Rokid is hardly the new kid on the smart glasses block. They have been putting screens in front of people’s eyes since long before Ray-Ban and Meta teamed up. But with the Rokid Glasses, the veteran AR maker is stepping into a very different arena.
The question Rokid asks is: can your AI assistant become your glasses?
Rokid has spent years trying to augment what we see.
Meta changed the game by demonstrating that smart glasses didn’t necessarily need a display at all.
Rokid’s response is more ambitious: keep the display, add AI, and somehow make all that technology disappear into something you’d actually wear.
Rokid Glasses Design and First Impressions
The Rokid Glasses are, well, glasses. They remind me a lot of the thick black-rimmed ones that my dad used to wear when he first started his teaching career, trying to look far older than the few years separating him from the students he was teaching.
And that’s pretty much what you get here: chunky black frames with arms thick enough to conceal the electronics, controls and battery.
If you don’t look too closely, they could almost pass for normal glasses.
On the left side though is a small camera lens. Not obnoxiously obvious, and not hidden. It’s there. On the opposite side is a spot for an indicator light – a notification for when you are recording.
If you catch the lenses in the right light, though, you can see the elements responsible for projecting the augmented display into your field of view.
At the base of the right arm is a four-pin charging port with a proprietary connector. One thing I do like is that the charging cable itself terminates in a female USB-C port, so I can plug in whatever length USB-C cable I happen to have on hand.
Rokid offers prescription inserts for the Rokid Glasses, addressing one of the obvious concerns for those of us without perfect eyesight. As a lifelong glasses wearer, I appreciate that the design potentially gives the Rokid Glasses a longer useful life, particularly when something as fundamental as your eyesight can change over time. Rather than replacing the glasses themselves, the individual optical inserts magnetically latch onto the frame, much like a pair of snap-on sunglasses.
Setting Up the Rokid Glasses
You’ll need the Rokid app, called Hi Rokid. Funny, because for ages I was looking for the app under R, but nope. Gotcha!
There are a few screens to get through to set up your Glasses, but nothing too strenuous. There are of course, permissions to be granted, but those are to be expected. You do have to create an account and give a date of birth as part of the onboarding process.
And have I mentioned YodaOS? As a Star Wars geek, this nerds me out far more than it probably should.
Glasses, Rokid you must!
In case you are wondering, YodaOS-Sprite is Rokid’s operating system designed specifically for smart glasses. It’s the software underneath the experience, bringing together the hardware, display, apps and interactions while being optimised for the rather difficult balancing act between performance, features and battery life.
I suppose they’ll get done in for copyrights if they had called it YodaOS-Padawan.
Testing the Rokid Glasses in Shanghai
I could have reviewed the Rokid Glasses at home, and be done many weeks ago.
But then I scored an invitation to China, and what better way to test something like these than with a live-fire exercise in a foreign country?
To be fair, I can kind of read traditional Chinese. It takes me a little time in the right environment to settle into the groove. China, though, uses simplified Chinese, which I’ve never learned. There is method to the madness, though, and I could work some things out.
Even then, I managed to try calling for a car wash instead of a driver on the WeChat Didi app. My bad.
My habit when I land in a new city is to spend at least the first half day just walking. Get lost. Wander around. Get a feel for the city. I had grand plans for the Rokid to help me navigate the language barrier.
But plans rarely survive the initial stages of implementation, and let’s just say, free time was limited. Despite the rumours that yours truly is a robot, sometimes even I need to recharge.
After a massive banquet dinner on the second night, I thought I would at least pretend to do the right thing and go for a walk. Not before a whisky in the hotel bar with the PR reps (Bunnahabhain and Bruichladdich for the record), because, priorities.
For what it’s worth, the video footage of my walk was actually pretty decent. Video tops out at 3K and, as you can see, it’s quite serviceable. One thing you do have to keep in mind when you are using the Rokid Glasses to film, is to slow down your movements.
If you are walking and looking around as you naturally would, the footage gets pretty dizzying. This means you have to be more conscious of your movements and your tempo. I imagine content creators who work predominantly with video would do this almost as second nature.
Not me, though. As David Attenborough might narrate: Here we find Kevin, far from his native habitat of still photography. Forced into the unfamiliar world of moving pictures, he must learn to control even the most basic movements of his head.
Where the Rokid Glasses really shined for me, though, was at FamilyMart, the Asian convenience store chain that’s a bit like 7-Eleven. I was tasked with nabbing local snacks to take back to Australia, as well as stocking the back of the coach that took us everywhere.
Faced with a smorgasbord of chips on the shelf, I just had to say, “Hi Rokid, translate this for me.” The Glasses take a photo of whatever I’m looking at, then pop the translation up on the augmented display right in front of me.
Easy as pie, and suddenly I could work out all the funky flavours, like kimchi and magic mushroom.
This is precisely the kind of situation where I hoped the Rokid Glasses would reduce friction on the trip. No grand gestures, no futuristic use case manufactured for a review. Just helping me work out which are the most interesting snacks to grab.
Sure, I could have pulled out my phone and achieved much the same thing. But that’s kind of the point – I didn’t have to. I looked at something, asked what it said and got my answer without taking my eyes off the shelf.
Besides, I had busted my digitiser in Suzhou and the phantom touches were doing my head in.
It was a layer of friction removed so that the most ordinary task remained ordinary.
At night and indoors, I found the display more than bright enough. But outside during Shanghai’s bright, sunny summer days, it struggled. At times I had to rely on the verbal feedback just to know whether I’d started recording.
Privacy and Recording Safeguards
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you will have heard that camera-equipped smart glasses are brewing up a storm around privacy. I’m not going to disappear down that particular rabbit hole here – this is a review of the Rokid Glasses, not a treatise on whether camera-equipped eyewear should exist.
But I did accidentally discover that Rokid has put some safeguards in place.
Like other smart glasses capable of recording what you’re seeing, the Rokid Glasses have a white status light to let people around you know they’re recording.
I discovered this when I was adjusting the frame on my face and the Glasses lightly scolded me for blocking the status light.
This goes beyond just an admonishment. If you persist in blocking the indicator light, the recording will be terminated after five seconds. That said, it doesn’t delete the footage captured up to that point, and you can very clearly hear the warning on the recording.
And if you block the indicator light before commencing a recording? It simply refuses to start.
It’s not going to settle the wider debate around cameras on people’s faces, but I do appreciate that Rokid hasn’t made the recording indicator something you can simply defeat with a strategically placed piece of tape.
Rokid Glasses in Daily Use
I have never been one for thick rimmed glasses, my last few pairs have all been barely there rims or half frame. The Rokid Glasses are quite a departure for me in style.
The main thing I need to point out is, with frames you can get at the shops, they can adjust it for you. Bend the ear hooks a bit more, adjust the nose pads. Bow the arms a little. Get them fitted just right for your face.
There is little of that for the Rokid Glasses. There is a lot of tech in the arms so trying to bend those is verboten. The nose pads though, are adjustable, carefully. So if you have an Asian nose bridge like me (read: practically non-existent), the adjustable pads are particularly welcome.
Weight-wise they are 49 grams, which in contrast to my minimalist titanium frame came in at just 18.8g. Bearing in mind that I also use high index glass to reduce the weight and thickness of the corrective lens.
However when I handed them to a PR rep at the Thermomix event last week, who sported a similarly chunky pair of regular glasses, there was less of a difference in weight. That’s pretty impressive when you consider one pair was just helping her see, while the other was packing displays, cameras, speakers, batteries and a computer into the frame.
For me, wearing the Rokid feels …. a little awkward. I don’t mean it in the way of, hey I am wearing smart glasses that can do funky things way. I don’t think they feel particularly different to wearing normal glasses, but the bridge of my nose (yes if you squint you can see my tiny Asian nose bridge) can definitely feel the additional weight.
But a lot of it has to do with my ageing eyesight. Being in that transition phase from young to old, I can rarely tolerate wearing my own multifocal for close distance work, and with the Rokid Glasses I am barely able to see to type this review out. For distance vision though, they work really well. There is essentially no difference to my normal glasses when I gaze out into the distance.
By the same token, the augmented screen projects roughly a metre ahead of me in large green fonts which makes it very legible.
A key drawback I discovered is that the default brightness is perfectly fine indoors and at night, but struggles in broad daylight. You can bump up the brightness either through the Hi Rokid app or simply ask the assistant to do it for you. The latter is obviously much more convenient when the whole point is to keep your phone in your pocket.
I am happy to say that after wearing them for an extended period, the Rokid Glasses felt comfortable enough to leave on. Personally, they didn’t cause me much strain or discomfort.
Translation, Media and Other Features
One feature I was particularly keen to try was live speech translation, especially with a trip to China on the cards. Unfortunately, this is one area where the Rokid Glasses didn’t fare nearly as well as they did translating the written word.
Before the trip, I tested live translation with my partner’s parents, who are native Mandarin speakers. The results were wildly comical. A perfectly ordinary conversation about getting dinner ready and how much food we wanted somehow ended up being about Cortana and Michael.
We don’t have a Michael in this family.
I didn’t give up after one attempt, either. I tried it against some C-Dramas and the results were just as comically bad.
It was unreliable enough that I eventually gave up on it.
That’s quite a contrast to my experience translating written Chinese in Shanghai. Point the camera at a packet of chips, ask Rokid to translate it, and the result was useful. I could look at something I couldn’t read and have the answer appear in front of me without reaching for my phone.
Live conversation is a much tougher proposition. Rokid promotes real-time translation as one of the Glasses’ major features, with support for 89 languages, but based on my Mandarin testing, it’s not something I’d want to rely on when getting the meaning right actually matters.
There are really two very different translation experiences here. Translating the written word? That became one of my favourite uses for the Rokid Glasses in Shanghai.
Translating a live conversation? For now, I’d keep expectations firmly in check.
Media management was one of the easier functions to deal with. The Rokid Glasses maintain a Bluetooth connection with your phone, but for larger data transfers the Hi Rokid app connects directly to the Glasses over its own Wi-Fi network. From there, photos and videos can be imported into the app and made available in your phone’s gallery.
You can also put widgets onto the screen, so it is overlaying information such as the time, weather or even song lyrics.
Controls, Voice Assistant and Audio
Many of the functions of the Rokid Glasses are app controlled, however there are still some basic things you can do with your phone in your pocket.
You can press on the button to take a photo, or long press to start and stop a video recording. If you change your mind about the photo, swiping on the right arm will delete it. You have three seconds from when the image is taken to use that option.
Otherwise, you can trigger commands by saying, “Hi Rokid” and wait for the assistant to respond. Whilst it is not immediate, there was not much delay either.
Voice control isn’t limited to the clever AI stuff either. Mundane things like adjusting the display brightness or speaker volume can be handled by asking Rokid, which means one less reason to reach for your phone.
Sound-wise, speakers are located on top of each arm near your temple. If you are moving from a pair of earbuds to the speakers on the Rokid Glasses, the contrast in quality is immediately apparent.
Suffice to say, the Rokid Glasses are not aiming to deliver audiophile grade sound reproduction. However, for translation, navigation and the occasional instruction, the sound is a bit thin but perfectly functional.
Finding the control button is easy enough; it’s positioned near the front of the right arm. Unfortunately, that’s also exactly where I instinctively grab my glasses to take them off. As a result, I have quite the collection of accidental photos and videos.
Rokid Glasses Review: Final Verdict
The Rokid Glasses are far from perfect, but when they’re at their best, it’s because they get out of the way.
Hands-free capture of what you’re doing from your POV? Tick.
Translate the occasional snack packet? Tick.
A teleprompter for that important speech? Tick.
Live speech translation still needs work, the augmented display can struggle under a bright summer sun, and at 49 grams you’re not going to mistake these for my minimalist titanium frames.
But at the beginning of this review I asked whether your AI assistant can become your glasses. After taking the Rokid Glasses halfway around the world, my answer is: sometimes.
And perhaps that’s enough.
At their best, I wasn’t thinking about AI, augmented reality or the computer sitting on my face. I was standing in FamilyMart trying to work out what flavour chips I was looking at. I asked, Rokid answered, and I carried on shopping.
It was a layer of friction removed so that the most ordinary task remained ordinary.
That’s what ultimately makes the Rokid Glasses useful rather than indispensable. There’s plenty of room for the technology to mature, but there are already moments when you can see exactly why you might want your AI assistant sitting right there in front of your eyes.
Now can someone please make a Death Star trench-run HUD widget? If you’re going to call it YodaOS, I feel like that’s the least you can do.
These are available on their website for A$999 as a limited time bundle with the AI Glasses, Clip-on Sunglasses and Power Capsule.
DRN would like to thank Rokid for providing the review unit.
