Last year's Even Realities G1 was one of the first pairs of waveguide smart glasses I tested. Although expensive and generally unrefined, I could see the technology's potential. The follow-up, the Even Realities G2, is significantly more reliable and features a promising app store and an optional smart ring accessory. Priced at $599, it's just as pricey as the G1 and shares many of the same frustrations, including a less-than-helpful AI assistant. On its own, the G2 makes enough improvements to be useful in certain situations, as long as you go into it aware of its limitations. Still, it's difficult to recommend to anyone who isn't an early adopter, which remains true for waveguide smart glasses as a whole. By comparison, prism-based glasses like the $399 Viture Luma aren't designed for on-the-go use, but they excel as personal, large-screen displays for your computer, tablet, or phone—making them a far more compelling choice for most people and earning our Editors' Choice award.

Design: Stylish Frames That Hide the Tech

The G2 is one of the lightest and thinnest pairs of smart glasses I've seen, trimming down the G1's already svelte profile. It’s available with rectangular or round lenses and in gray, brown, or dark green frames. The frames are incredibly narrow, and the temples are skinny metal arms that hardly seem capable of hiding the wiring built into them. In fact, aside from two indicators, the G2 is indistinguishable from a stylish pair of non-smart glasses.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The first indicator is the pair of waveguides on the lenses. The waveguides reflect light with a slight blue-purple sheen, and at some angles, the bright green of the displays can be seen from the outside when they're active. This is a common problem with many waveguide displays.

Another indicator is that the G2, like the G1, has many controls and electronics built into rectangular, chunky capsules at the ends of the skinny-armed, metal temples. Their builds are the opposite of most other smart glasses I’ve tested, where the temples are thicker near the hinges and slimmer near the ear hooks. I didn't find the glasses too uncomfortable, but the temples' ends squeezed my head rather than resting behind my ears.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The G1 lacked an IP rating, but the G2 is rated IP65, which means it’s dustproof and water-resistant. You should be able to wear it in the rain and rinse it off without worry, just don’t submerge it or hit it with serious water pressure. This is rare on display-equipped smart glasses, so it's great to see it here.

Controls: Slightly Awkward Without the $249 R1 Smart Ring

My real complaint with this design is the control layout. Each capsule has a touch-sensitive strip you tap or swipe to interact with the glasses. You can double-tap to bring up the menu, swipe forward and backward to scroll, and single-tap to select items. It’s similar to the Rokid Glasses' controls, except reaching behind my ears to access the touch strips felt much more odd than tapping right behind the front-right hinge. I also had more difficulty keeping my (fairly short) hair away from the G2's touch strips. Meanwhile, I could tuck my sideburns behind the Rokid Glasses' touch surface with no problem.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The experience improves drastically if you get the $249 Even R1, a smart ring that doubles as a G2 controller. The R1 is a silver-colored, ceramic-and-stainless-steel ring with inward-facing sensors for health tracking (heart rate, blood oxygen, temperature, step tracking), and a touch strip that works like the one on the glasses when both devices are paired through the Even app. Mapping the controls to a surface you manipulate with your thumb, rather than reaching behind your ear, makes the G2 much easier to use.

As a G2 accessory, the R1 is both very helpful and very expensive. Its health features currently seem half-baked, since the glasses and the Even app don't offer much more than self-contained metrics with no real analysis or guidance. It’s a smart glasses controller first and a fitness device second, lagging far behind the excellent $350 Oura Ring 4 and the cheaper $200 RingConn Gen 2 Air in holistic health information.

Display and Lenses: Sharp, Readable, and Prescription-Friendly

As waveguide smart glasses, the G2 uses flat, clear lenses with waveguides etched into them that redirect light projected from microprojectors built into the frames. The stereo display is monochrome green, with a 640-by-350 resolution and a 27.5-degree field of view. It’s bright, sharp, and easy to read indoors and outdoors on cloudier days. If it's sunny, though, the display can be hard to read on anything light-colored.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

If you use corrective lenses, you can get the G2 with a prescription. Prescriptions start at $159 for +2.00 to -3.00; move on to $229 for +4.00 to -6.00; and max out with a $349 high-index option that supports +12.00 to -12.00. I received a test pair with basic prescription lenses for my relatively weak nearsightedness. Because they're built-in and not inserts like the Rokid Glasses use, the smart lenses are undetectable and won't wobble out of place in use. Only clear lenses are available, but Even offers clip-on sunshades in gray, brown, or green for $99 each.

Battery Life and Case: Reliable Enough for Daily Use

Even says the G2 can last up to two days of regular use on a single charge, and the included charging case can fully charge it seven times. These estimates seem a bit generous, but the glasses lasted at least a day between pops into the case. The gray plastic case is identical to the G1's charging case, with a flexible flip-open cover and a trapezoidal profile.

Camera and Speakers: Noticeably Absent, Arguably Intentional

The G2 has microphones built into the frames for voice commands, live captions, and translations. Although it can hear you, you can't hear it. Unlike nearly all other AI glasses, the G2 lacks speakers, so you can't listen to music or podcasts. Additionally, any response from the AI assistant will be text-only. This will disappoint users who want their AI to talk back to them, or who don't want to use earbuds. I don't mind the omission, because decent earphones almost always sound better than the smart glasses' default audio (and are completely private with no sound leakage).

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The G2 lacks another big feature: a camera. This is a no-no for some people, but I don't mind the omission. Being able to take snapshots and video by looking at anything is convenient, but even the best AI glasses don't come close to the picture quality of midrange smartphones. There's also no potential creep factor from camera-equipped glasses. The lack of imaging hardware makes the G2 one of the lightest and slimmest waveguide smart glasses currently available.

Interface and App: Clean, Customizable, and Easy to Navigate

The G2 requires a connection to your smartphone, which you set up and control through the Even app for Android and iOS. The app walks you through connecting both the glasses and the R1 ring to your phone over Bluetooth, an easy process. In fact, the G2 maintains a better connection to a phone than the G1. After that, you can use the app to adjust the glasses' settings, activate their main functions, and enter information such as teleprompter scripts and navigation destinations.

The glasses' interface is simple, built around a multi-tab dashboard screen for displaying information and a pop-up menu that provides access to the active features. It pops up when you double-tap the touch strip or enable the HeadUp feature, which makes the dashboard appear when you lift your head to an angle between 0 and 60 degrees.

However you summon it, the dashboard features a large, easy-to-read clock on the left third, with the date, current weather, number of unread notifications, and glasses' battery life arranged around it. The right two-thirds of the dashboard is a multipurpose panel that displays news, stock prices, calendar dates, reminders you ask the AI assistant to include, and health metrics provided by the R1. In a nice touch, swiping back and forth switches between these views, tapping expands them to show more information, and double-tapping returns the default dashboard from any expanded view (or puts the display to sleep).

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Tapping and holding one of the touch strips opens a menu for the G2's more active features. There are eight options here by default: Notifications, Conversate, Teleprompt, Translate, Navigate, Even AI, Dashboard, and Silent Mode. These are the G2's core functions, but you can customize the menu by adding or removing items as you wish, which is helpful once you start playing around with third-party apps in the Even Hub.

As its name implies, Notifications displays your phone notifications. They automatically appear on the display whenever they come in, and the Notifications menu lets you check any you've missed. Silent Mode is helpful if you don't want to receive notifications or accidentally open the display with a stray tap (it turns off the display until you wake it by tapping and holding both touch strips at the same time).

Voice Features: Strong Captioning Undercut by Inconsistent AI

Conversate makes the glasses listen to and transcribe your conversations, using Even's AI to summarize and even suggest topics related to the subject at hand. I'm leery of features like this, partly because speech-to-text technology isn't always accurate, and then running that text through a large language model (LLM) to glean important details seems like a recipe for inconsistency. I experienced that while testing Conversate during work conversations. The AI misunderstood a key device name once, thinking I said I-95 and not S95. Because of this slip-up, the notes it took seemed to think that I was performing separate tests for two different devices.

That said, Conversate had impressive moments. It picked up and followed a lengthy discussion about comedy shows that arose when some of us were considering rewatching The Office, Parks & Recreation, and How I Met Your Mother. The AI identified those shows, noted a direct comparison between The Office and Parks & Rec, and took notes during our discussion of the 2007 writers' strike and James Spader’s filmography. It even added an action item to get a Criterion Collection membership.

(Credit: Even Realities)

Conversate recently received an upgrade during testing that added a new Prep Notes feature. It lets you upload documents relevant to a discussion you're planning, prepping the AI to better summarize and provide suggestions. It could potentially improve Conversate’s usefulness and accuracy, especially when dealing with technical terms. 

If you avoid these sorts of AI functions, whether because of philosophical differences or you just don't think they’re reliable, you still might find value in the Conversate mode. You can completely turn off the AI summary and conversation cues while keeping the mode's live transcription function. This setting visually captions your conversation, or any presentation, movie, or show that the glasses can hear, and transcribes it into the Even app without any LLM-powered extras. The tech worked well in my tests, both in casual conversation and while watching TV. Like all text-to-speech features on smart glasses I’ve tested so far, it got some words wrong, but was largely accurate.

Be aware that, even if you turn off the live AI summaries and cues, Conversate runs the transcripts it generates through its AI and produces a summary. So don't use it if you have concerns about generative AI's privacy.

Teleprompt is a simple teleprompter feature that works just like it did on the G1. You load a speech into the Even app, and the glasses scroll the words past your eyes. You can set the glasses to scroll the text at a fixed rate, scroll manually through the app, or use AI to automatically scroll the words as you say them. It's a basic and useful function, and easy to read on the display.

Translate also carries over from the G1 and performs much better than it did on those glasses, though you still need to manually select the input and output languages in the Even app. You can choose from 33 languages, and, like with live captioning and transcripts, it works well but not perfectly. 

Navigation: Improved, But Still Not Reliable

The Navigate feature has improved slightly over its extremely unreliable iteration on the G1, but not enough to be actually useful. It's more accurate and responsive in determining my direction and orientation during testing than its predecessor, which was so laggy in this regard that it was virtually unusable. Otherwise, it has the same problems as before. It still uses Even's AI and navigation system to find locations and produce directions, which isn't as robust as Google Maps or the Meta Ray-Ban Display's navigation feature. It couldn't find several nearby destinations during testing, like one of my favorite coffee shops, even though they showed up by name when I began entering them manually in the phone app. It also seemed to think my home address was two and a half blocks away from where it actually is, and on a different street.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

When the app gets the destination right and navigation starts, the glasses display turn-by-turn directions as an arrow, a distance number, and an instruction to turn at the end of that distance. Instead of clearly stating which street to take, it only directs you to turn left or right "onto the walkway." That is unhelpful.

A tiny square map appears to the right of the directions, and tapping the touch strip opens it to cover the whole display. In both views, the map is completely unlabeled, showing only a street grid and a brighter, glowing line indicating the route. The grid would sometimes disappear for no reason in the expanded view, too. In my tests, the feature was almost completely useless. Sadly, it seems the Meta Ray-Ban Display remains the closest smart glasses have come to my dream of navigating streets with a video game-like mini-map.

Third-Party Software: Early, But Full of Potential

Just as I was wrapping up this review, Even launched what may be its most promising new feature on the G2: Even Hub. It's a platform and app store that lets third-party developers build and release apps for the G2 that perhaps Even hasn't considered.

At launch, the Even Hub already has a few dozen apps available to load onto the G2 via the mobile app. They include a weather app, timer, and versions of solitaire, chess, Snake, and Pong. Some are almost purely proof-of-concept projects, like a web browser and a 200-by-200 photo viewer.

(Credit: Even Realities)

I tinkered with several apps, and a few are useful. Using the subway app to check when the next train would stop at my station was really handy. The Twitch app is cool, too, letting me read comments while watching a stream on a TV or monitor.

Others could be useful if they overcome some very frustrating aspects. For example, the weather app gives much more detailed information than the dashboard or Even AI, but to get it, you visit the weather app page in Even Hub on your phone and manually enter your location (and it doesn't save what you entered). If the app simply saved my zip code, I would use it regularly.

As for games, the G2's touch controls are just too finicky to handle precise, reliable gestures in rapid succession, like swiping to move a Tetris block left or right.

The Even Hub is off to a strong start, at least conceptually. It provides a clear path for developers to add functionality to the G2, which is something all other waveguide glasses I've tested, including the Meta Ray-Ban Display, lack.