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Is anybody making smart glasses that are just a display? For me, the rest of the feature set verges on being anti-features. I'd much rather a very rudimentary display that my phone or another device could send relatively low bandwidth data to over bluetooth or some other protocol and build from there.

Having a camera or a mic on the glasses themselves seems like something I'd mostly want to avoid for privacy, and having a speaker just seems like gilding the lily when we already have a variety of headphones to choose from.

Here's the deal, you don't need any of this.

I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.

Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).

So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.

Live translation is something I've been dreaming about since Google Glass. I just want translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions, and ad blocking.

How open-source are these glasses really? Are all software components compilable from source, or do they just publish an SDK Espressif-style?

I just found out about them and it seems super good. I wonder why Meta doesn't support such a thing called "Meta Glasses Application Store"

Related. Others?

Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906442 - May 2025 (25 comments)

> Devs get to write 1 app that runs on any pair of smart glases.

Except it seems they only run on Mentra glasses. Not Meta Ray-Bans, Echo Frames, or any of the many other existing smart glasses platforms.

I remember trying an early pair of smart glasses years ago and feeling let down because nothing worked beyond the demo apps. Seeing MentraOS now makes me think this could finally be the moment where smart glasses start to feel like real everyday devices.

Good to see someone jump on these early with FOSS. Seems pretty early days for the this OS and the tech though. No device has full support yet. I'm still not convinced smart glasses are going to have any staying power either.

Store requiring an account, and apps actually running on their servers.

This is definitely not the smart glasses operating system to converge on.

If there's anything worthwhile in it I'd advise interested people in forking it, and turning it into an actually open open-source operating system.

Very excited by all this! Have been searching for something like this for so long!

interested in getting one of these smart glasses, checked their website, nowhere mentioned if it's good for near-sighted or far-sighted, or both. I hate to wear two pairs of glasses on top of each other.

It seems to be an SDK for apps running on existing iOS and Android devices, hardly an OS.

From the careers page:

> Life at Mentra

> We're a squad of hardcore builders between San Francisco and Shenzhen working 996 to build the next personal computer. We're upgrading human intelligence with high bandwidth interfaces. We're transhumanist hackers.

> And we're not just here for a job. We're here for a mission.

This is the worst of SV VC bullshit right here and is antithetical to open sustainable software.

"We're here for a mission" - I'm sure all those VC firms involved are there for the the same mission too, right?

If this goes anywhere or becomes anything, it'll be rug-pulled out of open source.

So without their cloud service no apps.

Wouldn‘t call that an OS.

this doesn't include AR right? it can't overlay stuff on what i'm seeing? if not, then it's pretty useless

If smart glasses can’t self-adjust vision or flag cataracts, they’re missing the point. This is not being discussed.

Love this bit from mentra's careers page, https://mentra.glass/pages/careers

  This is not the place for

  * Prioritize work-life balance