Halliday's lens-free AI glasses beam AR straight to your eyes

Smart glasses usually have two massive turn-offs: cameras that creep people out, and bright glowing lenses that make you look like a walking billboard.

At CES 2025, wearable startup Halliday just introduced a pair of smart frames that neatly bypasses both problems. Instead of beaming images onto glass like traditional AR gear, it shines information directly into your field of view without using the lenses at all.

A hidden display in the frame, no lenses required

Named after the eccentric OASIS creator James Halliday from Ready Player One, the retro frames were developed by a team of Stanford optics PhDs. They come in matte black or tortoiseshell, look like ordinary classic glasses, and tip the scales at an ultra-light 35 grams.

Traditional smart glasses rely on waveguide lenses that often leak light forward and suffer from distracting rainbow patterns. Halliday bypassed that by putting an ultra-tiny projection module called DigiWindow into the upper-right corner of the frame.

It beams a virtual 3.5-inch display directly into the corner of your visual field, remaining sharp even under harsh sunlight. Because nothing hits the lens itself, you can swap in your own prescription lenses—or even pop the lenses out completely and still see the screen. Aside from a faint green light that might be noticeable in a pitch-black room at night, bystanders have no clue you are looking at a display.

Critically, Halliday left out the camera. There are no privacy alarms or creepy recording lights here. To navigate, you can use built-in frame controls, voice, or a sleek companion ring equipped with a trackpad.

Proactive AI that speaks when not spoken to

The software ambition is equally bold. Most assistants wait passively for a wake word, but Halliday says its built-in agent listens to ongoing conversations via Bluetooth once you launch the phone app, anticipating what you need on the fly.

During a business pitch or meeting, it can quietly answer tricky questions, summarize key talking points, and draft meeting notes right after you wrap up. The glasses also handle live 40-language translation, turn-by-turn navigation, discreet teleprompting, and synchronized lyrics.

Halliday says the glasses offer up to eight hours of battery life and will ship by the end of Q1 2025, priced between $399 and $499. However, the startup has not yet revealed which foundational AI model powers the backend, or whether heavy AI usage will require a recurring subscription.

Why it matters

We think Halliday made an exceptionally clever tradeoff by stripping out the camera.

While ditching cameras means giving up multimodal vision features, it eliminates the social awkwardness and workplace bans that plague Meta Ray-Bans. You can wear these into boardrooms, client pitches, or private lunches without anyone suspecting you have a digital edge. Weighing just 35 grams, they can actually be worn all day like normal eyewear.

For professionals who speak publicly, negotiate for a living, or juggle foreign languages, an invisible 3.5-inch teleprompter floating in the corner of your eye is a tangible, practical superpower. At $399 to $499, it is pricier than audio-only competitors, but competitive given the discreet display and included trackpad ring.

The real test will be the software. If proactive AI interrupts natural conversations with unhelpful noise, wearers will quickly turn it off. There are also unanswered questions about ring sizing, charging, and potential monthly AI fees. Still, by ditching heavy waveguide optics for a tiny unobtrusive projector, Halliday just handed the smart glasses category a much more socially acceptable blueprint.