What’s up with the smart AI glasses Google just showed at I/O?

Google just showed off a rather nifty AI feature dubbed Project Astra at its I/O developer conference. This feature combines your camera viewfinder with a responsive chatbot. However, the company’s demo also showed this AI feature running on a pair of smart glasses, and that certainly raised our eyebrows.

The demo showed a woman putting on a pair of smart glasses running Project Astra. The chatbot quickly responded to queries about what the user saw, providing assistance with a technical diagram and more.

However, we’re curious about the actual smart glasses used during this demo, which Google called a “prototype glasses device” in a YouTube video description. Google made a huge splash in the early 2010s with Google Glass, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re looking at a Google Glass 2 prototype, though.

One big reason why this isn’t likely new Google smart glasses is that the company reportedly canceled a next-gen augmented reality (AR) glasses project last year. It apparently decided to switch to AR software development and a so-called “micro-XR” platform for AR glasses.

It, therefore, seems like a safer bet that the company is working on software for AR glasses in general. And we wouldn’t be surprised if the smart glasses seen in this demo are actually running a very early version of Google’s micro-XR platform.