How do you bounce back from making the worst smart glasses of 2025?
Hou admitted to making "many mistakes," adding that the first generation glasses were "far from what we expected." Many of the issues were obvious to
Hou admitted to making "many mistakes," adding that the first generation glasses were "far from what we expected." Many of the issues were obvious to outsiders from the start, like the DigiWindow display; a 3.6mm microLED module embedded in the frame. It was intended to "project" text into your peripheral vision, that you could just flick your eyes and look at when required. But if you've ever tried reading text hovering mere millimeters from your eye, you'll get why it was an unusable nightmare.
There's a reason every other smart glasses worth talking about uses waveguides that aim their outputs into your direct field of view. Hou said the DigiWindow was the "right choice" when the glasses were designed in 2024, due to the prisming effects, light leakage and battery drain associated with waveguides. I'm not sure I agree given the number of very good waveguide glasses that were already in the market by then. Now, however, the new model uses waveguides in both lenses, which gives users a bigger field of view and better readability.
With last year's glasses, Hou prioritized lightness, opting to use small, but low-quality components that wound up spoiling many other elements of the experience. Other mistakes involved inexperience, like the manufacturing issues that held back the release. "As a newcomer to the industry," said Hou, "we didn't speak [the manufacturer's] language and didn't know how to control the process." Consequently, Halliday has rebuilt its engineering team, complete with experienced supply chain managers "that can properly collaborate with our partners this time." Hou is aware the company didn't do enough testing and QA, either.
"Even though the software worked fine on a demo, when it goes into the hands of thousands of consumers [...] I would say we did not do enough testing." It wasn't just that the features were unreliable, either, but there were so many of them that the company had to spread its finite resources thin.
The BriefWire