MentraOS – open-source Smart glasses OS

Here's the deal, you don't need any of this.

I have Rayban Metas and the hardware is great...but the software borders on being unhelpful. If they merely served a dumb camera and bluetooth headset to my phone they'd be an unbelievably good product.

Meta won't do this because they want to capture _everything_ going on, but I don't want to chat with Meta's AI, it is very bad, I want to chat with Gemini or ChatGPT and I can do so with their glasses but I must initiate that on my phone (Meta won't give you wakewords for OpenAI/Google of course).

So my suggestion here would be don't? There is no need for an app store or anything like that, just the thinest software layer you need to make the sunglass hardware work as a dumb bluetooth headset and remote camera for the user's phone.

That sounds nice but there's problems in reality.

How do the glasses serve as a "dumb camera to your phone"? What protocol do they use to do this? It doesn't exist. It's something that must be solved at the OS layer.

What if you want to use multiple apps? Are you going to spend 2 minutes each time disconnecting Bluetooth from one phone app, connecting to another, and then using it? No, you need to runtime that lets multiple apps access the sensors as needed.

Do you want to make an app that accesses the microphone? If you want to have translation app running at the same time that you're taking notes, then again you need some way to allow multiple apps to run at once.

MentraOS solves those problems.

> How do the glasses serve as a "dumb camera to your phone"? What protocol do they use to do this? It doesn't exist. It's something that must be solved at the OS layer.

USB webcams have been a thing for years ;)

I have a pair of Xreal glasses and, while they don’t have a camera, they do have the other components. They are entirely dumb. You plug the USB cable into your phone/laptop/portable gaming device and that’s literally it.

The cable runs discreetly from the back of the ear and has the additional benefit that you don’t need a heavy battery built into the frame of the glasses.

So you definitely can have a XR glasses that are “dumb”.

XREAL is DisplayPort Alt Mode + USB for gyros. It's also wired only. DP needs 10-40Gbps of bandwidth, doesn't work wireless.

USB cameras also aren't natively supported on iOS/Android. You need apps. With apps comes lock-in opportunities which are never not tapped.

So "just use USB" doesn't make technical sense at all.

> XREAL is DisplayPort Alt Mode + USB for gyros. It's also wired only.

I know what Xreal uses. As I said, I have a pair

> DP needs 10-40Gbps of bandwidth, doesn't work wireless.

And as I also said, having a cable is a feature, not a problem.

VR headsets are heavy and uncomfortable. USB powered XR glasses are not. And the reason for that is because you don’t need to make those XR glasses as literal portable computers with heavy batteries.

You might relish the idea of an ugly monstrosity that weighs as much as a laptop strapped to your head. Myself, I’d much rather have something that look and feel like sunglasses. If that means I need a discreet UsB cable behind my ear, then thats a small price to pay because they’d still look less stupid than wearing anything bulkier out in public.

> USB cameras also aren't natively supported on iOS/Android. You need apps. With apps comes lock-in opportunities which are never not tapped.

That’s not a limitation for all platforms though. And you’d have that problem on Android whatever solution you opted for. So it’s a moot point.

> So "just use USB" doesn't make technical sense at all.

It does and plenty of people, myself included, owning a pair of Xreal glasses are proof of that.

The problem here is not USB, it’s that you have very specific differing requirements and thus are dismissing the practical value myself and others have shared.

> VR headsets are heavy and uncomfortable. USB powered XR glasses are not. And the reason for that is because you don’t need to make those XR glasses as literal portable computers with heavy batteries.

no it's lenses and chassis. Lenses work precisely because of their density difference against air, so the better they are, the heavier they are. Chassis weigh a lot because they use impact resistant ABS and don't make them in forged Al-Li or Ti or molded Mg, which they should consider for hilarity, but then the product will cost like a bad joke. The mobile computer part weighs nothing, they're like somewhat soggy potato crisps. Those 0.8mm PCBs, boy they feel like cardstocks. Batteries weigh a bit, but they're also usually lipo pouches, like 0.5kg/L. You're not putting dozen 18650 into a VR headset.

Especially VR lenses are heavy and bulky because they need short focal lenses with massive pupils for max FOV and max transmittance. The panels tend to be way bigger than that for smart glasses thanks to Palmer Luckey which he deserves credit for. Smart glasses tend to use way smaller panels and prisms with fractions of FOVs relative to VR, like 1/6th? 1/12th? They carry some amount of weight but not nearly as much, especially if it's waveguide or holographic or working as pure fresnels.

I'm not going into the second half of this response. I am sorry but I don't think it's worth anyone's time if I explained why DP Alt don't count as USB and all that stuffs.

You’re arguing a lot but ignoring what other people are saying. It’s pretty clear from your other comments that you have distain for “software jockies”, but that doesn’t mean that we are idiots who don’t understand how hardware works.

Case in point: even if you took the lenses out, they’d still weigh more than a pare of sunglasses. You even admitted that yourself, but then you quickly brushed over that point.

So does it really matter that lenses are also heavy when we are talking specifically about the battery?

I also happen to know a thing or two about mobile computing hardware and there’s a bunch of stuff you’ve also neglected to mention that would add weight. But ultimately the battery alone is a compelling enough argument.

Let’s also remember that I wasn’t just talking about weight but bulk too. Even if you could get the weight down so it’s comparable to a pare of glasses (you couldn’t, but let’s assume for the moment that you do manage to break the laws of physics), it’s still going to be bulkier than a pair of glasses.

So even if you were right that the lenses were the only thing that matter about weight (which you’re not), it’s still just a moot point.

> I'm not going into the second half of this response. I am sorry but I don't think it's worth anyone's time if I explained why DP Alt don't count as USB and all that stuffs.

I’m not an idiot. I’m well aware that Xreal are using DP, and I’ve already pointed out before.

My point is all I need to do as an end user is plug in a USB-C cable and everything “just works”. The underlying protocol is largely irrelevant. It’s like saying “you’re not using wireless, you’re using 802.11ac…” literally zero consumers give a shit because it’s completely irrelevant to the UX of the device.