Problem
Envision made two bets early: AI and smart glasses. By 2024 both had come true at once. AI had become genuinely intelligent, and smart glasses had finally become affordable, with mainstream players entering the market years after Google Glass Enterprise Edition sunsetted in 2022.
That changed what our users should have to buy. The future is not a special smart glass for the blind. It is picking up whatever glasses everyone else buys, the way you pick a smartphone, and running the assistant of your choice on them. Our job was to make Ally that assistant.
Process
The breakthrough that made this possible was display-less glasses. Meta and Ray-Ban proved that once you drop the display, years of shrinking cameras, speakers and processors finally fit into a normal-looking frame at a normal-feeling price. And a display is the one component our users never needed anyway. A wave followed: Google with Samsung, Xiaomi, Snap, and startups like Mentra and Even Realities. The moment we had been waiting for since 2018 had arrived.
Being early meant most of these glasses had no developer platform yet. We did a lot of outreach, and struck a partnership with Solos, a Hong Kong company that has been building smart glasses for years. Their camera glasses had exactly what we needed, camera, speakers, processing, no display, and together we co-developed the sync between the Ally app and the glasses.
The engineering underneath is harder than it looks. Glasses at this price cannot run AI themselves; they stream images to your phone over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, and the phone and cloud do the thinking. Keeping that loop fast and reliable, with all its failure points between glasses, phone and network, is where most of our effort went.
Solution
Ally Solos Glasses deliver the full Ally assistant heads-up and hands-free: reading books, signs, menus and mail, describing surroundings, answering questions, natural conversation with memory. Sync once and every bit of a user’s Ally personalization, voice, verbosity, personality, comes along.
At under $500, they cost a quarter of what the previous generation of assistive glasses did. Affordable enough to buy out of pocket, no reimbursement bureaucracy required, with payment plans for those who need them.
Unveiled 14 August 2025; shipping from October 2025.
Impact
The pre-order campaign passed a thousand pairs within the first weeks, and over 1,500 pairs have sold in total. Sales are currently paused by choice: Solos is readying the second generation of their hardware, and the next Ally Glasses will launch on it.
The bigger outcome is invisible: the engineering that made Ally device-agnostic. The work we did for Solos is the foundation for running on any wearable with a developer platform, whichever glasses our users end up choosing. Any smart glass can become an Ally glass.