These 1080p Smart Glasses Can Be Controlled With a Touch-Sensitive Ring

Smart glasses are pretty exciting right now, not just because they’re increasingly popular, but because they’re not quite mainstream yet, which means companies are still allowed to get very weird with them. It’s in that nascent zone of experimentation that you get some interesting stuff, and that definitely includes Inmo’s Air 3 AR glasses.

There are lots of cool / quirky things about Inmo’s Air 3—which announced a Kickstarter as a part of IFA 2025—but my favorite thing is that it tackles one of the most vexing issues with AR glasses as they stand: the UI. To control the Inmo Air 3, the smart glasses come with a smart ring that acts as a button, a touchpad, a mouse, and it also helps track the movement of virtual objects in the display. It reminds me of what Meta is likely cooking up with its pair of smart glasses (a wristband that reads your body’s electrical signals), but with a lower footprint.

See INMO AIR3 at Amazon

The other major highlight of these smart glasses is that, with the help of a micro OLED display from Sony, the Air 3 are not only full-color, but they’re 1080p and have up to 600 nits of brightness. It’s a relatively small field of view at 36 degrees, but it covers 100% sRGB, which is a far cry from competitors like Rokid Glasses that only show overlays in a Matrix-like green color. On paper, these smart glasses are equipped to do everything you wish you could do with Meta’s Ray-Bans, and with those extra capabilities, Inmo is planning a lot.

One thing Inmo envisions is lots of 2D apps that you can use in your smart glasses for things like doomscrolling X or Snapchat, if that’s a thing that people still use. There’s a built-in Google Play store, so pretty much anything you could download on there should be possible to use in the Air 3, which runs Android 14. One of the most compelling use cases is using the smart glasses as a virtual screen. Similar to competitors in the space like BigScreen, Inmo envisons its smart glasses as a way of gluing a big screen on your eyeballs—the Air 3 translates to a 150-inch screen, according to the company.

To do all of those things, Inmo is loading the Air 3 up with a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR processor, 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage, which it says should enable up to three “independent floating virtual screens.” There’s also a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera for pictures and computer vision, and an array of mics and speakers so you can use a voice assistant or listen to audio playback.

My biggest questions are the same as any pair of AR glasses that claim to do all this stuff. One is battery life; according to Inmo, the Air 3 has a 660mAh battery, though it doesn’t give figures on how that translates to battery life. The other thing is weight, and Inmo hasn’t shared figures in that department, so I’m going to go ahead and assume these weigh a great deal more than less capable competitors from Rokid or Meta.

Either way, the Air 3 is doing some interesting stuff, especially in terms of UI and display, and whether or not any of it pans out, it’s hard not to appreciate the exercise in “how the f**k are we going to make smart glasses work?” Inmo’s Kickstarter officially launches on Sept. 15, and its Air 3 glasses will cost $899.

See INMO AIR3 at Amazon