Are These New AI Glasses the Future?

In a high-tech lab at Stanford University, a team of scientists has just shared with the world a pair of glasses that do some pretty cool shit, honestly.

These aren’t your average spectacles.

Led by Associate Professor Gordon Wetzstein, the team at Stanford’s Computational Imaging Lab has been pushing the limits of what augmented reality can do with the help of AI.

Their secret sauce? A nanophotonic metasurface waveguide.

Yeah, it sounds like something out of a sci-fi novel, but this waveguide—a fancy piece of glass embedded with tiny optical elements—might be the key to next-gen VR and AR headsets. Essentially, these microscopic structures guide light in and out of the waveguide, allowing for stunningly realistic 3D images to be projected right onto the lenses.

“We're talking about a bunch of tiny optical elements embedded in the glass surface that help guide the light,” Wetzstein told CNET.

The prototype, which currently can't be worn but can be handled while attached to a model head, weighs just half a pound and can project moving AI images through its lenses.

That’s less than half the weight of Apple’s Vision Pro, a mixed-reality headset that uses cameras to project the real world onto screens in front of your eyes.

These glasses, on the other hand, aim to blend the real world with digital enhancements directly within the lenses — you’re looking directly through them and not through a video screen.

“What we're aiming for is a perceptually realistic experience that’s very similar to the real world,” Wetzstein explained. “The vision is to create something indistinguishable from a real object.”

Imagine a surgeon using these glasses to map out a complex procedure or an airplane mechanic using them to learn the intricacies of the latest jet engine.

Or, just picture yourself in the back passenger seat of a long Uber ride, watching a film that appears in mid-air with your partner beside you.

Manu Gopakumar, a doctoral student who helped design and build the prototype, highlighted these practical applications. “One could imagine a surgeon wearing such glasses to plan a delicate or complex surgery or airplane mechanic using them to learn to work on the latest jet engine,” he said.

Before these glasses can become available for everyone, there are a few hurdles to clear.

For starters, they haven’t been tested on human eyes yet (not kidding).

That’s the next big step, along with making the glasses more compact and efficient. If they can reduce power consumption and size, we could see these glasses becoming as common, but not for a long, long while yet.

In the lab, the glasses are demonstrated with an illuminated waveguide activated by a laser. You can watch a video of the glasses here.

The work at Stanford is a major leap forward in augmented reality. Even if it is tough to explain without sounding like something from a Sci-Fi movie…