Howdy all! I’ve been daily driving a pair of Even Reality G1 smart glasses for a couple of weeks, and an exchange during one of this weeks Links with Friends made me realize I should talk about them here. I’ve already actually made a blog post with my full thoughts, so I’ll link that here
The TLDR is the glasses hardware is incredibly impressive, the displays are crisp, the battery lasts the advertised day and a half even for a heavy user like myself, and the potential is sky high. The software on the otherhand… its fine, but it could be so much better. Like if all you want is basic smart watch functionality (minus the fitness tracker) but on your face then its great, the teleprompter also works pretty well, and the quick notes function has honestly helped my ADHD brain out a TON, but they could be so much more.
There is a third party “OS” (app on your phone) that can connect to them called mentraOS which does have an open source SDK so you can write your own apps, but that solution is a bit limited, for one all apps need to run on an app server that talks to Mentra’s cloud that then talks to your phone and glasses, so you have to build a bit of infrastructure to offer an app, and if you want that app to interact with things on other devices then you need to build companion applications for those devices that connect to your app server. Another big limitation is that Even Realities locks the touchpads in their firmware, so no third party apps can utilize them which really sucks.
Even Reality has talked a big game about supporting open source, and opensourcing things, but besides an example application written in C, the only direct btle api documentation is from reverse engineering efforts and stored in some dudes google drive. I really hope Even Reality opensources their SDK or at least posts full BTL API documentation because building local only applications for these smart glasses would be SICK, but they haven’t yet.
They are a bit expensive, especially when you compare them to meta’s display glasses, but not outrageous compared to designer prescription glasses frames, especially considering their functionality.
I’m not sure how to tag Wendell but I remember from the links with friends video it was mentioned that true smart glasses would be interesting to him, and while meta’s exist… I don’t want facebook to data mine everything I look at and say throughout the day. The Even G1s do have a toggle to not share extra information, and you can configure it to use specific AI back ends so you can choose the one you trust more, or if you use mentraOS you should be able to select a self hosted AI back end.
I’ll admit I haven’t played with MentraOS a ton yet, as I prefer Even’s default app’s dashboard, but I do plan to write a MentraOS app myself to try it out. The first app I want to build is similar to the quicknotes feature, but I want to save the notes in markdown format and run an agent on my computer that will save the notes in my obsidian vault. I’m still working out how to do that and offer it for other user securely, maybe have like some kind of account back end… I’m still working through that. Lessons learned there will help inform my other project idea, which is an ssh client in the glasses, where you could speak commands, and see the output in your glasses. I don’t know how actually useful that would be, but I want to hacked with smart glasses and my voice like a Cyberpunk netrunner. we already have a ton of the shitty parts of Cyberpunk, why not a few of the cool things too?
Any way wanted to start this topic to see if anyone else here has the G1s, or are interested in them and has questions for a nerd who daily drives them. Also what apps do you think would be cool to develop for them? I’m wanting to deep dive into deving mentraos apps here soon so any ideas to add to the pile would be appreciated!
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