Warby Parker's $395 smart glasses: hands-on verdict is 'not much different'

By Rebecca Stone

Warby Parker opened presales on Thursday for its Intelligent Eyewear collection — smart glasses built with Google and Samsung, starting at $395 in three frame styles. The number matters less than the positioning: this is Google's first return to consumer eyewear since the "Glasshole" debacle a decade ago, and the product's core pitch overlaps almost completely with Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. They film, translate, and answer questions with AI.

A reviewer who spent a rainy Friday morning at Warby Parker's New York pop-up, themed "Literature Land," reached a blunt conclusion: the differences from Meta's glasses are minimal. "Not much," he wrote.

What do the glasses actually do?

The glasses ship with Google's Gemini built in. Users ask verbal questions — what's my schedule, what should I text back, what's my horoscope — and get spoken answers.

Visual intelligence is the added layer. The glasses can describe the room in front of you or give directions based on the street you're looking at. Every interaction is spoken aloud, which creates a social friction point the reviewer flagged directly: saying "Gemini, where am I going?" on a New York sidewalk. Meta glasses share the same assumption — that users will happily narrate everything, everywhere.

The conversation handling also broke down in a real room. After Gemini answered, the reviewer would repeat the answer to someone nearby — and Gemini interpreted the repetition as a reply, then kept asking follow-up questions. He called the result "sonically overwhelming." You can prompt the glasses from your phone instead. But then, as he put it, why have the glasses at all?

The translation feature felt early. Asked to translate Spanish at the pop-up, the glasses crawled through each word. That's roughly the pace of a subtitled film, not a conversation.

How did Warby Parker approach the design?

Co-CEO Dave Gilboa argued the surface similarity dissolves on contact. "This is the kind of product that, on the surface, may seem similar to other devices," Gilboa said. "But as soon as you put it on, start demoing the functionality, and do that head-to-head, a lot of the differences become pretty clear."

Co-CEO Neil Blumenthal framed the object itself as identity, not gadget. "This is a fashion product," Blumenthal said. "At its core, it's someone's identity."

The engineering trade-off was battery life versus bulk. Gilboa said the company spent "hundreds of hours" maximizing battery without swelling the frames — nobody wants the heavy-glasses problem that folds your ears down. The reviewer's verdict on fit: they looked good, weren't bulky, weren't uncomfortable. So do Meta's standard glasses, he noted, excluding the chunky screen-and-neural-band model.

Can the glasses escape the 'pervert glasses' backlash?

Meta's camera glasses earned a "pervert glasses" reputation after men used them to film women unknowingly, despite a recording light. Meta has since pushed updates that disable filming for users who physically tamper with the light, and it banned some harassers' Instagram accounts.

Warby Parker's glasses carry a similar recording light and anti-tampering features. The company says it redacts faces before Gemini analyzes images, and that camera visuals are excluded from AI training and ad targeting.

The risk remains. That backlash erupted mid-development of these glasses, and Warby Parker, Google, and Samsung could easily be ensnared in the same blowback Meta faces.

Gilboa's bar is high: "For someone to wear it all day, every day, it has to provide real utility to them. It also has to be a product that people around them are comfortable with. We think we've achieved both of those elements."

Pushed on the timing, Blumenthal kept it short: "Our reaction is we should all be concerned about privacy."

Whether face redaction and a recording light are enough to keep a $395 camera-on-your-face product out of Meta's controversy cycle is the question the next year of wear — on subways, in stores, at dinner — will answer.