n the midst of the current backlash against smart glasses that has seen Meta release glasses without cameras, a pair of privacy-first, open-source AI glasses have arrived with an alternative approach.

On Tuesday, Brilliant Labs officially launched its much-anticipated Halo smart glasses. The product retails for $399, focuses on ambient intelligence, and offers what is arguably the most open hardware platform of any AI wearable. The company not only open-sources its software but discloses all the details of every component inside the device. It's the kind of transparency that cybersecurity and enterprise purists crave.

The primary function of the Halo glasses is to act something like Granola, but providing text summaries from real-world conversations. The glasses also have a low-res camera that makes visual summaries of what you see, so it can combine audio and visual information from your lived experience into rich summaries that can serve as a digital long-term memory you can query as needed.

Of course, that's where the privacy focus comes in. Halo does its processing of raw audio and images using models running locally from your phone. It converts the audio to transcripts and converts the images to descriptions and then erases the original files.

"All of the rich media captured by Halo, the images, the audio, [are] processed locally on your device, and then we toss that original rich media right after the model inference happens. We literally delete it," Brilliant Labs CEO Bobak Tavangar told The Deep View. Neither Brilliant Labs nor the model—or even the user—can access it after that.

In addition to becoming your digital memory, Brilliant Labs built a number of other experiences into the AI glasses:

• You can vibe-code mini apps for the glasses purely using voice commands
• Its built-in game, Narrative, turns your everyday environment into an experience for discovery and collaboration
• A custom AI assistant avatar is created in the onboarding experience, similar to OpenAI's Dots and Meta's Muse
• An enterprise options lets you override the consumer experience to integrate your company's agents that you can access from the glasses, and Tavangar reported that Halo is being used by organizations from various industries including tech startups, medical, agriculture, manufacturing, and aerospace

In terms of the hardware, Halo weighs 40 grams (compared to around 50 grams for Meta Ray-Bans and most of the competitors), features 14 hours of battery life, two microphones, a full-color microOLED display that projects into your right eye, Bluetooth 5.3 connectivity, and lenses that can be manually swapped out for prescription lenses. With the weight and battery life, Halo is optimized for all-day wear to take advantage of ambient intelligence when you want to activate it from the Noa digital assistant app on iPhone or Android.

Our Deeper View

I've been testing the Halo glasses for over a week and what surprised me the most was the whimsical nature of the onboarding experience. For a product that is so deeply technical and has such a natural appeal for open-source enthusiasts and hardware hackers, I was struck by the level of thoughtfulness and playfulness in the Noa app that introduces you to Halo. There's almost a Japanese Kawaii vibe that brings a smile to your face when trying the product. I still need to do a lot more time with the product to get it dialed into ways that it could be useful to me. And make no mistake, it's a far different product than Meta Ray-Bans and Android XR glasses. Those are mainstream consumer glasses, while Halo is for wearables enthusiasts, AI experimenters, and professionals who care deeply about privacy and security and would like a wearable device for specific use cases they can fully control. But the existence of Halo shows that the market for AI glasses continues to broaden out.