At CES 2025, wearables startup Halliday unveiled a distinctive line of smart glasses. Unlike other AR glasses that display phone notifications, live language translations, and advice from AI assistants on the glasses’ lenses, this device projects a 3.5-inch round display directly to your eye.

Small screens that fit perfectly in the wearer's line of sight have been used in earlier attempts to create futuristic, display-enabled eyewear (consider Google Glass, which placed a thumbnail-sized screen above the right-hand lens, or XREAL Air, which projects a theater-sized augmented reality display onto the wearer's environment using a Micro OLED panel.) However, these glasses appear silly to uninformed onlookers, and if you truly need prescription lenses, you probably won't wear them every day.

Halliday reverses this trend by positioning the display of its glasses in the frame. The screen, which is about the size of a cotton swab tip, is located at the top of the right-hand frame and appears to the wearer as a 3.5-inch display. Its positioning, according to Halliday, makes its display "completely private without light leakage or rainbow patterns." It also implies that Halliday Glasses are not much different from their analog counterparts, with the exception of having somewhat bigger frames than your typical pair.

Halliday's smart glasses are less expensive than other AR prototypes and work with standard prescription lenses since they are able to bypass costly AR lenses thanks to DigiWindow technology, reports Tomorrow’s World Today.

In addition to displaying phone notifications, notes, navigation directions, and more, the glasses provide real-time language translation for 40 languages. Users may read messages or play music aloud thanks to speakers built into the arms of the glasses.

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A "proactive AI assistant" will be included in the glasses, according to the company, however it was apparently not quite ready for CES 2025 demonstration. To access the many capabilities of the glasses, users will also be able to wear a control ring on their index fingers.

The Halliday smart glasses don't include a front-facing camera like other choices, so they appear more like regular spectacles.

Halliday plans to begin shipping these glasses in March 2025. The full price is $489, but you can preorder them for $369 by pledging $9.90 to their Kickstarter.