Eyes on with Vuzix Ultralite: affordable (and amazing!) AR glasses for everyone

 “Nobody wants to look like the guy who just stepped off the Starship Enterprise,” Paul Travers, the president of AR eyewear maker Vuzix tells me. 

He’s being polite here, so I’ll say what he won’t: It’s hard to wear current VR and AR headsets for more than an hour. They’re heavy! Microsoft’s Hololens is really neat, but at a pound and a half, it’s a lot of headgear to wear around. And Magic Leap is cool, sure, but they look odd when you’re wearing them.

Vuzix has the answer. At CES 2023, the company unveiled new Ultralite AR glasses, ordinary-looking plastic frames with a tiny projector tucked in one stem and a tiny battery and Bluetooth radio in the other. Combine that with Vuzix’s waveguides – a layer in the glasses that bends the projector’s light into your line of sight – and you’ve got ordinary-looking glasses that do the extraordinary.

I put on the Vuzix Ultralite, and saw in the corner of the right lens a line of green text, the sort you’d see on old mainframe computers in the movie War Games. It was sharp, perfectly readable, and bright as day. It was a real-time transcription of what another Vuzix staffer was saying; the device is equally adept at displaying directions, with arrows to indicate where you should travel, workout status, text messages, and so on.