Smart glasses are increasingly being pushed as the future of personal computing. But so far, an overwhelming majority have focused on aspects like social media sharing, pulling up AI agents, or media consumption. Soliddd wants to push smart glasses into a challenging niche of medical science.
At CES 2025, the New York City-based company introduced SolidddVision smart glasses. Soliddd claims these are “the first true vision correction for people living with vision loss due to macular degeneration.” Notably, these glasses won’t require any FDA clearance and will enter the market later this year.
Macular degeneration is an age-related condition that prevents people from seeing what’s directly in their line of sight, blocking their central vision due to degeneration of the macular region of the retina.
Millions of people across the world suffer from dry and wet macular degeneration. Unfortunately, there’s no cure for it, though, there are some drugs that can sometimes improve the vision, or simply arrest the damage.
“We can provide sight in areas of the visual field where patients otherwise see nothing,” Neal Weinstock, founding chief of Soliddd, said in the announcement. Results from a clinical study involving the SolidddVision glasses have also yielded a positive outlook.
The SolidddVision smart glasses take a leaf out of the VR playbook to allow sight restoration for people living with macular degeneration. Inspired by a fly’s eye, these smart glasses employ a proprietary lens array that pushes multiple images to the retinal zone that is still healthy.
The trick here is to let the brain construct “a single full-field image with good acuity that feels like normal, in-focus sight.” The whole system is a combined effort of patented optical design and software, beaming in-focus views courtesy of a parallel-ray light field.
There are two front-facing cameras to capture the world outside, and an equal number of inward-facing cameras for mapping the eyes and gaze tracking. The software combines the input video with eye mapping data, performs spatial adjustments, employs the necessary color correction, and beams the final view to the internal display units.
The SolidddVision glasses are currently in the beta-testing phase, but the company is eying a market launch in 2025. So far, the SolidddVision glasses appear to be the most practically rewarding implementation of this wearable form factor, and it would be interesting to see where the technology leads.
Nadeem is a tech journalist who started reading about cool smartphone tech out of curiosity and soon started writing…
The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses just got an interesting new competitor
Wearing a camera on your face can make you and others uncomfortable. That’s something Solos has addressed in its latest pair of smart glasses, the Solos AirGo Vision.
While the frame has a camera in it, the unusual modular design means you can swap the front plate out for one without a camera without losing the AirGo Vision’s other features.
Read more
Forget the Galaxy S25. Samsung may announce smart glasses soon
As excited as we are about the Galaxy S25 and its upcoming release (and we’re really excited), something even more exciting may be coming soon from Samsung. The company may reveal plans for a pair of smart glasses at the Galaxy S25 Unpacked event early in 2025, according to the Korean news site Yonhap News. The augmented reality glasses are expected to closely resemble a standard set of glasses and weigh only 50 grams, or about a tenth of a pound. The average weight of eyeglasses is between 20 and 40 grams, so these wouldn’t be much heavier.
Don’t expect them to launch right away, though. Only the reveal is scheduled for January, with an estimated public launch sometime in the third quarter of 2025. In addition, Samsung is looking to hire more people and “strengthen leadership in related departments” to ensure a steady development cycle. It would be Samsung’s second new push into the wearables space in recent times. It launched and released the Samsung Galaxy Ring in July 2024, alongside the new Galaxy Watch Ultra smartwatch and its latest Galaxy Watch 7.
Read more
Apple is hoping to one-up Meta with its own smart glasses
Apple has been stuck in an innovation rut for the past few years. Aside from the Vision Pro headset — which expectedly didn’t gain a mass reception — the company hasn’t made any notable hardware strides apart from its bread-and-butter mobility and computing portfolio. That could change in the next few years.
According to Bloomberg, Apple’s Vision Pro team is working on smart glasses to tackle the challenge presented by a resurgent Meta. The social media giant has already scored an early lead with the well-received Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses, which have steadily received meaningful social and AI upgrades.
Read more
