Live translation is something I've been dreaming about since Google Glass. I just want translation, subtitles, turn by turn directions, and ad blocking.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
20 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 39.3 ms ] threadWouldn‘t call that an OS.
Show HN: Sheet Music in Smart Glasses - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43906442 - May 2025 (25 comments)
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.