Vuzix has been making smart glasses for over 15 years, but you probably haven’t heard of them because they've focused almost exclusively on enterprise models. The Z100 ($499.99) breaks from the rest of the company's lineup as a product anyone can buy and use. Featuring an integrated waveguide projection system with unobscured lenses, the Z100 is safe to wear while walking around outside. It can caption and translate speech, provide turn-by-turn directions, and show notifications. That said, it also has some significant limitations and doesn't feel like a fully baked product just yet. We're still searching for waveguide-equipped smart glasses we can confidently recommend, but if you want a pair of AR video glasses to enjoy while sitting down, the Viture Pro ($459.99) is our Editors' Choice.

Design: They Look Like Any Other Glasses

The Z100 looks as plain and unassuming as any pair of glasses can be, but the black plastic frame and rectangular lenses offer a timeless look. The frame has a glossy finish with matte accents on the lower half of the lenses and rubber portions on the inside of the temples near the ears. The nose pads are fixed and integrated into the frames.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

Though it has a bulkier frame than the Even Realities G1 ($599), the Z100 lacks the large capsules at the ends of the temples that give its rival away as smart glasses. These glasses will disappear on your face without any clearly identifiable signs of electronics.

Only a close look at the inside of the Z100 will reveal that it’s a pair of AR glasses. The right lens is etched with a rectangular waveguide that is only visible to others from the back. A second set of lenses stacked directly in front of the first layer hides the Waveguide display on the right side. Other tech components include a small button on the bottom side of the right hinge and contacts for the included charging cable on the inside of the left hinge.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The glasses are available with clear or tinted lenses. Vuzix doesn't offer a clip-on sunglass accessory like you can get for the Even G1, and the Z100 doesn't offer integrated dimming functionality, a feature of some other smart glasses I've reviewed.

You can’t order the Z100 in a prescription, but Vuzix offers prescription inserts for an extra $150. I couldn't get inserts at the time of testing, though since my nearsightedness is fairly minor, I could still evaluate the glasses without issue.

Display: Large, Green, and Just for One Eye

The Z100 has a 640-by-480 monochrome green projection display with a 30-degree field of view. That’s more than double the number of pixels and a slightly wider viewing angle than in the Even G1 (640 by 200 pixels, 25 degrees). This is all good news, since the G1’s low resolution was one of our big complaints about it. VGA resolution (640 by 480) isn’t exactly on par with 1080p video glasses like the Viture Pro or XReal One, but the Z100's display is much better than the G1's squished rectangle. I also found it much easier to keep the Z100’s display aligned with my eye to stay visible, whereas the G1 required some careful angling of the glasses on my nose to see its full picture.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

This doesn’t mean the Z100 is more pleasant to use in every way, though. While the display is better by every measurement, it has one drawback over the G1: There’s only one. The G1 projects its picture to both eyes, while the Z100 only shows information on the right lens. As much as I’ve always loved the idea of a heads-up display monocle, it took a bit of getting used to before I could read what was on the screen without getting slightly disoriented.

Vuzix sent me a Z100 with tinted lenses, so I was unable to see how the monochrome green display fares with transparent lenses in sunlight. I had no difficulty reading it in all lighting conditions thanks to the contrast a dark background provides, but don’t expect it to fare as well with clear lenses during a bright day. Since it uses a similar projection system to the Even G1, it will also probably be difficult to read against a clear sky or a well-lit outdoor wall.

Battery Life: Two Days on a Charge

The Z100 comes with a charging cable and a plain flip-top hard case, which doesn’t serve as a charger or battery like the Even G1's case does. According to Vuzix, the Z100 can last up to 48 hours on a single charge. The G1 gets about 1.5 days of battery life on a charge, and its case holds 2.5 charges.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

For comparison, the Viture Pro doesn't have a built-in battery and instead runs off whatever device you plug it into. The Ray-Ban Meta smart camera glasses can power through roughly four hours on a charge, and their case holds eight charges.

Vuzix Connect: An Accessible App

Vuzix is primarily a white-label and enterprise-focused wearable display company with only a vestigial eye on consumers. It specializes in hardware and pre-user-level software implementation. It usually leaves at least some user interface development to firms repackaging the glasses or deploying them across fleets for specific use cases.

That’s clear as soon as you open the Vuzix Connect app for Android and iOS, the primary way to access the Z100’s functions. The app is sparse, highlighting the Z100's similarly light feature set. There are four options: Captioning, Fitness, Maps & Directions, and Teleprompter. Those features—and showing notifications from your phone—are the only things the glasses can do.

(Credit: Vuzix/PCMag)

The Z100 also serves as a development platform with Android and iOS SDKs, demo apps, and sample code readily available for companies that want to rebadge the glasses with their own software (like XanderGlasses, which sells the Vuzix Shield as a real-time speech captioning tool for people with hearing difficulties). This is good for developers, but it also limits what the Z100 can do for everyday buyers out of the box.

If you want a heads-up display filled with information at a glance, you will be disappointed. Unless you activate one of its features in the app, the Z100 will only show the time, its remaining battery life, and your most recent phone notifications. This simple display can disappear with a tap on either temple and can be brought back with a tap on the right temple. It will also pop up automatically when you get a notification, and you can choose which phone apps can send notifications to the glasses.

Captions and Translations: Effective, With a Caveat

The Captioning feature generates text captions that appear on the Z100’s display based on what the app hears. This mode also serves as a translation function with support for dozens of different languages through Google Translate’s engine. Under the right circumstances, both features work very well on the Z100. Captions and translations were generally accurate, at least getting into the ballpark of what was being spoken perhaps nine out of ten times with English-to-English and seven out of ten times with Japanese-to-English. Their translation performance is far better than the almost useless non-Google-powered feature on the Even G1.

(Credit: Vuzix/PCMag)

The big issue with the Z100 is that, unlike the Even G1 and Captify, it has no microphone and relies entirely on your phone’s mic. That means if your phone is in your bag or your pocket, the speech-to-text functionality won't work. If you want to read what someone is saying to you on the Z100's display, your phone better be in your hand.

The Teleprompter mode is also pretty self-explanatory: Paste text into the app, and it will scroll it upwards on the Z100’s display. It’s a simple tool for giving speeches and presentations without needing to stare at cards or distant teleprompter screens. It’s functional, though it’s more limited than the Even G1’s Teleprompt mode. You can only choose one of 10 fixed scrolling speeds, while the G1’s microphone and AI could automatically scroll based on how fast you’re talking.

Directions and Fitness Features

The name of the Maps & Directions feature is only half accurate. It can indeed provide turn-by-turn directions, but you won’t see a map anywhere on the Z100’s display or the app. Instead, the app hooks into Google Maps, and pipes the path provided by it into the display as text and direction arrows. The Even G1 has a map, but its resolution is so low it can’t show any labels, so it's almost completely useless. The Z100 has more than double the pixels, but that still isn’t enough for clearly displaying street names.

(Credit: Vuzix/PCMag)

Even without a map, the Google Maps-powered turn-by-turn directions are useful, clearly showing the next leg in your route as text instructions with the distance, street, and direction, along with a large arrow indicating the next turn. It more quickly and reliably adjusts navigation guidance based on your location and the direction you’re facing than the Even G1, which uses an unidentified and much less responsive navigation system. Make sure you have earphones in while you navigate, though; neither pair of glasses has its own speakers, and without earphones, your phone will be shouting every step.

In terms of fitness features, it's first worth noting the Z100 isn’t designed to be sport eyewear. It doesn't provide an extra-secure fit or the same wide unobscured view as sporty glasses like the display-less Chamelo Music Shield. It also lacks a formal IP rating, though Vuzix claims it’s “quite capable of resisting sweat, dust, and debris.” Basically, if you want to wear the Z100 when working out, it’ll be about as comfortable as wearing regular glasses.

The Fitness feature is limited to tracking your numbers while you bike, run, or walk. It can show distance, duration, pace, speed, steps, time, and even heart rate if you have a Bluetooth heart rate monitor paired to your phone. It doesn’t integrate with any fitness or health apps, and it doesn’t log your workouts, so you can’t track anything you do outside of each run. The display means you can look at your numbers without glancing at your phone or smartwatch, but that’s the only benefit for fitness tracking against the huge pile of limitations. If you want a good workout tool, consider a smartwatch or a fitness tracker instead.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)