Trust me: you need a pair of smart glasses for your next vacay. I know what you’re thinking, but smart glasses are so useful for tourists and much more than a tacky tech fad. There’s the benefit of help with translation, filming hands-free (great if you’re quad biking or on the back of a camel) for that unique travel POV, and techwear in general gets you away from constantly looking at your phone.
In my opinion, smart glasses are one of the most underrated travel hacks for creatives, but there are actually two main kinds of smart glasses we should differentiate between to avoid confusion.
Gaming AR/XR display glasses are used to give you a larger blackout second screen for content consumption. Smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta series, on the other hand, allow you to film your surroundings hands-free, which I’ve found can be very useful when attending press conferences and trade shows.
I’ve been testing the RayNeo Air 3s Pro for gaming sessions on longer flights (like the 17-hour flight to Japan I have in a few weeks), and it allows me to stream content and game on a larger screen, without having to hunch over my aeroplane tray table and hurt my neck looking at my Switch 2 display. For content creation, the Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer (Gen 2) specs helped me get some great footage while attending the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona back in February.
Those are the only 2 experiences I have with using smart glasses at the time of writing, so you’ll have to try out some of my picks below and be the judge for yourself.
