Making spectacles

As smart glasses make a comeback, Viture One and Nreal Air allow us to look at games in a different way

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FACE OFF

For all their similarities, Viture One and Nreal Air aren't quite identical. The Viture pair have a touch more style about them (though in truth, neither looks quite like something you could convincingly wear to the beach) and a magnetic connector, rather than Nreal's USB-C port, making it easier to connect or disconnect once the glasses are on your face. Perhaps the biggest difference, though, is how they handle unwanted light: One's electrochromic film can be dimmed at the push of a button, while Air has a plastic 'light shield' that you can snap onto their front, leaving you looking a little like you're recovering from eye surgery.

Ten years have passed since Google co-founder Sergey Brin took to the stage during the keynote of the company's I/O event to give the world its first real demo of Google Glass. It was a defining moment in the public understanding of smart glasses, albeit perhaps not in the way Brin might have hoped, as the tech became something of a byword for misconceived tech projects. But in this year's keynote - just in time for the decaversary - Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced a similar demo of the company's next smart glass project. "Subtitles for the world", was the description that stuck, providing live captioning of speech for the benefit of the deaf or hard of hearing, or for people speaking different languages. The focus, then, was on something Glass infamously lacked: a clear reason to exist.