Pokemon Go creator backs $349 multimodal AI glasses

Most attempts at smart glasses end up looking either like chunky welding goggles or undercover spy equipment.

Brilliant Labs is taking a very different route with Frame, a pair of lightweight, open-source AI glasses that look like something John Lennon might wear. They weigh just 39 grams—the same as a typical pair of prescription specs—and retail for $349. Deliveries kick off on April 15th, and they have already caught the eye and backing of Niantic CEO John Hanke, the mind behind Pokémon Go.

Tiny displays and a comical charging nose

Keeping the weight down to 39 grams forced some aggressive engineering decisions.

Instead of full augmented reality, Frame features a tiny 0.23-inch Sony color MicroOLED prism display embedded inside a single lens. It delivers 640 x 400 resolution at up to 3,000 nits of brightness, enough to cut through direct sunlight without using PWM dimming.

The trade-off is a narrow 20-degree field of view. You are essentially seeing a small, floating informational box rather than an immersive canvas.

The hardware is built for tinkerers. Driven by an nRF52840 Cortex-M4F processor, Frame runs a custom Lua-based operating system with virtually no dependencies. The entire stack is open-source.

Tucked into the bridge is a 1280 x 720 camera, an IMU sensor, and a microphone. Because the 222mAh temples cannot hold massive juice, Brilliant Labs includes an orange clip-on battery dock dubbed Mister Power that fast-charges the device while looking hilarious on your nose.

Multi-model AI right before your eyes

Brilliant Labs connects Frame to a companion mobile app called Noa, and its AI setup is unusually modular.

Rather than routing everything into a single chatbot, Noa stitches together specialized models. It uses OpenAI GPT-4 for visual analysis, Whisper for real-time speech translation, and Perplexity for live web lookups.

That Perplexity integration means Frame pulls fresh web information rather than stale training data. Brilliant Labs claims Noa can automatically pop up useful overlays, such as product price comparisons when you are holding an item, nutrition stats on meals, real estate estimates as you stroll through a neighborhood, or visual bullet points summarizing a physical book page.

Hardware owners can use Frame with third-party software for free without subscriptions. The built-in Noa assistant has a daily usage cap on the free tier, with a paid subscription coming later.

Why it matters

We think Frame proves that the smartest AI hardware today knows when to do less.

Meta stripped displays entirely from its Ray-Bans to save form factor, while Apple built an isolating 600-gram computing helmet. Frame finds a clever middle ground: keep the look of normal spectacles, add an ultra-light notification display, and leave the doors wide open for hackers.

For everyday consumers, we would still advise caution. A 20-degree display is basically a tiny text overlay, and a 222mAh cell running machine vision and wireless streaming raises major battery questions. But for developers and makers looking to build multimodal wearables without waiting on Big Tech permission, Frame might be the most exciting sandbox on the market right now.