Google plans to debut its first AI-powered eyewear in 2026, challenging Meta Platforms in the consumer market for AI smart glasses. Google’s inaugural AI glasses will come in two styles. The audio-only model features built-in speakers, microphones and cameras “to let you chat naturally with Gemini, take photos and get help.” Another style features an in-lens display and can show things like navigation. As previously announced, Google is working with partners Samsung, Xreal, Gentle Monster and Warby Parker to create “stylish, lightweight” smart glasses that can be comfortably worn all day.

“Google’s putting it all on glasses next year,” suggests CNET, noting that just months after releasing the Android-powered Galaxy XR headset with Samsung, the Xreal collaboration known as Project Aura involves wired glasses that are an “alternative to bulky headsets, ready to slide into your jacket pocket.”

While most consumers have yet to put AI glasses on their must-have lists, when they see the way they work with phones, apps and devices like watches, their minds may change. “Google’s taking a multi-product approach that makes a lot of sense,” CNET writes after a demo.

The CNET reviewer describes the Project Aura prototype as “VR shrunken to a far smaller form,” writing that “I launched a computer window wirelessly, streamed from a nearby PC, and controlled it with my hands. I laid out multiple apps. I circled a lamp in the room with a gesture, which caused a Google search, and I launched and played ‘Demeo,’ a VR game, using my hands in the air.”

Tethered to a phone-sized puck, the prototype has a 70-degree field of view, CNET explains, contextualizing that while “smaller than what I see with VR headsets,” the eyeline was “more than enough to experience immersion. It felt like my VR and AR worlds were colliding.”

The partnerships with Warby Parker and Gentle Monster focus on lightweight, untethered smart eyewear. Google lays out its 2026 vision — including not only glasses but an XR ecosystem that includes PC Connect, which links a Windows PC to your headset, and the Developer Preview 3 of the Android XR SDK — in an Android Show XR Edition video and accompanying blog post.

Engadget opines that mixed reality could be the next major OS. Describing a demo in which the glasses switched seamlessly between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, the outlet notes that Google’s focus on “Android XR is making it easier for developers to port over the apps people already know and love.”