Even Realities G2 Review (From a Developer's Perspective)

0:00 In this video, I'm going to look at the Even Realities G2 from a developer's perspective because I think that is where the real power in these smart glasses lies. I'm not actually that interested in the stock software that comes with these at the the app store ecosystem that they're trying to build for the hardware. I think these things work best when you build your own software for them. So, I'm going to explore what it's like to build software for these, what we're dealing with in terms of the actual hardware, what kind of limitations are you working with, how does it work with the microphones and the battery life, all of this stuff that you want to understand when you're thinking about the capabilities of building your own software to run on these smart glasses. So, obviously, like most software developers, I'm using Claude code for the bulk of my work now.

0:39 And that, of course, opens up this idea of using something like smart glasses as a way of interacting with those Claude code sessions. We know we're just putting in human language and getting human language back out of it. So, why are we stuck sat in front of a computer when actually all we really need is just a way of seeing the output? And of course, it's this style of smart glasses that really answers this. We have this ultra-light hardware with all-day battery life that lets you read text on the screens as well as listen to you with its microphones for dictation. Now, there's a couple of quite significant contradictory points that I'm going to explore in this video about these smart glasses that no other reviewer seems to really be talking about. that's become quite obvious to me after using these day in day out for a couple of months now. This is not a sponsored video. I bought these with my own money and I did this because I really wanted to test this idea of can these glasses be used as a way of working with computers without being sat stuck in front of a computer at a desk using a keyboard. So, this kind of smart glasses different to the ones from Meta and all of that where the cameras and no screens. These glasses have a screen but no camera and they do have the microphone as well.

1:39 So, I'll just kind of just start by introducing what kind of hardware we're looking at here. So, this style of smart glasses, very small, very lightweight, nothing like your kind of VR headset or anything like that. You can wear them all day. They weigh 40 g. And because they don't have the full display experience, they have a very special kind of display which I'll get on to in a second, the battery lasts all day or pretty close to it with a couple of quick charges if you need to. It all depends on how much you're using the microphones primarily and we'll get on to that as well. So, the hardware themselves just really does two things.

2:07 It displays text in the lenses and it has microphones to listen to your speech. From there, they have the control surfaces on the backs of the arms. So, they have one each side and you can tap and swipe and hold and different combinations of those are available to you when you're developing on these to tap into that. So, I've built my stack to actually work almost entirely with these and my voice. So, you can toggle the microphone on and off with a different gesture and then it obviously take over from your voice. I have also made a live mode for these glasses where it will just be listening all the time and when I say certain phrases, that is what interacts with my software. So, you obviously when you're building your own applications for this, all of these kinds of ways of building software are open to you. And on top of that, I've built the support for my 5K macro pad.

2:50 I've done other videos looking in more detail at that and I'll touch on that a little bit in this video, but mostly I'm going to be talking about what it is actually like to develop software for these glasses. So, the glasses themselves and this is why the battery lasts such a long time, don't really do a great deal. They are just a lightweight Bluetooth connected peripheral to your phone. They send the audio to your phone over just standard Bluetooth. Nothing fancy going on there and they receive the text back again through Bluetooth. In fact, people have reverse engineered these so that you don't even need to use the Even Realities app and you can actually just connect straight to the glasses from third-party apps. So, if you look at Mantra OS, they actually provide a development environment open source for you to put stuff on these glasses without using the Even Realities app at all. So, if you don't quite trust the SDK environment from Even Realities, that option is also on the table for you. Obviously, you're going to sort of wave your warranty. But, as a piece of hardware, they're actually versatile.

3:40 There's not really a lot of lock-in. It's just for me, I haven't really found the need because the Even Realities SDK is is good enough really. And I don't think there's any issue with privacy. I don't think the Even Realities app listens to your audio or reads your text. When you're using your own software inside their environment, I'm pretty confident that that is written defense and they're not snooping on that. I did ask them and they confirmed that no audio is being sent to their servers when you're using the app like that.

4:04 So, the actual screens are really interesting. So, you put these on, they just feel like normal glasses. You've got the normal lenses in there and you can see through them and the way that it works is they have this thing called a waveguide display. So, there's a thing inside the lens that will reflect light to you that's projected into it from the side and they have these tiny projectors in the sides of the frames that shines into that and that's how you see this text and it's like that bright green text like a fighter pilot heads-up display thing. And the position of this virtual screen in your view is quite high. It's above your horizontal position in your field of view, which makes it very easy to have text displayed on these whilst going about your normal daily routine.

4:42 And this is what's so different about this kind of a device compared to the things that use the prism screens where you have a full color screen, but it's a prism system. I have these as well, the Vitruvian Pros. I bought those myself as well to test the difference and see what it's like. When you're wearing those, you can't see anything. You have to put the tinted screen on the lens and that's it. You're locked in then. It's just like a lightweight VR headset, really, even though they positioned them as these glasses for augmented reality.

5:06 really work like that. Whereas with these, you can just wear them like normal glasses and fully interact with the world around you and that's why I find them so appealing. It's very easy to just opt in and out of the screen just literally by glancing at the screen or not. If you want to ignore it, you can just look straight below it, past it. It's not a problem. It gets out of your way. And what's interesting about almost all smart glasses actually is the way that they project the image into the distance away from you. I've always been really interested in this idea of using a screen that's a good distance away from you instead of a close screen for reducing eye fatigue. So, the virtual focal distance of these is something like 3 to 5 m away from you. It's very relaxing to be focused on the virtual display when you're wearing these glasses and I think that really leans into this idea that these are actually an ergonomic device. If you're using these as an alternative to staring at a nearer screen all day, this is really fantastic. So, there's an interesting thing going on here in terms of the depth perception. So, obviously we have this virtual focal distance. Your eyes have to focus at that distance to see the image. So, when we see things with two eyes, we're seeing in this stereoscopic vision and we have this ability to judge depth. So, our eyes are not only just focusing at different distances, they're also converging at different distances. And obviously, as you're looking around and looking at things in real life, your eyes are used to a certain distance in terms of convergence and focus. So, if you think about the lenses in these glasses, the distance from side to side is a fixed thing. So, obviously, all our eyes are at different distances. This is the pupil distance. But of course, the focal distance of the lenses is just an optical thing. That's the same. So, that means that the convergence depth of the image is slightly different for everyone. So, there's this slight fight between what your brain expects the focal distance to be based on your convergence. So, for me, it didn't actually seem like much of a problem for these glasses. Your brain just adapts very quickly to this. And this is what's interesting with even realities. They do offer you this 14-day returns period if you don't buy them with your prescription initially. So, this is what I did. I bought them without the prescription so that I could test this >> >> before sending them back and getting my prescription put in. So, if you're not quite sure, if you've never used them before, get them, use the trial, see that you're comfortable before you buy them. If you are, you can send them back just for the cost of the shipping to get your prescription put in. I think that's a worthwhile trade-off for the option to use this no-quibble returns period.

7:14 So, if we drill a bit further into the display side of things, I've I've mentioned this screen position being higher than your eye line, which makes it very easy to opt in and out of it. You can also adjust in the software this vertical position of the screen in your view. The waveguide projector in the hardware is a lot taller than the image that we have access to. And they reserve that for this ability to move the image up and down. A lot of reviewers and they sort of mention this as a preference thing. It's actually much more interesting than that. The height of everyone's eye compared to the bridge of their nose is different for everybody. So, for me, if I put it all the way down, I see it fade out of the bottom. So, there's a position where it works. And then, towards the edges of that, it pushes out of your actual eye lines. But, you can tune that for your preference. Initially, I put it way up high and got really tired of having to move my eyes that high to see it. So, what I do now is just bring that vision down a bit, bring the glasses forward on my nose and because that's much more comfortable for long-term use when I'm primarily just using these as a display.

8:08 So, the other thing that's interesting think about is the field of view. It's very hard to understand what they're going to be like when you put them on. So, I can explain this. The sofa behind me is 2.7 m away from the screen on that side of the wall. When I'm wearing the glasses and sat on that sofa, this is a 55-in TV, the projected image is about the same size as that 55-in TV. They're not massive. They're not like these VR glasses that claim to take up all of your field of view, and I think that's a good thing. So, obviously as a result of this relatively quite small field in the glasses, we don't have a lot of room for text. These can only display 10 lines of text at a time using the native inbuilt text display. Now, you can send images to them and you can obviously put text on that a little bit smaller. It's not as sharp as using the native font rendering in the actual real text display. So, I will always recommend sticking with using the real text display. It's the fastest way of getting the the text to update on the glasses as well. And we'll get more into what it's like to work with the images in these displays in a second. And of course, the screen is just only green. It can display something like 16 different levels of green. So, you can actually understand an image in these, all green obviously, but you do get this tonal effect going on. But of course, you are dealing with brightness of green over that real world. There is no idea of black and white here. And in fact, I find it much easier to invert an image when I'm displaying them. That seems to be the easiest way of making an image look more natural with this mode. Now, I'll give you as best I can simulation of what it looks like to view an image on screen through these as well. So, these are 60 Hz displays. So, that means it does change the text. It is an instant switch. The main issue of course is just actually getting the new data to the glasses over the Bluetooth. You can't for example play 60 frames a second images on these. There's not enough bandwidth in the Bluetooth. That takes a good few seconds to load a full image into these. If you're updating the text, that's more or less instant.

9:51 There's enough bandwidth for those tiny text changes. 10 lines of text so you can refresh the whole screen of text. That's instant. So, obviously if you're thinking about seeing the output of a cloud code session paging through text, that works really well. Pagination is something that's interesting with these glasses. You can send more than 10 lines of text to them and they have a native scroll. So, you can swipe on your touch surfaces and it will natively scroll.

10:13 For me, when I'm building software for these, I've completely bypassed that. I only ever send the 10 lines of text to the screen because I don't want to have anything to do with that native scroll. so, I use my macro pad to page up and page down. Interestingly, that scroll gesture you can tap into when you're developing. So, I actually use that scroll gesture to fire my page up and page down command. So, instead of it actually being allowed to scroll the text, it will just flick pages. But, they do have that in there. And of course, if you use that ring accessory, that will allow you to scroll within those views as well. And it is a very smooth scroll. So, they have the ring which reproduces the same gestures that the swipe controls on the glasses do.

10:49 So, tap, hold, and up and down swipe. I didn't bother with that ring because I knew I was going to lean into this idea of a custom macro pad to really get the most out of this. I think there is some utility in the idea of a ring. It's truly one-handed. It's always there. Again, it lets you be doing other things in the kitchen and switching between controlling without picking up and putting something down. I think it's just too expensive. I think they try to put health features in there. I think it's trying to do too much again from my perspective at least. I just wanted these to be a computer input device. So, the brightness of these things is fantastically bright. You can use these outside in full sun. You probably want to put the clip-on sunglasses or wear a hat just to to reduce the full sunlight effect on them. But, once you've got clip-on sunglasses, absolutely easy to see this text outdoors in full sunlight. And I've always been really interested in the idea of being able to work with computers whilst being outside, breathing fresh air, getting some natural sunlight. and these allow for that. And of course, being glasses that you're wearing on your face, you can use these extremely comfortably when you're lying down. And using a computer whilst lying down is actually quite hard thing to pull off in many ways.

11:50 The biggest, most important thing I want to get across with these, and this is what no other reviewer seems to talk about. They all seem to propagate the myth that you can do things on the screens in here whilst you're doing other things. Now, that's true in that obviously we know the glasses behave like normal glasses and get out of your way, and you can switch between them very easily. You can't do that at the same time. If you're reading, say, full 10 lines of text on the screen here. The impact of that in terms of your attention and your peripheral vision is huge. You can't comfortably walk around, maybe if you knew the ground was clear, you could just about do it whilst reading, but you you'd be looking from the screen to the real world and back again. So, when you're using these and you are switching between the screen and the real world, and that's what is so good about these, it makes that very easy. But, do not expect to be able to do two things at once. Don't expect to be able to see the world and your text and understand it at the same time.

12:42 One of the things that's becoming clearer to me as we move into this AI era is the role of hardware and software is just drastically changing. We're able to make our own software tooling now, faster and easier and more specific to our own requirements than ever before, and that's just redefining the expectation of software that comes with hardware. If thinking about things like iPhones, where they put so much effort into the mobile OS, I don't have any need for that App Store ecosystem on a mobile device now. I use all of my tools through the web browser, which is just my own web apps running on my desktop Mac, which is always on, accessed over Tailscale. The progressive web app idea is alive and well and stronger than ever, I think, and I think we're going to see more and more people less and less interested in the whole mobile operating system and the lock-in and the App Store, because you can just build your own apps that work exactly how you want, with your own workflows, and then just use smartphones and things to access them like that. And once you've done that, you can then just feed the data from to custom applications into things like smart glasses, which is essentially what I've done. I have all these apps, I have my email app, my to-do app, I have all of my tmux session management with cloud codes running inside those tmux sessions. I can access all of that on my phone in those custom apps, but I can also obviously then access the stuff that translates really well to text and and dictated text back into it in the smart glasses. And that's this power and ownership over the hardware layer here that we get as a result of being able to make our own software for these things.

14:07 But, of course, we see even realities themselves shipping these things with the headline apps that they bundle with them, and they're trying to make their own App Store now. If that helps them sell these things, then fantastic. I think all of those apps are fairly novelty-based things. For me, I have to see these things as a productivity tool to be able to justify the expense that they cost. These things are not cheap. I am really pleased that they are leaning into this and allowing the developers to build custom apps for these. They published the SDK. It's easy to get up and running. I think that is where the real merit in these things lies. Once you see these for what they are, you can display anything. You can use voice as input through dictation or actually as a command layer. And then, of course, you can build your own custom control pads, macro pads for controlling whatever you build on these. So, once you see them like that, and you think about them just as an input device for an app essentially that you run on a desktop computer somewhere that your phone connects to over Tailscale, then everything changes about the way you see these. I've kind of ended up building this mini operating system, have all of these different apps that I can jump into between my to-do system and my emails and my messages, which I use the Beeper API for, which lets me read and reply to messages from all of my channels, including WhatsApp and all of these things that are notoriously hard to do custom implementations with.

15:19 I built this grid tree system for navigating between these apps. So, I don't have to switch in and out of different apps with different endpoints. It's all just going to my Mac over Tailscale. And then, I have full control over everything, the whole pipeline. And that really does just solidify this idea that these are simply an input device for my computer, which is exactly what I wanted them for. But, of course, you do have to build your own custom interface here. This is not using the same concept as a normal operating system. There's no translatability between a mouse and a keyboard and working with these. You have to build this layer on top of what your desktop is already doing. This small text output, voice input, small command pad input approach, like a translation layer between everything that's running on your desktop and then how you interact with it through these smart glasses.

16:02 Now, there's one big caveat that I discovered when I was building this, that if you're using Bluetooth on another device with the phone and expecting that to still communicate to your phone whilst you're dictating with the mics live in the glasses to the phone, I found that my connected device would interfere with the audio stream from the glasses to the phone. So, for my macro pad which uses Bluetooth, I actually have that disconnect itself as soon as I put the mic live on the glasses. It's just a little flag that I set up. So, if you're building something that uses a custom Bluetooth accessory as a control input, you you need to think about that. I don't know whether you're always going to hit that same issue, whether it's specific to my phone or the macro pad or whatever. And obviously, the fact that these are Bluetooth connected to your phone means you do need your phone near whenever you're using these, which I'm perfectly fine with because of course we know that is why the glasses themselves last all day. They have no networking, they have no Wi-Fi. It's just Bluetooth to the phone and all the networking and Wi-Fi stuff happens on the phone.

16:57 So, in terms of actually developing software for these, it's dead simple. You're building the main application on a desktop running somewhere. Then the lightweight web view app that you run inside even realities app, that's the thing that talks to your endpoints and takes the data from that and then tells the glasses what to display on the screen. So, that's the basic concept and it is that simple. The SDK is easy to understand and access and of course Cloud Code just cake walks this stuff and they provide a simulator that you can run to test this out on your computer as well. So, you can actually see exactly what's going to the glasses in a simulator view and that's how I get these screen recordings where I can show you what I'm seeing in the glasses, which have been throughout this video. And of course, that SDK environment when you're working inside the web view exposes various things from the hardware like all of the gestures and GPS position, which it will feed to you of course from the phone status. There's nothing stopping you running another app on your phone to do other which is how I get my macro pad to work.

17:49 So, the macro pad is essentially using a Bluetooth GATT system which is not a normal HID human interface device. So, the reason for that is that it actually works when the phone is locked. And this is just brilliant. So, I just run my own custom Android app on here. And of course, that then uses Tailscale to send the commands from the macro pad back to my desktop and that's what controls the output back to the glasses. And even with all of those steps in the round trip, it's more or less instant. If I hit a command on the macro pad, I see a change in the glasses instantly. Even though the macro pad is talking over Bluetooth to my phone's custom Android app that's pinging to my desktop over Tailscale that does something in the desktop app that is then read by the web view inside the Even Realities app which then pushes the text back to the glasses. Not really a perceivable delay, certainly nothing to worry about. Absolutely fascinating way of thinking about building software for these I think which is just overlooked in their own marketing and you may not really realize there are all of these ways you can do really quite exciting stuff with these as a developer.

18:50 So I think in terms of actually if you're weighing up buying these, I think the only real justification at least from my perspective is to use these as a productivity tool where I'm interacting with my real daily working routines. I'm not sure I can really recommend these glasses for anyone who isn't a developer prepared to put the effort in and build their own custom interface for these and then only really using them if you're working frequently with AI. Of course, more people are doing that because I don't think there's any way you can just expect these to work off the shelf in a really meaningfully productive way. They do have their terminal mode which will get you into a command line. You have to pipe it through their app on your desktop first. It's not really a native setup for me. I have real tmux sessions running on my Mac, each one of those with a real Claude Code session. I can use that directly on my Mac in the way that I would normally with that and then I can just put the glasses on and jump straight back into the real sessions. So in terms of that Claude Code setup, the trick there is to use the Claude Code transcript as the main source of information that you allow to display on the glasses and page through.

19:49 And then it's a hybrid of scraping the Claude Code TUI interface out of your tmux session to work out the state of your Claude Code session. Because this is just a real Claude Code session on the Mac, you are using your normal Claude subscription. So you don't have to use their API or anything like that. So Even Realities have been pretty good for updates on this. They I've seen a lot of updates come through to the glasses. Stability has improved massively. I have no stability issues ongoing now. Images used to have a bug that they just quite often wouldn't display. That's gone. Images load every single time now. Claude Code is very good at understanding the updates to their SDK when they publish them so you can keep your stack up-to-date.

20:23 And of course, the full stack that I've built here is available to master level members of this channel. So, your support is hugely appreciated by all means use my software as a good starting point for your own work and extend and build on that. And there's lots of solutions to weird problems that I encountered while I was setting this up in there. And it's all all fully understandable and documented throughout that. That's available through GitHub. So, if you become a member on YouTube, check my post tab, you'll have a members-only post on there with a link to my Discord, which will automatically get your membership status from YouTube. And then you can connect your GitHub account to that. And then you can have access to my GitHub repositories, which contain all of the up-to-date versions of these scripts.

20:59 So, this whole concept really comes back to this idea that we just want hardware now. We don't need hardware connected to entire App Store ecosystems with all the lock-in. There is so much we can do on our own now in terms of the software. It really becomes about hardware. And this is what I've been exploring with buying Macs. The 2017 MacBook, such a beautiful piece of hardware, the smallest, lightest MacBook they've ever made. And to all intents and purposes, it's still more than enough for me. I can connect to my Mac mini, which is where the real stuff happens, through the terminal on there. And then I can use the web browser on there to access any of my kind of custom apps. And that's all I need from a laptop now. I only have this requirement for hardware to do the thing. And then I build the software stack myself. And I think more and more developer mindset people are going to be seeing hardware like this. And I think it might even get to the point when AI makes this stuff so accessible that more and more non-developer types are going to even start to look at hardware in this way as well, as they realize they want to get ownership back over their stuff. Like my photo library app on my Mac upstairs, I can still access that from any of my devices. Before I had to pay a huge iCloud subscription to make the Apple photo library do that for me.

22:03 I just think we're at this stage now where we just want hardware. Just ship us the damn hardware. Don't sort of lock us into these App Store ecosystems as well. And certainly don't try and charge us extra for all of those things. If you're new to this channel, I like doing these things. I like doing these experiments where I'm kind of testing the defaults, testing what we're normally expected to do in these different day-to-day work, productivity, lifestyle workflows. And then how far can we go in improving them or doing things a little bit differently. There's tons on this channel now. I've been doing it for 6 years. Have a good look around and thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video.