How Smart Glasses Could Transform Driving Safety

The smart glasses market stands at an inflection point. Following Meta's successful Ray-Ban collaboration that proved consumer appetite for wearable tech, industry giants including Meta, Snap, Google, and Apple continue significant investment in AR glasses prototypes and developer editions. This momentum has triggered a wave of innovation, with hundreds of Chinese companies, from established tech brands to OEMs and chip manufacturers, now actively developing smart glasses solutions.

The evolution of smart glasses mirrors the smartphone's transformative journey. Just as mobile phones evolved from simple communication devices into powerful ecosystems that revolutionised how we live and work, smart glasses are positioned for a similar trajectory. As these products mature and integrate more deeply with systems in our homes, workplaces, and vehicles, they'll do more than display information, they'll reveal hidden patterns that help us understand our world more profoundly and take meaningful action.

Matthew Cockerill and Carsten Eriksen bring decades of experience helping global brands transform advanced technologies into compelling use cases and everyday products. This background gives them unique insights into this rapidly evolving product category and its untapped potential.

Moving beyond the obvious applications of navigation prompts and smartphone notifications, Matthew and Carsten have explored use cases that demonstrate the true transformative potential of smart glasses. Their automotive integration concept serves as an example of how these devices could create entirely new value when thoughtfully integrated with existing systems.

Beyond Smartphone Extensions

The automotive context provides an ideal proving ground to explore this because it combines high-value safety outcomes with existing sensor infrastructure, creating immediate practical applications while demonstrating how smart glasses can move beyond passive information display to become active perception enhancers in complex environments.

Matthew and Carsten have explored what happens when AI reveals the hidden patterns of the world while driving with smart AR glasses. Their concept augments our view to enhance visibility in difficult driving conditions and anticipate the actions of other road users.

Their smart glasses solution would tap into vehicle systems, leveraging existing sensing capabilities and combining them with edge-AI processing to generate augmented reality overlays that align perfectly with the driver's field of view.

The Current Market

First-generation offerings from Meta and Ray-Ban have introduced glasses with integrated cameras and speakers for hands-free video capture and AI assistant interactions. These glasses showcase AI capabilities by listening to our questions while understanding the world we see. For example, Meta's glasses can tell the wearer more about a house they're looking at in San Francisco.

While Meta has initially focused on enhancing existing glasses with digital capabilities, both them and Google are developing the next step, glasses with integrated displays.

Google's Android XR, an AI-powered operating system specifically designed for headsets and glasses, is nearing public release. With Google's stated vision is to "bring together digital information and the real world to help you watch, work, and explore," creating a seamless blend between digital and physical realities. And the company recently showcased their advanced AR Glasses prototype at the TED 2025 conference, demonstrating the capability to project contextual information directly into the user's field of view through sophisticated display technology.

However, even these promising developments represent only the early generation of smart glasses technology. With companies like Apple rumoured to be developing their own AR glasses, the market is poised for rapid expansion. Yet all current offerings primarily function as smartphone companions, essentially overlaying digital information onto our physical environment without deeper integration with surrounding systems.

How It Works

Existing driver assist systems in advanced cars today—with adaptive cruise control, lane control, emergency braking, and park assist—are powered by cameras and LiDAR sensors to detect objects and estimate distances. This information is often shown to the driver with explicit warnings or ongoing street visualisations on the dashboard, as in Tesla vehicles.

The proposed system utilises both inward-facing sensors (monitoring brakes, gears, steering, and acceleration) and outward-facing sensors (radar, LiDAR, and cameras) to understand the world around the car, the driver's behaviour, and that of surrounding vehicles.

In this concept, this information also helps understand what the car and driver are seeing. In real-time, it calculates what would be helpful to the driver, projecting graphic elements that enhance the driver's view of the road ahead to augment their natural perception of the surrounding environment.