Magic Leap and Google just showcased another pair of Android XR smart glasses – with Gemini on board (www.techradar.com)

Google and Magic Leap publicly demonstrated a prototype pair of Android XR smart glasses at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, marking the first visible hardware from their 2024 partnership. The glasses combine Magic Leap’s waveguides and optics with Google partner Raxium’s microLED light engine to project visuals into the user’s field of view, and run Android XR software. They include cameras, microphones and speakers and showcased Gemini-powered multimodal interactions — for example, identifying rugs in view and answering questions about them — illustrating a familiar smart-eyewear form factor akin to Ray-Ban Meta and Google’s Project Astra prototypes. No launch date was announced and the device remains at the prototype stage. For the AI/ML community this matters because it’s another major push toward mainstream multimodal, wearable compute: a platform where vision, audio and large multimodal models (like Gemini) converge in real time. Technically, the pairing of microLED optics and waveguides hints at higher-brightness, compact displays suitable for consumer eyewear, while integrated sensors enable real‑world visual question answering and context-aware assistance. That raises practical research and engineering priorities — efficient on-device inference or low-latency edge/cloud pipelines, privacy-preserving sensing, power and thermals, and new datasets/benchmarks for wearable multimodal perception and HCI.