HTC enters the AI smart glasses race with the Vive Eagle

Everyone is trying to put AI on your face, and now HTC wants a turn.

Meta turned its Ray-Ban glasses into an unexpected hit by keeping things simple: no bulky screen, just a camera, speakers, and an assistant. Now, HTC is taking a page out of that exact playbook with the launch of the Vive Eagle.

Unveiled on August 14, the Vive Eagle is a pair of AI-powered smart glasses that look remarkably like everyday sunglasses. Equipped with Zeiss sun lenses and weighing under 49 grams, the frame comes in black, gray, brown, and red.

GPT and Gemini in the same frame

Unlike Meta, which locks wearers into its own Llama ecosystem, HTC built its Vive AI assistant to tap into both OpenAI’s GPT models and Google’s Gemini.

The hardware is built around a 12MP ultrawide camera and open-ear speakers designed to cut down on sound leakage while keeping your ears open to the world. A simple "Hey Vive, take a photo" triggers the camera hands-free.

Its standout feature is photo-based translation. The camera can scan street signs or menus and translate them directly into spoken audio across 13 languages, including Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, French, and German. You can also ask for nearby restaurant picks, dictate voice notes, and set quick reminders on the fly.

HTC also tackled the inevitable privacy creep. The glasses pack a front-facing LED that lights up during capture. If you take the glasses off or try to cover the indicator light, recording shuts down automatically. Local data is secured with AES-256 encryption, and third-party AI requests are anonymized.

Battery life sits around 4.5 hours of continuous music playback with up to 36 hours of standby, and magnetic fast charging juices the 235mAh pack to 50 percent in 10 minutes.

Why it matters

Hearing HTC pivot toward lightweight smart glasses tells you everything about where wearables are heading. Big VR headsets are stuck in a niche, but lightweight audio-camera frames are proving to be the most practical form factor for consumer AI.

HTC made a smart move by keeping the hardware light and opening the software to both OpenAI and Google instead of trying to train an in-house model from scratch. The anti-tamper privacy sensor is another clever touch that Meta should probably steal.

That said, the hurdles are steep. At around $520 USD, the Vive Eagle costs almost double the $299 entry price of Meta’s Ray-Bans. Launching exclusively in Taiwan via Taiwan Mobile and 2020EYEhaus also means it is effectively a regional test run for now. Unless HTC brings the price down and expands globally, it will struggle to dent Meta’s head start.