Journey Lens: New AI Smart Glasses Enter The AR Arena
The field of AI wearables is becoming increasingly crowded, with many products like the Humane AI Pin, the Frame smart glasses from Brilliant Labs and Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses already in the market. Journey Lens is a new product from Phantom Technology Limited meant to compete with these wearables. Based on long experience with many different AI wearables, it has become clear to me and others that one of the best options in terms of form factor is a pair of glasses, whether full AR glasses like Meta's Orion or smart glasses like the Meta Ray-Bans.
A Primer On Smart GlassesI have been seeing a lot of people misuse the term "smart glasses" recently, so as an analyst covering this field for a long time, let me clarify the term. The XR spectrum, represented in the diagram below, includes various flavors of "extended reality," going all the way up to fully digital virtual reality. AR is a subspectrum within that larger spectrum; it presents the user with virtual elements augmenting a perspective that is predominantly focused on the real world. Smart glasses like Meta Ray-Bans represent the least immersive, most real-world version of AR because there is no display inside them. Theoretically, AI earbuds could be argued to be in this category as well, but most smart glasses are effectively smart earbuds with cameras.
This is to say that smart glasses, even when they have displays, do not change our view of the natural world, but rather create a minimally intrusive augmented layer on top of the real world. This is in contrast to more immersive 3-D AR experiences like Meta's Orion or Snap's Spectacles, which are considered "full" AR. These tend more toward full immersion with an experience that seeks to heavily augment the real world with virtual assets and data.
As touched on above, smart glasses are also the most user-friendly form factor as they target size and weight above adding functionality. When they do have displays, it's usually a single heads-up display off to the side of the field of view. The best example of this in the past was Focals by North, which was an incredible piece of hardware that had nearly perfected the form factor all the way back in 2019. But this is now, and we've got a new wave of devices to consider.
Journey Lens SpecsOne of the things working in favor of the Journey Lens is that it has a full-color display, whereas many smart glasses displays are monochrome for cost and complexity reasons. The whole device weighs only 40 grams; the maker claims it has all-day battery life while running an RTOS that allows it to be connected to an Android or iOS device. It also has EMG sensors that can be used to track a user's minuscule muscle impulses, which could be used as another input at some point. For example, Meta uses EMG in its wristband for Orion to track a person's finger movements.
Like just about every other pair of smart glasses, this model has stereo speakers. What will be important is how good the speakers are and whether they offer an audio experience that makes them useful. The Journey Lens also has a 2K resolution camera, but it's unclear whether that resolution is for video only, or what the photo-only resolution might be. My personal opinion is that the first generation of Meta's Ray-Ban Stories glasses did not have very good image or video quality, although they did have good stabilization. With its second generation, Meta significantly improved both image and video quality, and I hope the Journey Lens has image and video quality that can compete with that.
Journey Lens Software And AI ExperienceA big emphasis of the Journey Lens is to pull you away from your smartphone and allow you to control your day-to-day experience more from the glasses. That's why this lightweight device has that small see-through display in the upper righthand corner, acting almost like an annotation on what you encounter rather than something in the middle of your field of view that's trying to control what you see.
Phantom Technology offers a range of different monthly plans based on the experience the user wants with the Journey Lens glasses. These start with a free plan and go up to a premium pro plan at $18 a month, which includes early access to new features and something called Deep Focus.
As shown in the image above, there is a range of how many apps you can connect to the glasses for getting notifications, reading messages and so on—just three with the standard plan, or unlimited apps with the premium and premium pro plans. Three months of the premium plan is included for free with a pre-order of the $195 device, but I believe Phantom Technology would be better served to give everyone three free months of this plan so that new users can understand the value.
Market Sizing And StrategyI believe that we are starting to see more smart glasses in the market because they can enter at lower price points and therefore reach much larger addressable markets. For example, Meta recently disclosed that it sold 700,000 units of its Meta Ray-Bans at a minimum price of $299. The company hasn't even started advertising them yet. That said, there are still challenges in areas such as privacy that need to be addressed to increase consumers' comfort with using devices like these. However, I believe something like Journey Lens could serve a specific segment of the smart glasses market that doesn't want to entrust its privacy to a social media company.
Additionally, Phantom Technology's business model appears to bank on making money from monthly subscriptions rather than the hardware itself. While $18 per month adds up to being more expensive than the glasses themselves across a year, it does seem that the Journey Lens' capabilities are mostly in software—much like most AI-enabled wearables. I'm personally excited to see and try out these smart glasses in person sometime early next year. The company says it will enter high-volume manufacturing in Q4 2024 and start shipping in Q1 2025, and I expect we'll see a significant second wave of news and coverage around the time of CES at the start of 2025.
