Brilliant Labs Unveils the Halo Smart Glasses, with Narrative AI and "Vibe Mode"

Wearables specialist Brilliant Labs is diving head-first into the era of large language model-powered artificial intelligence (AI) with Halo, the follow-up to the company's Frame smart glasses.

"Halo [is] a radically redefined and fresh pair of lightweight glasses embedded with major updates to its AI agent, Noa," Brilliant Labs claims of the device. "Halo's design is indistinguishable from a pair of glasses, but dig deeper and you'll discover a groundbreaking toolkit of features. This includes a series of industry firsts, including a revolutionary real-time conversational interface; long-term agentic memory system called Narrative; and a pioneering vibe coding assistant called Vibe Mode, purpose-built to generate personalized applications for AI glasses with only natural language input."

This is far from the first wearable Brilliant Labs, founded in 2019 by former Apple program lead Bobak Tavangar and Ben Heald, has designed. Back in February 2023 the company unveiled Monocle, an open-source device designed to bring augmented reality to a user's existing glasses as a clip-on accessory. A year later the company announced Frame, a fully-featured pair of smart glasses designed to tie its wearer in to popular large language model platforms including OpenAI and Perplexity.

Halo is closer to the latter than the former, but takes the concept considerably further. It's user experience is centered around a conversational assistant system dubbed Noa, capable of taking visual and auditory input and providing contextually-relevant information in real-time — though with the usual caveat that the large language models for which Noa acts as an interface do not respond with answers but with streams of continuation tokens that form an answer-shape, but which may be entirely divorced from reality, a fundamental flaw in how the technology works.

The new Noa also adds a "Vibe Mode," described by Brilliant Labs as "an experimental new feature" inspired by the popularity of "vibe coding" with LLMs. With this, the company says, users will be able instruct Noa to build custom applications for the glasses using voice commands. "For example, if you're a developer with an idea for a better maps application for AI glasses which is better suited to how you navigate cities," the the company claims, "you can prompt Noa, which will instantly query its AI coding agent to build, display, and run your custom Halo application right before your eyes."

On the hardware front, Halo is designed around what Brilliant Labs calls the "Halo Display" — a 0.2" full-color micro-OLED panel that projects "a retro arcade-style" user interface into the user's vision. The wearable's design includes a camera sensor with "a novel imaging and compression technique optimized for AI," which the company claims helps drive a 14-hour battery life per charge, which feeds into the on-board Alif Semiconductor B1 system-on-chip driving everything. The glasses also include an inertial measurement unit (IMU), microphone array, and bone-conduction speakers at the tips of the arms.

Visual and auditory input captured by the Halo glasses, meanwhile, will be mined for information through what the company claims to be a "patent-pending agentic memory system" — which "analyzes the context of your life and builds a private and personalized knowledge base." This, on the face of it, sounds rather invasive, which is why Brilliant Labs is touting a process of protection for personal data.

"In the interest of its open-source values and safeguarding user privacy," the company says, "all rich media required for Noa including visual and auditory inputs captured by Halo are immediately converted into an irreversible mathematical representation. No rich media is stored. Furthermore, no third party can view customer data, ensuring that your personal experiences remain yours, and yours alone."

Halo is available to pre-order on the Brilliant Labs store at $299, initially only in a matte black finish, with devices expected to begin shipping in November; Brilliant Labs has also announced a partnership with SmartBuyGlasses to provide prescription lenses for those who need them.