Ranking the Best Smart Glasses: Meta, Viture, & More (2026)

This burgeoning wearable tech lets you talk to an AI assistant, listen to music, or check out a display screen from the comfort of your very own face.

The top 3

  1. First Head-Mounted Displays: The concept of wearable displays dates back to 1960 with Morton Heilig's stereophonic television HMD, followed by Ivan Sutherland's "Sword of Damocles" in 1968, which is recognized as the world's first head-mounted display, presenting simple wireframe drawings overlaid on the real world.
  2. Google Glass's Rise and Fall: Google Glass, launched to a select group in 2013, was an optical head-mounted display that offered hands-free access to information via voice commands, but ultimately failed due to high price ($1,500), privacy concerns, poor battery life, limited functionality, and unclear market positioning.
  3. Early Augmented Reality Headsets: Following early HMDs, the first functional AR systems for immersive mixed reality emerged in the early 1990s, such as the Virtual Fixtures system developed at the U.S. Air Force's Armstrong Laboratory in 1992, which allowed human users to control robots in real-world environments.

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