Smart glasses firm Phantom Technology has debuted its next-generational product to tech markets on Thursday: Journey Lens.

Emerging from stealth after a period of research and development (R&D), funding, and innovation, the artificial intelligence (AI)-based spectacles are set to offer consumers immersive functionality for everyday uses.

For example, wearers can use the device’s patented AI technologies to focus on tasks, receive assistance from integrated conversational AI, and connect with popular mobile apps for seamless experiences.

It will also include new biometric sensor technologies and AI algorithms to measure the wearer’s focus with eye-tracking software. It then converts eye movements into suggestions or productivity assistance via synced user behaviours with predefined profiles.

The Journey Lens’ “invisible technology” will also incorporate Bluetooth connectivity to tether devices to Android or iOS-powered smartphones. Additional 2K cameras assist the wearable with computer vision features.

Users can also receive updates from their smartphones directly to the smart glasses’ viewfinder, or via audio queues, removing the need for direct interactions to keep the user focused on their environments.

Journey Lens’ New ‘Dépêche Modes’

The Journey Lens comes with several modes to provide the user with enhanced functionality. These include:

• Discover Lens to explore physical environments with computer vision interfaces
• Focus Compass to direct a user’s attention to healthier, more productive habits
• Smart Companion for receiving real-time help with daily tasks, using conversational AI
• Life Journal to record ideas and practise mindfulness

Full specifications for the device include the following:

• Full-colour, freeform prism optical display
• Directional microphone with stero speakers
• Biosensor electromyography
• Set of Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors
• RTOS software platform compatible with iOS and Android
• All-day battery life on a single charge
• Panto-styled frames
• A weight of 40-grammes

Pricing and Comments

Farbod Shakouri, Chief Executive and Co-Founder, Phantom Technology, explained that, following five years of “intensive R&D” and three product pivots, the company could reveal “the fruits of many thousands of man hours” of hardware and software development.

He continued,

“We believe the Journey has hit the consumer sweet spot of sub-$200 pricing and solves the problem of digital screen addiction without resorting to unusual form factors or expensive price points – Journey Lens is for tech savvy professionals, at any age, who want a better relationship with technology.”

The new smart glasses were also for “tech savvy professionals, at any age, who want a better relationship with technology,” he concluded.

The San Francisco, California and Cambridge, UK-based company will launch the Journey Lens in the first quarter next year (1Q 2025) with “an extremely aggressive price point of just $195 for the frames,” it said.

The news comes after a major $900,000 pre-seed fundraiser involving SFC Capital, along with government grants and angel investor funding, in addition to an ongoing seed-level funding round.

Smart Glasses, Clever Strategies

Phantom Technology is one of the latest candidates in the consumer smart glasses market amid a growing roster of enterprises hoping to capture shares of the rising wearables market.

Companies such as Meta Platforms, XREAL, Amazon, Rokid Max, VITURE, Vuzix and many others have thrown their hat in the ring to deliver wearable solutions to the general public. Doing so has kicked off the race to explore use cases and receive feedback on how such technologies function in the everyday lives of the average consumer.

To date, Meta’s Ray-Ban Stories smart glasses have captured a significant percentage of the market. Since their second-generational debut last October, EssilorLuxottica noted its partnership with the Menlo Park-based tech giant has resulted in sales substantially greater in a few months than their predecessors were in two years, Reuters reported in July.

Overall, Grand View Research reported that the smart glasses market reached $1.23bn in 2022 and is set to top a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27.1 percent from 2023 to 2030.

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The report noted that smart glasses demand has begun to increase as devices can “perform complex computer powered tasks.”

Arguably, with the rise in compute power comes an increase in adoption rates, which have come from several key players in the market. One such pillar of the smart glasses community remains Qualcomm, who unveiled its AR2 Gen1 platform for developers worldwide in late 2022.

Cristiano Amon, Chief Executive, Qualcomm, revealed last week that his firm’s triple partnership with Samsung and Google aimed to expand the current ecosystem of mixed reality (MR) smart glass solutions in the market. Using its AR2 Gen1 platform, manufacturers could leverage top-rated compute, visual, and AI processors to develop a host of solutions for enterprises, consumer, and industrial use cases.

Amon’s comments also reflect a key part of widespread adoption: the smartphone. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor dominate global shares and the latest are powerful enough to support the AR2 Gen1 platform.

Combining Snapdragon interoperability with Qualcomm’s smartphone chipsets, there is a massive amount of potential to increase seamless functionality amongst emerging developer products.

This will allow developers to update software via the Snapdragon software developer kit (SDK), create bespoke programmes, and access sufficient compute power as manufacturers grow in complexity at scale.

Furthermore, through the Snapdragon Spaces ecosystem, AR2 users can grow and extrapolate solutions from consentual data gathered from their respective AI algorithms, data pools, and large language models (LLMs).

This will, in turn, provide the empirical justification for expanding solutions, refining current ones, and offering niche products for a host of applications. The enterprise market has perfected the art of such observations, and the consumer market can follow, if audiences are keen.

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