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.

"USB cameras also aren't natively supported on iOS/Android. You need apps."

The attachable endoscope for my Ulefone Armor would disagree. It works with the stock Android camera app.

Lo and behold, you just need DRIVERS.