This morning, the upstart smart glasses company Even the facts. started Even the hubAn open app store and developer platform for it The G2 line of display-style smart glasses. This could be the first salvo in the battle between open and closed platform display smart glasses.

One side is meta. The goliath of the smart glasses market has until now completely locked down its new display glasses: Meta decides what your smart glasses can do and determines which apps you can access. The David to Meta’s Goliath is Even Realities, a boutique tech company that just launched a storefront with more than 50 apps created by third-party developers, so users can decide for themselves what to install and what to ignore.

While the market for AR-style smart glasses with displays is currently limited to tech heads and early adopters, if HUD-style glasses catch on (and both companies stick to their current strategies), the winner could determine how much control consumers will have over their augmented future.

Competitive strategies for display-style smart glasses

In terms of total market share, meta and even realism are not in the same universe. Meta has a market capitalization of about $1.47 trillion, and its line of Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses is about 82% of the smart glasses market. Even facts are predictable. $10 million And its $3.3 million annual revenue is less than one percent of the total smart glasses market. But within the display-integrated glasses niche, the two companies are about the same age: projections for 2025-2026 suggest that Meta will sell approx. 20,000 of his high-end, Meta Ray-Ban display glassesWhile Realty’s profit also suggests that the company has moved between 10,000 and 25,000 pairs of its G2 glasses.

The two companies are taking very different approaches to selling “glasses with a HUD.” Meta’s display glasses are priced at $799, and its popular non-display glasses are designed to do it all, including full color, high-quality video, and a distinctive, Ray-Ban look. Even Realty’s $599 G2 glasses don’t have an onboard camera or audio, and the monochrome display is housed in a very discreet frame that no one would suspect is anything other than a “normal” pair of glasses. They are designed to be fashionable, functional, everyday glasses that can also project a map before your eyes or help you with the bartenders when you need them. For more information, here’s a review of the latest generation of Avon Reality Glasses.

The most important divide between these companies may be their approach to software. All technology is on a continuum between “open” and “closed,” and Meta’s smart glasses have, so far, moved to a limited end of the spectrum. You get a highly tailored experience, with the Meta acting as a mediator for your face to be installed on the computer, whether you’re rocking display glasses or Ray-Ban Metas. You don’t download apps, you turn “experiences” on and off. You can choose to disable or enable Apple Music, but you can’t choose to listen to music on new platforms developed by third parties. You can’t delete core features you don’t want. Even something as basic as changing wake-up words for the AI ​​is out of bounds. It’s “hey, meta” or it’s nothing.

Even the virtual reality approach is semi-open, like Apple’s App Store. It’s not an “anything goes” approach to Linux, but you can use Even Realities’ library of approved apps and choose whether you need an EPUB reader in glass, a chess game, or a charge indicator for your Tesla. Reality even lets you remove basic features you don’t even use on its glasses.

It’s worth noting that Meta isn’t fundamentally opposed to third-party development. The company’s MetaHorizon store for its Quest line of VR headsets is a huge, vibrant marketplace that has everything from high-end games to small, junky tools, and the company has shut down much of it. The first party Committing to continue supporting VR development, indie devs. So it’s possible/probable that Meta is waiting for the hardware to mature before opening a more open store for its glasses, or just adding a “display” section to the existing Horizon store.

Open is not necessarily better.

While a knee-jerk reaction might lead one to conclude that the choice offered by an open system is more desirable than a closed one, that’s not always the case in the tech world. Nintendo dominated video games in the 1980s. Maintaining strict quality control More than the games it released on the NES, and some kids wanted a more “open” competitive system. Adobe’s Flash dominated everything the “open web” had to offer in the early 2000s, only to die when another relatively closed system, Apple’s iPhone, refused to support him. Speaking of Apple, account for its iOS devices 63 percent of the US smartphone marketwhile the closest competitor, the more open Android, is always in second place. Time, as he says, will tell whether consumers want a curated experience, modular, open, or even glasses with a HUD.