AR smart glasses like the Viture Pro ($459.99) use bulky prisms that enable big, colorful, high-resolution projections, so you can’t really wear them and safely walk around. The Even Realities G1 ($599), on the other hand, uses a waveguide projection system that’s lighter and completely transparent. It looks like an ordinary pair of glasses with transparent lenses, but it can show notifications and perform other useful functions. Its transcription and teleprompter features are easy to use and can be helpful if you’re hard of hearing or need to give presentations. That said, the glasses exhibited some wonky connection issues in testing, and their language translation and navigation guidance features aren’t reliable. For now, we can’t confidently recommend any waveguide-equipped smart glasses, but if you want a pair of AR video glasses to enjoy while sitting down, the Viture Pro is our Editors’ Choice.
Design: A Different Kind of Smart Glasses
Over the last few years, I’ve tested many pairs of smart glasses with displays and found plenty that are useful as wearable screens while sitting down and stationary. These video-focused AR glasses provide a personal head-mounted display that is great for watching shows, playing games, and getting work done, but due to the bulky prisms inside, you can’t actually see through them well enough to walk around safely with them on. Proper mobile smart glasses need transparent lenses and unobtrusive displays.
Available in oval or rectangular lens shapes in brown, gray, or olive green, the G1 is incredibly thin and light by any measure of smart glasses. The frame is magnesium alloy with a coating the company describes as sandstone that feels smooth and cool. The temples are titanium with silicone on the inner surfaces. The lenses are almost completely clear, offering 98% light transmission. They feature UV protection and blue light reduction, though the latter seems subtle as there’s almost no perceivable tint to the lenses at all.
While the G1 doesn’t have a formal IP rating for water and dust resistance, Even says it should be able to handle splashes and light rain.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
Unless you look very closely at the lenses, the only indications that the G1 is a pair of smart glasses are the blocky capsules on the ends of the temples. These hold some of the electronics, including touch-sensitive surfaces on the outside. Otherwise, the only hints of the G1’s nature are the rectangular waveguides in the lenses, which are only visible to others from certain angles and can be mistaken for bifocals. There are no cameras, LEDs, or even charging connectors.
The base model without vision correction costs $599, or you can get the G1 with prescription single-vision lenses for an additional $150. Note that G1 glasses with prescription lenses are not returnable. Even also offers custom UltraFit lenses in both progressive and single-vision that are tailored to your facial measurements, but you’ll have to go to one of the company’s partner opticians for them, and in North America, only two stores are currently listed.
With the sunglasses clip (Credit: Will Greenwald)
No tints are available, but you can get a clip-on sunglasses accessory for $100 extra. It’s a hefty price for a completely standard sunshade, especially since you need to manually install it with four small hooks that slide over the corners of the frame. Once clipped on, the piece stays securely in place, but it’s wiggly until you get all hooks into the right positions. It’s borderline necessary if you want to use the glasses outdoors in the daytime, though, since the projected display isn’t bright enough to overcome much sunlight on completely transparent lenses.
For this review, Even sent me the brown rectangular pair with lenses in my prescription, along with the sunshade. The G1 is as comfortable to wear as my usual glasses, and its prescription lenses work perfectly to sharpen my eyesight.
Waveguide Projection: What It Is and How It Works
The G1’s display appears as a clear overlay in a rectangle in the upper half of your view. It is monochrome green and has a 640-by-200-pixel resolution, a 20Hz refresh rate, a 1,000-nit peak brightness, and a 25-degree field of view. The Viture Pro, for comparison, has a 1,920-by-1,080 resolution, a 120Hz refresh rate, a 4,000-nit peak brightness, and a much larger, vision-covering 46-degree field of view.
A waveguide projection system drives the G1’s display, shooting light straight into the lenses where it shows a picture across a specially textured surface. This is a significantly different technology from video-focused smart glasses that use bulky multi-lens prism designs, like the Viture Pro. Waveguide projection allows for a lightweight and unobtrusive design and lets you see straight through the lenses so you can safely and comfortably walk around while wearing them. The trade-off is a much lower resolution, a smaller field of view, and very limited color compared with prism projection systems. In other words, the G1 is only useful for showing information and not watching any media.
The display, with calendar details intentionally blurred (Credit: Will Greenwald)
Monochrome green already gives the G1’s display a retro flavor, but the low resolution really seals it in. It mostly shows text and simple icons, with the exception of a map view that, as I explain below, isn’t exactly useful. The readout is visually closer to an LED clock radio than a smart display and is only slightly more flexible than a purely alphanumeric output.
Waveguide projection displays are very finicky when it comes to the viewing angle, and you’ll probably have to play with the glasses’ positioning on your nose to see everything. When wearing the G1 high on the bridge of my nose, the lower half of the projection dims into nothing. To get the whole picture, I have to push the glasses down to the center of the bridge.
The low resolution is fine for text, but not for complicated graphics (Credit: Will Greenwald)
The 1,000-nit peak brightness is fine for most indoor and nighttime use and even in daylight if you can look at a relatively dark background. Since it’s a green projection across an almost completely transparent view, any bright light or well-lit light background can easily overcome the display. The clip-on sunglasses accessory alleviates this problem and makes the display much easier to read outdoors.
By default, you won’t actually see any projection when you put the G1 on. In fact, the view is completely clear even when the glasses are turned on until you interact with them through the Even app (available for Android and iOS), gestures, or physical controls. Doing so makes the glasses spring to life with glowing green text and symbols across your eyes.
The dashboard is a customizable display that shows the time, weather, notifications, and other basic information. It’s organized into one to three sections, depending on the display mode. Minimal simply shows a status panel (time, weather, notifications); Dual shows a status panel and a widget; and Full shows a status panel, a widget, and the next appointment on your calendar.
The widget can be QuickNotes, stocks, news, or a map, and each has its limitations. With QuickNotes, you can tap and hold on the right temple to make a voice note that will show up on your dashboard. If you make multiple notes, you can flip through them with a tap. The news and stocks widgets are customizable, letting you select the kind of news you want to see or which stocks you want to track.
For QuickNotes and news, you’re limited to four lines of text for each entry, and you can’t scroll any further. Voice notes that can’t be shown in four lines get AI summaries, but you can at least see the full note on the app. News items only get headlines with identifying sources like ABC News and Sports Illustrated, and there’s no way to get further information on the glasses or through the app; you’ll have to search for the full articles elsewhere. Stocks shows a line graph as well as the current value and its latest movement up or down by both value and percentage, but it doesn’t actually label the time frame or let you customize it.
The map widget is the most disappointing for me because I’ve long wanted a wearable display that could show me a video game-like mini-map of my surroundings. It indeed does show a mini-map, which is easily the most visually complex piece of information the G1 can display, and you can set the view to a range of 25 meters, 50 meters, or 100 meters, which is fine for street-level navigation. However, because the display’s resolution is so low, the map has no labels whatsoever. If you recognize the layout of a neighborhood, you can sort of use it to figure out where you are, but even that’s being very optimistic. It ostensibly has some directional orientation, but it was wildly inconsistent in testing and wouldn’t update reliably. A simple compass would actually be more useful than this map.
The G1 can also show phone notifications as pop-up messages on the display. This worked reliably, letting me see texts and Slack messages instantly. It’s certainly useful once you become accustomed to it, like getting notifications on a smartwatch.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
Controls: Use Your Head, Not Your Fingers
Physical controls are kept to a minimum on the G1, with the most common input powered by a vertical angle motion sensor. The main way you interact with the glasses is by tilting your head upward to make the dashboard view appear. Even calls this HeadUp, and the trigger angle can be tweaked from zero degrees (looking straight ahead, so the dashboard is effectively always on) to 60 degrees.
Using HeadUp often had me looking at a blue or gray sky that was too bright for the dashboard, which was a nuisance. The display was much more readable outdoors when looking straight ahead, but having the HeadUp angle set to zero degrees meant keeping the dashboard constantly visible, which was distracting.
You can also interact with the glasses using the left and right control surfaces at the ends of the temples. However, I found the touch gestures difficult to set off and too limited to be useful, so I controlled the G1 almost exclusively through HeadUp and its companion app.
Each temple has a different press-and-hold action—the left surface activates Even’s AI assistant, while the right opens QuickNote for making voice notes. Triple-tapping either side toggles Silent mode. By default, a double-tap of either side will close the active feature, but this gesture can be customized to instead bring up the dashboard view when head-tilt activation is disabled or to open the teleprompter, transcribe, or translate features. Finally, single-tapping on the right panel will flip through the entries on your chosen dashboard widget.
Even App: Required for Use
(Credit: Even Realities/PCMag)
The G1 requires a smartphone to work. The Even mobile app manages most of the glasses’ processing and determines what information to show on its display. The G1 has almost no onboard processing and doesn’t even maintain a clock without a phone connection. Until connected, it shows whatever time it was when I last used the glasses.
The app also lets you configure various features, including the HeadUp angle, the dashboard view, and the double-tap gesture. Additionally, since the physical controls are so limited, you must use the app to access most of the G1’s interactive features like navigation and translation.
After setting up the app and granting permission for it to connect to the glasses, the G1 is supposed to automatically reconnect every time you turn on the glasses by opening the temples. This worked less than half the time, and I more often had to open the app and manually tap the connect tile. Once manually connected, the G1 reliably stayed linked with the phone for that session.
Battery Life: Days of Use, With a Wireless Charging Case
With an integrated 160mAh cell, the G1 glasses can last up to 15 days on a charge with regular use, according to Even.
The G1 comes with a very clever charging case. It’s made of black, matte plastic with a trapezoidal profile and a magnetic flap that stays securely closed over the glasses compartment or open against the back panel. The glasses sit neatly in the compartment and charge wirelessly, though you must make sure to close the left temple first, then the right temple before you put them inside. You don’t even need to plug in the case to charge the glasses; it has an integrated 2,000mAh battery that, according to Even, can fully juice the G1 2.5 times.
(Credit: Will Greenwald)
For comparison, the Viture Pro doesn’t have a built-in battery and instead runs off whatever device you plug it into. The Ray-Ban Meta smart camera glasses have a 154mAh battery that can power through roughly four hours on a charge, and their case holds eight charges for a total of 36 hours.
Useful Features: Transcribe and Teleprompt
(Credit: Even Realities/PCMag)
The G1’s transcribe and teleprompt features are some of the best examples of what waveguide smart glasses are currently capable of.
Transcribe is a voice-to-text feature that writes out anything the glasses hear through the built-in mics. The text shows up both on the glasses display and in the app, where it’s saved and can be read later. Voice-to-text notetaking isn’t impressive on its own, but having it come up directly in front of your eyes is a big benefit for any user who’s hard of hearing. Caption might be a better name for this feature than transcribe.
Regardless, I used the transcribe feature while watching a presentation, and it quickly converted the spoken words into text on the glasses. Accuracy was quite good, though not perfect; while most of the transcription was correct, several words and phrases were wrong. It was about as accurate as live captioning on TV and certainly close enough to follow most conversations and presentations.
Teleprompt works like it sounds, and it’s useful if you’re planning to give a speech or presentation. You paste text into the app, and it will scroll across the display, letting you look around naturally as you speak. It can scroll automatically based on words per minute or pace itself to match your speech, or you can manually scroll it using your phone or a Bluetooth presentation remote.
Less Useful Features: Translate and Navigation
The G1 can translate from 22 different languages to a shorter list of 18, showing the translated words on the display as you speak and listen. You have to manually select the language pair yourself, and it doesn’t work in both directions, so you can’t translate your own speech back into the language you’re listening to without flipping through the language lists. The mode also doesn’t transcribe, so you won’t get logs of what gets translated in the app. Such a feature might be useful if you want to watch a video or listen to audio in a foreign language, or keep up in a conversation in a language you’re somewhat proficient at, but Even’s implementation needs improvement.
Translate and Translate Pro output (Credit: Even Realities/PCMag)
In tests, watching some videos in Japanese on YouTube and anime on Crunchyroll and speaking using my own tenuous proficiency to see how the translate feature works, I found it to be, well, まあまあです (maamaa desu, or just OK) at the very best and simply unusable most of the time. The translation is phrase-based, which means it requires hearing a full sentence or a pause between phrases to start working. It often shows only baffling snippets of English that have little to do with what’s being said, putting it well behind Google Translate in terms of coherency. Even when the translations seemed accurate, they weren’t fast enough to keep up a conversation very well. The glasses don’t have any speakers, so the translation feature notably doesn’t have any audio at all; it only gives a visual translation.
Even offers a premium add-on service called Translation Pro, which enables real-time translation, purporting faster and more accurate results than the standard phrase-based version. It’s based on use time, starting at $4.99 for one hour and going up to $44.99 for 10 hours. That’s already bordering on too expensive to use with any regularity, but in testing, I actually found the Translation Pro feature to be even less reliable and coherent than the free version.
The map, with no labels (Credit: Will Greenwald)
Navigation has the potential to be very handy, giving turn-by-turn walking or cycling directions with a mini-map on the G1’s display. Unfortunately, that wasn’t how it played out in testing. While the app generally found the route to a destination quickly, the glasses would display the message “please wait while the route is being generated” for 10 to 20 seconds before directions would actually appear.
The mini-map occupied only about a quarter of the view, with the rest showing the distance to the next turn in the route. It also proved useless, as even the unlabeled street layout would fail to appear most of the time, leaving only a single bright, squiggly line indicating the shape of the path against a blank background, seemingly oriented neither in the direction I was facing nor true north. Oddly, looking up to activate HeadUp would show a display-filling map with a street layout oriented north. Street names were still missing, but just seeing the number of blocks to cross improved the functionality.
Navigation views on the app (Credit: Even Realities/PCMag)
Directions were correct in my tests, though the G1 made figuring out the first step in the route difficult. It told me to turn right onto the street when I needed to turn left from my starting point, and would take a solid 10 to 20 seconds to go to the next step in the route after I turned and started walking. It also kept telling me to turn onto or go down the “walkway” rather than the street or road, which was slightly confusing.
If you do use navigation on the G1, make sure to put in earphones first. In addition to the visual navigation guidance on the glasses, the app offers audible directions. If you don’t have headphones in, the audio directions will play on your phone at media-playback levels that anyone around you will be able to hear.
Verdict: The Future of Eyewear (Is Not Here Yet)
The Even Realities G1 is, without a doubt, the most impressive and user-friendly pair of waveguide display smart glasses yet. It feels far less experimental than similar devices I’ve tried in the past, and its pop-up phone notifications, transcription, and teleprompter functions make it genuinely useful for some applications. Still, the G1’s monochrome, low-res display severely limits its functionality, as the glasses can only show a few lines of text and very, very simple icons. Its translation and navigation features are borderline useless, and its wireless connection can feel laggy and inconsistent. Add a hefty price plus an extra $100 for sunshades to make the display visible in daylight, and you have a pretty big ask for smart glasses that still feel more like an early adopter gadget than a polished product. Most people should wait a bit longer for a more fully developed pair of waveguide smart glasses with a higher resolution. In the meantime, if you want a pair of smart glasses that function as a wearable display for working from a stationary position, the Viture Pro remains our Editors’ Choice.
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The Bottom Line
The Even Realities G1 is a pair of augmented reality glasses with a waveguide display that can provide helpful information as you walk around, but it’s too unpolished and pricey.
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About Will Greenwald
Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics
