CES 2025: Vuzix has updated its consumer smartglasses reference program with Ultralite Pro.
There’s been a bunch of AR glasses start-ups at CES 2025, and the segment is certainly gaining traction. If in five years’ time we’re all wearing excellent AR specs, it’s likely we’ll look back on this CES and say, “This is where it started.”
Vuzix has been in the AR game since the beginning but has smartly stuck to enterprise, where warehouse workers and oil rig technicians use bulky smart glasses to get tasks done.
The company announced it’s entering the consumer market at CES 2025, so I was keen to head over and see what was new.
Last year, I checked out the company’s Ultralite platform, which was a pair of fairly fashionable specs that showed a basic green-text heads-up display. It’s designed for OEMs rather than for Vuzix to break into the consumer world themselves. The form factor was good (although there are scores of similarly designed glasses here at CES 2025), but the user experience was really underwhelming.
This year, however, they showcased a new reference platform — the Ultralite Pro. And the quality of the AR on display here kind of blew me away.
The Ultralite Pro is not a consumer-ready product. It’s a reference platform with huge stems and chunky frames. They’re not ready for consumer prime time but serve to demonstrate an AR experience.
It uses the Snapdragon AR1, dual full-color Avegant LCoS projectors on a designed waveguide, and boasts a field of view of up to 40 degrees.
Once donned, the quality of the visuals was impressive. No green The Matrix-looking text to squint at—just bold, vibrant visuals, 3D effects, and a huge field of view, overlaid on the world around me.
The demo unit cycled through visuals, including a 3D-rendered beating heart that tracked around the room in front of my eyes.
The hardware is still a long way off, but for the first time, I can kind of imagine smart glasses offering something people would actually want to use. This is closer to the experience people crave from AR.
I also tried a new translation feature on the standard Ultralite platform. To use it, the user must have their smartphone with them, but the translation is done instantaneously, with local processing to ensure low latency.
Wareable says
All around the show are smart glasses that look the part but don’t deliver what we imagine AR to be. No one is really talking about the mismatch between consumer expectations and the reality of AR glasses right now.
The Vuzix Ultralite Pro does not look the part—not even close. But it delivers something akin to a user experience that people would enjoy.
Now we just need form factor and function to meld together, and we might have lift-off for AR.
