I first slipped on Halliday’s original smart glasses at CES 2025. I was not a fan. The glasses had a tiny, movable display window embedded into the frame that was incredibly finicky to see, and my 30-minute demo left me with achy eyeballs. It was an interesting concept with terrible execution, especially compared to the several other smart glasses on the show floor. So I was skeptical when a few weeks ago, Halliday reached out to say its second attempt at smart glasses was much better.
Well, having tried the Halliday Gen 2, I’m happy to report these are better glasses. That secret display window is gone, replaced by more traditional but discreet waveguides. They’re not like the Meta Display’s nigh-invisible screens. You can still spot the reflection if angled just right, but they’re considerably easier to see. And inside of a single-lens display, the Gen 2 has one for each eye, giving you a much larger screen to look at. Spec-wise, the Gen 2’s displays are monochrome green, with a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits and 600 by 300 pixel resolution per eye.
On my face, the Gen 2 has a nondescript design but is very lightweight compared to other display glasses I’ve tried. The display was also easily visible inside a dark bar, though I didn’t get a chance to see how it’d fare in direct sunlight. The four-mic array was able to pick up commands despite the ambient noise, and Halliday told me that it gets about 12 hours of typical use. That’s partly because these aren’t camera glasses. The exclusion of the camera was a deliberate choice, both for privacy and to extend battery life. That’s because these are more so meant to be a tool for work meetings.
With the Gen 2, Halliday is launching a feature called Meeting Flow. It’s meant to help you follow along in a conversation, using AI to surface context or facts without needing to look at your laptop or phone. I’ve seen this in other smart glasses to varying degrees of success. (Mostly non-success.) More interesting are the so-called Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check features. The idea is to provide real-time updates about what decisions have been made in a meeting, what items need following up on, and a visualization of a meeting’s overall conversation flow. For example, Thread Tracker might show that a team meeting started off talking about budget allocations, before moving on to potential new hires and timelines for those hires. Decision Confirmation might show that the meeting concluded that all new hires should be finished by a specific date. Lastly, Commitment Check verifies if action items have been assigned (and to whom) with a clear deadline. The glasses will also provide post-meeting transcripts and summaries.
I saw a brief glimpse of what this could look like at my demo, albeit a product interview is less conducive to these kinds of features than a typical planning meeting. That said, the glasses also support more general-use AI features like captioning, real-time translations for over 45 languages, the ability to take phone calls, and teleprompters/notecards for public speakers. Users can also make use of the Halliday AI assistant for voice control.
Overall, this is a much more tightly focused vision for a pair of smart glasses than Halliday’s original glasses. That said, we’ll have to see if the AI features are all that useful. So far, I’ve had little success with AI wearables successfully intuiting what I actually need surfaced in a conversation, or deriving the correct conclusions for to-do items. And at $599, the Gen 2 comes with a pretty steep price tag for the average person. That’s not including any extra costs for prescription lenses. (Halliday claims it’ll be able to handle my prescription, which is -10 in one eye and -8.75 in the other with monster astigmatism. We shall see!)
The Halliday Gen 2 are available for preorder starting today with a $10 deposit and a subsequent $100 discount on the final price. The glasses are expected to ship in September.
