This month's startup spotlight: Even Realities brings productivity-first smart glasses to Brisbane

A pair of smart glasses that look like normal prescription frames but project digital notes directly onto the lens are arriving in Brisbane this month, and the startup behind them is betting that what they leave out, a camera, matters more than what they include.

Even Realities, the Berlin-based company that raised $8.1 million in seed funding last year, began shipping its G1 smart glasses to Australian customers on July 1. The devices, priced at $949 full retail or $599 with a qualifying prescription, lack the outward-facing cameras found on competitors like Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. Instead, they rely on a monochrome micro-LED projector to overlay calendar alerts, turn-by-turn directions and text transcripts into the wearer's peripheral vision.

Why Brisbane is a test bed for camera-free wearables

The product arrives as Brisbane's tech sector grapples with growing privacy fatigue. At the Fortitude Valley co-working space The Capital, where multiple tenants have posted signs banning smart glasses with cameras since late last year, Even Realities' no-camera pitch has drawn interest from developers and architects who want heads-up displays without alarming colleagues.

The company has been demonstrating the G1 at two local venues: the River City Labs incubator on Brisbane Street and the Queensland University of Technology's Cube facility in the Gardens Point campus. QUT's research group on human-computer interaction has been testing the glasses for how they affect reading comprehension in noisy environments, such as the Café 63 on George Street during peak lunch hours.

According to a July 2024 survey by the Brisbane-based think tank Digital Rights Watch, 63 percent of Queenslanders said they would feel uncomfortable if a stranger wore smart glasses with a visible camera in a public place. Even Realities co-founder and product lead Adi Bhoopathy told TechCrunch in a June interview that the company deliberately excluded the camera to "build a product that doesn't creep people out."

Data and local pricing reality

The G1's on-device processing means it can display up to six hours of continuous use for navigation tasks, the company claims, with a standby time of three days. Brisbane buyers who order through the startup's website face an estimated shipping cost of $35 and a delivery window of 12 to 18 business days, according to the checkout page viewed on July 10.

The $949 full retail price puts the G1 between the $499 Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and the $1,999 Xreal Air 2 Ultra augmented-reality headset sold at JB Hi-Fi's Queen Street Mall store. A spokesperson for JB Hi-Fi confirmed the chain does not yet stock the Even Realities glasses, but said it is "watching the category closely."

A team of four postgraduate students at the University of Queensland's St Lucia campus has been running a small trial since June 15, using the G1 to display lecture captions in real time. The trial, funded by a $15,000 grant from the Queensland government's Advance Queensland program, is expected to publish preliminary results in August.

For now, anyone in Brisbane who wants to try the glasses before buying can book a 30-minute demo session at The Capital in Fortitude Valley on July 20 or July 27. Even Realities has not announced a permanent retail presence in Australia, but the company said in a July 2 email to local pre-order customers that it is "evaluating pop-up locations in Sydney and Brisbane" for later this year.

The bet is that a head-up display without a recording lens can slip into Brisbane's cafes and co-working spaces without triggering the friction that camera-equipped wearables have created. Whether that bet pays off will depend on whether workers in the city's CBD and the Valley actually look up, at the digital text floating in front of their eyes, more than they look down at their phones.