realities G1 or Halliday's way of doing things.