Apple eyes new frontiers: smart glasses, fitness ring & more

Within the wearable space, there are reports that Apple is currently examining new designs for its products. According to Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, some of the possible concepts Apple is studying include smart glasses, integrating cameras into AirPods, and developing a smart ring

Concepts: Apple smart glasses and camera-embedded AirPods

The rumored smart glasses are likely to mimic Amazon Echo Frames and Meta Ray-Bans with intelligent sound features and AI functions. These represent an interim step before more ambitious augmented reality glasses could take over. The smart glasses being more accessible than Apple’s Vision Pro is a profitable route for the company.

One of the more interesting projects described in the Newsletter is the reimagined AirPods. The new design embeds low-resolution camera sensors inside the earbuds. This project began last year and aims to make AI and health seamlessly fit into people’s lives using multimodal voice-and-image AI systems. Such a system can recognize objects for the user in their field of vision, similar to Meta x Ray-Ban glasses.

The AirPods with built-in cameras demonstrate a direction toward stealthy yet potent AI-integrated wearable gear. As far as embedded AI cameras go, smart glasses could have better capture quality and longer battery life, though, at the same time, they would be more conspicuous.

Apple fitness ring with health-sensing features

Furthermore, Apple is also mulling over a smart ring design that might offer health-sensing capabilities to customers unwilling to wear bulkier devices like the Apple Watch. 9to5Mac expands on the topic and suggests that Smart glasses, in a similar vein, will help ease the flow in Apple’s ecosystem, liberating users from constant interactions with handheld devices. Although undisclosed, there are more innovative ideas on the company’s drawing board. And we will be hearing about those soon.

These initiatives are only commencing now, therefore, it would be too early to predict where Apple is going with its wearable tech portfolio. For now, these projects are internal developments with no market releases expected in the near future. These revolutionary wearables will remain speculative until Apple suggests otherwise.