Google and Samsung's first mainstream smart glasses go on sale in challenge to Meta

Warby Parker and the South Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster began taking preorders Thursday for the first consumer version of Android XR "Intelligent Eyewear," a line of smart glasses co-developed with Google and Samsung. The launch marks the first time Google's Android XR software, previewed nearly two years ago, has reached the market in a product most people would actually wear.

Warby Parker's frames, sold under three style names, Alden, Reid and Wren, start at $395 and come in 14 color and lens variations. Gentle Monster's six frame designs range from $449 to $489. Both companies say general retail availability and shipping begin Dec. 10, with Warby Parker offering guided demonstrations in more than 60 U.S. stores this week, expanding to its full roughly 360-store network next week, plus a dedicated demo space at 666 Broadway in Manhattan. Warby Parker disclosed the Nov. 12 preorder date in its third-quarter earnings release filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, in which Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Dave Gilboa told investors: "One week from today, on November 12, we'll begin accepting pre-orders for our first Intelligent Eyewear collection."

A Second Run at Smart Glasses

The glasses have no in-lens display. Instead, they are built around Google's Gemini assistant, activated by voice with a new "Hey Gemini" hotword or by tapping a touchpad on the frame's temple. A 12-megapixel ultra-wide camera captures stills and video, four microphones support spatial audio and noise cancellation, and two open-ear speakers deliver audio without earbuds. The hardware runs on Qualcomm's Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 chip with 2 gigabytes of memory and 64 gigabytes of storage, split across on-frame processing and a connected phone; Samsung engineered the physical device while Google built the software layer. Battery life is rated at up to nine hours of active use, extended to roughly 72 hours with the included charging case. The frames weigh about 40 to 44 grams and require pairing with a Galaxy phone running One UI 9.0 or later, a Pixel 7 or newer, or an iPhone 13 Pro or later.

Google first teased Android XR glasses in December 2024 and gave the Intelligent Eyewear line its name and a fall launch target at Google I/O in May 2026, where it described two tracks: audio-only glasses arriving first and display-equipped glasses to follow later. Thursday's rollout fulfills the audio-glasses half of that promise. It follows Samsung's $1,799 Galaxy XR headset, the first Android XR device to actually ship, released several weeks earlier as a higher-end companion product aimed at developers and early adopters rather than daily wear.

Who Is Affected

The glasses are designed to double as prescription eyewear. Warby Parker is offering single-vision, progressive, blue-light-filtering, light-responsive and custom polarized or tinted sun-lens options, processed through its own optical labs. Gentle Monster offers prescriptions on most of its designs as well. Samsung and Google have built in features aimed at everyday tasks: turn-by-turn navigation through Google Maps, live translation in more than 70 languages, hands-free messaging and calls, visual search for questions about one's surroundings, and a "Gemini Guided Vision" mode that gives spoken descriptions of a scene for people with low vision. A white indicator light signals when the camera is recording, and Google says images captured for on-the-spot tasks are not stored or used to train its models, with bystanders' faces redacted before Gemini processes any image.

"These glasses give you powerful new tools, but they're designed to feel intuitive and unobtrusive," Warby Parker Co-Founder and Co-Chief Executive Neil Blumenthal said of the collection's design.

The product puts Warby Parker, a publicly traded company that reported $244.7 million in third-quarter revenue, into direct competition with Meta, whose Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses have so far dominated the category; Meta's current lineup includes a roughly $449 third-generation audio-and-camera model and a $799 Ray-Ban Display with an in-lens screen. Warby Parker told investors the Intelligent Eyewear launch weighed on free cash flow this past quarter, which came in negative at $2.0 million, as the company absorbed costs tied to the rollout; it nonetheless narrowed its full-year revenue guidance to $966 million to $976 million, now including a modest contribution from the new product.

What Comes Next

Google and Samsung have said Intelligent Eyewear will launch first in the United States and South Korea, with China, Europe and Japan expected to follow in 2027. Industry coverage has focused on how the launch compares with earlier attempts at mainstream AI eyewear, which drew far less attention than Meta's Ray-Ban products have. Google has said display-equipped Android XR glasses, the ones that show information directly in the lens rather than relaying it through audio, remain a separate product track without a confirmed release date. For now, the test is simpler: whether shoppers browsing frames at a Warby Parker or Gentle Monster store this holiday season are willing to pay a premium for glasses that also listen, see and talk back.