The archive · Product Ideas · Product decision · 2024
Brilliant Labs Frame: $349 open-source AI glasses — normal-looking, hackable, in demand
Round, 39-gram glasses that put multimodal AI in your sightline — fully open-source hardware and software; pre-order demand pushed shipping back a month.
Brilliant Labs
What it had to solve
After Google Glass, AR wearables remained bulky, expensive and locked down, while hyped AI gadgets like the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin stumbled in early reviews. Brilliant Labs wanted glasses that disappear as hardware — and expose everything, from AI assistant to circuit designs, to users and developers.
How it works
Brilliant Labs' Frame is a pair of 39-gram round glasses — John Lennon style, three colors — with a 640×400 micro-OLED display that projects text and images in front of one eye. At $349, they offer visual analysis, real-time translation and web search through a multimodal AI assistant called Noa, with a front camera, microphone and speaker hidden inside what otherwise looks like ordinary eyewear.
The distinctive bet was openness: the hardware schematics, custom Lua-based operating system and app code were all published, with design files on GitHub, so users could run whatever software they wanted. Noa started with OpenAI vision, Whisper speech and Perplexity search, and Brilliant Labs later added Claude 3, Llama 3 and Stable Diffusion. A USB-C 'Mister Power' charger clipped onto the frame like a small orange nose.
Pre-orders opened on February 8, 2024 with shipping from April 15; by the worldwide launch in May, demand had pushed shipments back about a month across all colors. Brilliant Labs said its open-source release had grown an 8,000-member developer community building apps for agriculture, accessibility, healthcare, education and retail, and the glasses were called one of the most anticipated wearables of 2024 — a deliberately open counterpoint to the closed AI-hardware launches of the same season.
Why it lands
- Normal round frames at 39 grams attack the two reasons AR failed before: glasses that look like glasses and feel like nothing on your face.
- Fully open hardware and software let developers and users own the device — a stark contrast to closed AI gadgets like the Rabbit R1.
- Pricing at $349, far below headset-class hardware, aimed at developers and early adopters rather than a premature mass market.
- Bundling a multimodal assistant (Noa) with GPT-4o, Perplexity and Whisper made the glasses useful on day one, before any app ecosystem existed.
What it did
Orders backed up across all colors and demand pushed shipping back about a month. By the May 2024 global launch, the open-source hardware and software had drawn an 8,000-member developer community building apps for agriculture, accessibility, healthcare, education and retail, and reviewers called Frame one of the most anticipated wearables of 2024.
What you can take
Open-sourcing the hardware turns a niche gadget into a platform: developers extend the product while the company keeps the assistant, and trust comes from users being able to read and modify it.
Since then
Frame established Brilliant Labs' open-source approach and led to Halo, the company's next-generation open-source glasses with an on-device AI processor and 14-hour battery, with Noa continuing as its multimodal agent across devices. The Frame codebase, SDK and schematics remain publicly available, and the developer-program playbook — docs, office hours and hackathons — carried over to Halo's launch.
Sources
- These $349 smart glasses have 'AI superpowers' and a comical charging nose
- The Frame are Open Source and AI-Equipped AR Smart Glasses
- Brilliant Labs announces global rollout for $349, AI-powered Frame smart glasses
- AI smart glasses with Chat GPT-4o, Claude 3, Stable Diffusion and more now available worldwide
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