The best wearable is the one you were already wearing

Over the last few years almost every piece of AI hardware has asked for the same thing: please wear one more object.

A ring, a pin, a pendant, a screen. Each has its own logic, but each has to win a very hard fight first — persuading somebody to change what they carry on their body.

Sunglasses do not have to fight it

When the sun comes out, you put sunglasses on. We do not have to persuade anybody of that; it is already settled.

So we did not invent a new category. We added a button to something people were going to wear anyway. The first consequence of that choice is that the cost of adoption is close to zero. You do not have to build a new habit. You just press once more on the thing that was already on your face.

The constraint deleted a lot for us

Once you decide that it has to be a good pair of glasses first, a lot of trade-offs that are hard on other products answer themselves.

• It cannot be heavy. So: ordinary indoor eyewear proportions, not a sports wrap.
• It cannot be ugly. So: every colour pale, no saturated colours, no gradients.
• It cannot come off at the door. So: the lens has to be pale enough to live under indoor lighting.
• It cannot have a light blinking at your eye. So the indicator faces outward, beside the camera, where you cannot see it and everyone else can.
• It has to take a prescription. Because a pair with a correction in it gets worn roughly ten times as many hours as sunglasses do.

That last one is the most important and the easiest to miss. A prescription is the step that turns an object from "a gadget you remember to bring" into "already on your face when the thought arrives". So we treat lens fitting as the main line of the business rather than a paid extra — myopia, farsightedness, astigmatism, progressive lenses, high-index materials and unusual pupillary distances are all cut here.

You can think of us as an eyewear shop. A specialist, young, fashion-minded eyewear shop that happens to have put a record button on the temple.

It also solves the problem of everyone else

An unfamiliar wearable makes the people around you tense. A pair of glasses does not — it is something they look at every day.

The recording half is settled in hardware: main mic 4 to 7 centimetres from the mouth, reference mic twelve centimetres away facing the sky, anyone half a metre away never reaching storage. That half asks nobody to believe us.

The camera has no such boundary, and we do not pretend otherwise. So the light is lit while it captures, facing outward. That half rests on being visible, not on geometry. About that light is the note that works through the difference.