These smart glasses offer a glimpse at the future Apple and Facebook are planning

Published

4 years ago

November 20, 2021

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Avegant, a start-up in San Mateo, California, has built an LED light-engine that could enable device manufacturers to build small, stylish augmented-reality smart glasses.

Courtesy of Avegant

I recently tried a pair of prototype smart glasses from Avegant that gave me a glimpse of a future where we may be able to watch videos, get directions, see notifications and more, all through a pair of traditional-looking shades.

These sorts of glasses may be the next big thing as companies like Facebook, Snap, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple and others look beyond phones.

I’ve worn Google Glass, the Microsoft Hololens, Snap’s Spectacles and, most recently, Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories glasses. But those all have shortcomings. They’re either too big and bulky to wear everywhere (Hololens), don’t yet display anything on the lenses (Facebook) or look silly (Spectacles, Hololens, Google Glass.)

Big Tech companies will need smart glasses to look normal if they’re to have any chance at success. So they’re desperately looking for a display component that is small and can be manufactured and shipped in the next year or two, Avegant CEO Edward Tang told CNBC.

Avegant doesn’t make smart glasses, but it put together a prototype pair to demonstrate the capabilities of a new LED augmented-reality light engine that the company unveiled to the public this fall. And I was impressed.

Here’s what you need to know.

The problem with current ‘smart’ glasses

CNBC | Magdalena Petrova

A lot of companies are building smart glasses, but they’re all taking different approaches. It’s sort of a mess. Here’s a quick recap:

Microsoft’s $3,500 Hololens and the $2,295 Magic Leap 1 are the most advanced but they’re bulky and more akin to goggles.
Amazon offers the $249.99 Echo Frames, but they just let you talk to Alexa and you don’t see any augmented reality visuals through the lenses.
Facebook’s $299 Ray-Ban Stories glasses can be used to take photos and videos but little else. The latest version of Snap’s Spectacles offers some AR visuals, but it isn’t fashionable and is only available to social media creators.
Google repurposed its $999 Glass device for enterprise customers after it was dismissed by the public due to privacy concerns.
Apple is also reportedly working on its own glasses, but it’s still unclear when they’ll be unveiled let alone released to the public.

Avegant thinks it has a solution that might help companies build a product regular people will want to buy.

Its new light engine, which is thinner than a pencil and weighs as much as a large paper clip, fits within the hinge and temple of eyeglasses where it can show high-definition visuals to the wearer. The light engine could enable some companies that don’t have huge in-house hardware engineering teams to build glasses that are as stylish and small as a pair of Ray-Bans but offer the visual capabilities dreamed up in science fiction films like “Terminator.”

A glimpse at the future

I demoed the light engine in October when Tang handed me the prototype glasses his team built. They were thin and looked like any normal pair of glasses except that they were tethered to a smartphone by a cable. The prototype is intended to demonstrate just how small a hardware manufacturer can make a pair of glasses using Avegant’s light engine.

“We’re getting our stuff ready to have the smallest manufacturable display for these customers,” Tang said.

I put the glasses on. A translucent blue square came on at the center of my field of view, showing a display that was overlaid on top of what I was seeing in real life. Then the demo started.

The glasses began to cycle through different visuals. The small translucent screen showed me the weather, a stock chart and a text message conversation. I was looking in the direction of Tang and could see him, but the visuals also appeared on top of him in crystal clarity. It was true augmented reality.

The highlight of the demo was when the glasses began to play a video. It was a snippet of a soccer match from this summer’s Euro 2020 tournament. I saw the green grass, the vast crowd and the players passing the ball to one another before the forward blasted a goal into the back of the net. The game looked as good and as big as it would if I was watching at home on my living room TV or sitting with friends at a sports bar.

The Avegant light engine offers a 30-degree field of view and appeared like a rectangle in the middle of my line of sight.

I handed the pair of glasses back to Tang, who put them on and began watching the demo. I could hardly tell he was watching anything, though I noticed a subtle hint of blue light on the lens. It appeared as if he was daydreaming.

But there are still drawbacks. Manufacturers who use the Avegant light engine will have to determine how much battery life they want their smart glasses to have. The more battery life, the bulkier the glasses will be. Likewise, a 30-degree field of view is on a par with the first Hololens, but it’s a smaller window than Microsoft’s Hololens 2.

The reality

Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories glasses can take photos and videos through cameras at each corner of the device’s frames.

Courtesy of Ashley Bogdan

Components like Avegant’s may help some tech companies develop smart glasses people will want to wear. But it’s still early days and skeptics don’t think we’ll have normal-looking smart glasses anytime soon.

“The long-term vision here is to get rid of your phone in your hand, and you’ll wear your phone on your face,” Kevin Irwin, chief investment officer at Knollwood Investment, said. Irwin is an investor in Avegant.

Avegant isn’t yet mass-producing its light engine. It envisions a business model in which it will sell the component to companies that can build it into their smart glasses.

Larger companies may not even need Avegan’ts technology, explained Karl Guttag, an expert on augmented reality display devices.

“Facebook and Apple are ground-up companies — they’ve got phenomenal, huge teams working on this stuff,” Guttag said. “They don’t need an Avegant, if you get my drift, whereas a Snap might because they’re not really in this. They’d be looking to get a component.”

Guttag also has his doubts about smart glasses replacing smartphones anytime in the near future, which would limit Avegant’s prospects.

“The expectation that these things are going to be like Ray-Bans is off the chart far away,” Guttag said. “Now something like what Avegant’s engine does could get you something that is moderately stylish. It’s going to be a little bigger and bulkier but not all the way there.”

Technology

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Published

2 hours ago

July 11, 2025

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Technology

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Published

11 hours ago

July 11, 2025

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Published

13 hours ago

July 11, 2025

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.