The Best Smart Glasses for 2025

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With various combinations of cameras, displays, and sensors built into their frames, smart glasses can offer augmented reality (AR) views, AI assistants, and Instagrammable snapshots right on your face. I've been covering smart glasses since they first hit the market and have seen them evolve from basic phone-tethered wearable displays into wireless mixed-reality marvels. They're still developing, and glasses that can unobtrusively show a map of your surroundings and translate languages as you walk around . As for models you can get now, the Viture Pro is the brightest pair of smart glasses we've tested and features diopter adjustments for nearsighted wearers, while the XReal One pushes AR possibilities forward with built-in head tracking. You can read more about them and our other favorite glasses below, followed by everything you need to know to find the right pair for you.

What Are Smart Glasses?

Smart glasses include any eyewear that contains electronic components and can do anything beyond correcting your vision or protecting your eyes. As you can imagine, that covers a wide array of devices that can do completely different things.

We can sort smart glasses down to a few specific types, with some overlap between them. Audio smart glasses have speakers built into the frame, allowing them to function as headphones. Augmented reality smart glasses use tiny projectors and lenses to display a picture as if there were a screen in front of your eyes. Social media-focused smart glasses feature built-in cameras to let you capture photos and videos, and even live stream.

There are some rarer types of smart glasses as well, like Chamelo's Music Shield and Dusk glasses. They use liquid crystal lenses to provide an adjustable tint, switching from transparent to sunglasses with a tap or through an app. Some AR glasses, like the Viture Pro and the XReal Air 2 Pro, use similar technology with less precise control. Their displays make them bulkier and less suitable for casually walking around.

While they have strong connections to computers and video games, blue-light-blocking glasses aren't actually smart glasses. They don't have any electronics inside and simply rely on lens coatings to reduce the amount of blue light exposure to reduce eye strain. They can be soothing but are not smart in the vein we're talking about here.

The Best Smart Glasses for Music and Calls

Audio tech is arguably the backbone of all smart glasses because it's available on most models. Audio-equipped smart glasses are headphones in glasses form, usually with small earphone-like drivers built into the temples that are angled to project sound into your ears. Paired with beam-forming microphones, they not only let you listen to music, but also make phone calls and use voice assistants.

Their sound quality is limited due to the nature of acoustics and how sound travels, which is why we've yet to find any solely audio-focused smart glasses all that compelling. Because there's a significant air gap between the drivers and the ears, bass is virtually nonexistent for these glasses. The mids and highs might come through well enough, but as we witnessed on the Bose Frames Tempo and the Razer Anzu, you don't get much in the way of lower frequencies. You also don't get much privacy because sound can leak.

Given how expensive most smart glasses are, we prefer when they offer useful features beyond just audio. If audio is your main concern, you're better off with a pair of true wireless earphones and a regular pair of glasses.

The Best Camera-Equipped Smart Glasses

Social media is all about sharing, and for most shutterbugs, that means keeping your phone out with the camera app open. Camera smart glasses let you shoot, record, and stream whatever you see and hear without grabbing your phone. The idea first hit with the oddball Snapchat Spectacles, which went through three iterations but are currently dormant. Meta has picked up the slack, first with the Facebook and Instagram-friendly Facebook Ray-Ban Stories, and now with the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses.

These glasses have audio and video features, so you can use them as headphones. However, it's the camera aspect that really makes them appealing.

The Best AR Glasses

Augmented reality is a technology that can project images over your surroundings, letting you see computer-generated information overlaid in the real world, like a personal hologram. It's a promising, futuristic concept that is still in development and requires a multitude of components like micro-displays, motion sensors, cameras, and processors to all work together. We've seen AR work in limited cases on phone screens in everything from Google Lens to Pokemon Go, and we've seen ambitious head-mounted displays like the Microsoft HoloLens offer early implementations of the full AR experience.

Current AR and XR (extended reality, mixed reality, or anything in the blurry ground between AR and VR) glasses are something of a misnomer. They use tiny projectors and lenses to display a picture in front of you, and (usually with the help of some shaky mobile apps or optional accessories), they can even use built-in motion sensors to fix a screen in a physical location relative to you that stays put even if you move your head.

Here's the caveat: Without cameras or the ability to analyze your surroundings, they don't provide true augmented reality. They can't automatically display information based on what's around you. Instead, they just act as a head-mounted screen.

Still, they're useful if you can become accustomed to them. They work just like USB-C monitors, so you can plug them into almost any laptop, some Android phones, the iPhone 15, and (with an adapter) most devices that can output video over HDMI.

Fully functional augmented reality displays are slowly becoming common in commercial, educational, and industrial settings, but these headsets usually cost several thousand dollars and have limited software suites intended for specific tasks. We're still far away from AR smart glasses that can, say, recognize a cafe you're staring at and pop up its customer reviews. In the meantime, if you'd like a taste of true AR with apps and games you can actually use, the Meta Quest 3 is your best bet. It's a fully enclosed headset (meaning you shouldn't try to use it in public), but its color pass-through cameras let you see around you well enough to toss images and 3D models around a room.

Apple doesn't make smart glasses, but its Vision Pro is the most advanced AR/VR headset available, with support for eye-tracking, hand-tracking, voice control, and seamless mobile app integration, all in one streamlined package. Like the Meta Quest 3, though, you shouldn't wear it outside of the house, and at $3,499, the Vision Pro is out of reach for most people.