Brilliant Labs launches Halo: AI smartglasses that last all day

Today, Brilliant Labs launched its third product: the smartglasses Halo. Halo brings with it interesting innovations on the AI side, while being very comfortable and with a battery that can last up to 14 hours! And its price is very competitive. Keep reading the article to discover all the most important features of these new glasses!

Halo smartglasses

You have for sure already heard about Brilliant Labs. The startup became pretty well known in the past for its first device, the Monocle, which was a simple programmable device with a camera you could put close to your eyes. It then established itself as a believable brand when it delivered its second product: Frames, a set of very lightweight AI-powered smartglasses. Both products produced by Brilliant Labs were totally open, programmable in every aspect, and with the code of their software fully open-source.

The company has now launched its third device, while keeping the same philosophy. Halo is another AI-oriented smartglass product that is fully open and that offers intriguing features. Halo offers a camera and a microphone to capture the world around you, and both a display and bone-conduction speakers to let you see and hear the analysis of the AI assistant.

Main Characteristics

The company provided this list as the set of specifications for the glasses:

• ‘Halo Display’ – The Halo Display module projects full color images directly toward the user’s eye and is adjustable for a wide range of Interpupillary Distances (IPD). The module features a tiny 0.2 inch full color microOLED heads up display that projects a retro arcade-style UI into the wearer’s purview with the clarity and simplicity of ordinary lenses without need for inserts.
• As Lightweight as Conventional Eyewear – Weighing just over 40 grams and well distributed for all-day comfort, Halo combines a modern, thin, and lightweight design indistinguishable from everyday eyewear.
• AI Optimized Optical Sensor – Halo’s optical sensor captures at extremely low power and employs a novel imaging and compression technique optimized for AI, allowing for all-day battery life.
• Ultra-Low Power Edge AI/ML Inference Chip – In another industry first, Halo is the first device to use the recently released B1 chip by Alif Semiconductor – a cutting-edge, ultra-efficient AI/ML microcontroller for on-device AI with a dedicated Neural Processing Unit (NPU). This all-in-one sensor fusion chip for Halo is a game-changer that powers the full range of sensors at ultra-low power consumption that extends battery life.
• Lua Integration on Zephyr – Brilliant Labs implemented a novel integration of the Lua programming language directly on top of the Zephyr Open Source Operating System for a lightweight development environment. This approach allows for fast, efficient development, making it ideal for embedded AI applications on Halo.
• Optimized for 14 Hours of Battery Life –  By integrating optical sensors, an IMU, microphone array, bone conduction speakers, and a color display all within a sleek frame, Halo stands in a class of its own. Despite this full suite of low-power sensors and features, advanced software optimizations enable Halo to last for up to 14 hours of use – setting a new standard for full-featured AI glasses.
• Customizable Prescription Lens Options – Out of the box, Brilliant Labs offers a pair of non-prescription lenses with anti-reflective coating, but Halo is also compatible with a wide variety of prescription lens options (including astigmatism) from clear, single vision, Transitions®, and blue light to sunglass lenses through an exclusive partnership with SmartBuyGlasses.
• Bone Conduction Speakers – When conversing with Noa, Halo’s open-ear bone conduction speakers deliver rich stereo sound discreetly behind your ears.
• IMU – An IMU sensor installed on the glasses allows to track the orientation of the device

There are a few things I would like to comment on. First of all, let’s talk about the display. There is a full-color display, which is great, because I’ve always found audio-only glasses a bit limiting. You can do a lot with audio, but if you can also have some sort of visuals, there are more interactions possible. What is a bit disappointing to me is that there is only one display and not two. Our brain is meant to perceive with two eyes, and when something is seen only by one eye, the image reconstruction becomes a bit weird. Many smartglasses follow the monocular approach for performance, cost, and battery reasons: I understand all of this, but let’s say that I’m not a big fan. I hope the next edition will have two displays.

I am also very curious about the use of Bone Conduction speakers. There are ongoing debates about the pros and cons of bone conduction speakers vs traditional ones: for instance, the experts in the field say that the audio quality via bone conduction is a bit lost, but the fact that the ear is uncovered ensures that you are fully aware of your surroundings. I have tried various smartglasses, but I’ve never tried some employing this kind of speaker, so I am very curious to try these and feel the difference.

The battery life of 14 hours is incredibly good: for comparison, the average battery life of Ray-Ban Meta is 4 hours. But battery life becomes even more important when you pair this information with the weight: Halo weighs just a bit more than 40 grams. I’ve learned from Mentra that 40g is a bit of a special threshold that defines if glasses are comfortable enough to be worn for the whole day or not. If Halo is just a bit more than 40g, it is suitable to be worn for many consecutive hours, and thanks to the battery life, it can be operational the whole time. This is crazy important: you want AI glasses to be ready when you need them. If you have them in your charging case, taking them out whenever you want to ask something to your AI assistant creates so much friction that you end up not using them. If they are lightweight enough and stylish enough that you can wear them the whole day, it’s very easy to look at something and quickly summon the AI when you need it. Brilliant Labs seems to have brilliantly (pun intended) hit this point.

Design

Let me put here a few photos of Brilliant Labs people wearing the glasses.

The glasses are very thin and similar to normal glasses. If you look at them very closely, you can see some differences, like the little cylinder of the display or the end of the bone conduction speakers. And of course, if the display is on, people can see that there are some images on the lenses. But from a medium distance, no one would ever spot that you are wearing smart glasses. I would say this is pretty cool.

As an Italian, I have anyway to say that they are functional, but they are not super fashionable. They are not bad, but the lines of the Ray-Ban Meta are much more stylish than the straight profile of these glasses. Being a devkit device, this is fine, but I imagine that in the future, Brilliant Labs should also work on fashionability: if I have to wear something the whole day, I want to appear cool with it.

Noa conversational agent

With the Halo glasses, you can interact with the AI assistant Noa. The company claims that “[Halo] enables users for the first time to engage in near real-time conversations with Noa that, unlike other AI agents, feel natural and intuitive as if speaking with a real person“. This is what more or less what every company proposing an AI agent says. Noa is, of course, multimodal: it can see and hear what you have around you and answer your question using your surroundings as a context.

What is cool is that the context the AI agent uses to provide its answers is not only what you have now in front of you, but also what you did in the past. Noa remembers every conversation you had with it thanks to Narrative, Brilliant Labs’ patent-pending agentic memory system. While both audio and video are captured using Halo, Noa’s Narrative capability analyzes the context of your life and builds a private and personalized knowledge base. Thanks to this big knowledge base, Noa can, for instance, follow you on something that develops over multiple days. This makes the assistant incredibly useful because it not only lives in the moment, but can, for instance, make comparisons with the past. This is a very powerful concept that enables many new types of AI-based applications.

If you, like me, are thinking “this is technically a dream, but privacy-wise a nightmare”, you would be happy to discover that Brilliant Labs also thought about this. The company claims that Halo “puts users fully in control of their privacy. With privacy protections baked in at the system level, Noa functions like a VPN between you and the AI model. It masks your unique identifier to keep interactions private by default.[…] all rich media required for Noa, including visual and auditory inputs captured by Halo are immediately converted into an irreversible mathematical representation. No rich media is stored. Furthermore, no third party can view customer data, ensuring that your personal experiences remain yours, and yours alone.” I admit it is not super clear what they mean when they talk about a VPN between you and the AI model, but I guess that the images and sounds are not used raw, but they undergo some preprocessing, like some embedding, so that the AI model never gets access to the raw images of your house, but just to some mathematical representation of those images. This is a good thing, even if I think that, anyway, all this data stored about my life, even if approximated, is still a lot of sensitive information.

One last interesting thing about Noa is that it can also take action on the glasses themselves: for instance, you can ask it to put the glasses in standby or mute the microphone by just speaking naturally.

Noa can make you vibe code apps

As a professional developer, every time I hear about vibe coding, all my body starts itching, so for this part I will resort to vibe-blog and just copy-paste the press release:

In an industry first, AI glasses are entering the vibe coding era. Vibe Mode, an experimental new feature from Brilliant Labs, enables users to create custom applications using simple natural language voice commands. Just tell Noa what you need, and it will generate an app within seconds that’s tailored to your preferences. For example, if you’re a developer with an idea for a better maps application for AI glasses which is better suited to how you navigate cities, you can prompt Noa, which will instantly query its AI coding agent to build, display and run your custom Halo application right before your eyes.

With Vibe Mode, Noa democratizes app creation by enabling any user, even with no coding experience, to not only create but share new AI applications with users around the world as fast as they can imagine them. Users can even remix existing generated apps and build on the functionality developed collectively across the community, creating a multiplier of creativity never before seen in the smart glasses industry.

At launch, Vibe Mode will first be made available to everyone through the Brilliant Labs website and the Noa app.

The concept of “no store” is a bit frightening to me: as a developer, I want a store, I want to create something cool and share it with the other users of the glasses… and I want this to also bring me some money, so that I can keep providing value through applications. Stores create vibrant ecosystems. An ecosystem where the AI of the glasses does everything sounds a bit poor to me. I understand the idea of democratizing app creation, but I think this goes a bit too far.

The company anyway confirmed to me that it is also still possible to use the current SDK for building the apps. Professional developers can so avoid the abomination of vibe coding.

Price and availability

Halo retails for US$299 on its official website https://brilliant.xyz/ in Matte Black and begins shipping globally late in November 2025. Halo will follow the same limited release model as the recently sold-out Frame, with only a limited number of units being made available for purchase. If you like them, then consider buying them these days.

Final impressions

I think this new device by Brilliant Labs is interesting, like the previous ones. Halo glasses are meant to be kept on the whole day, are lightweight, and have a lot of AI features. They carry with them intriguing innovations. They are not perfect, and some things can be improved, but smart glasses are all about compromises today. For such a competitive price like $299, I think they are a great product for developers and technologists who want to experiment with the future of glasses and artificial intelligence. I’m considering preordering one myself.

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