Smartglasses have a trust problem. Cameras on your face make plenty of people uneasy, and most wearables lean heavily on the cloud. Brilliant Labs is pitching its new Halo Glasses as the answer, built around the idea that personalized experiences should start with trust. They launched today at $399.
The privacy approach starts with on-device processing. Core functionality runs locally whenever possible, which cuts down on how much the glasses depend on the cloud and gives you more control over your data and personal context.
The most interesting design choice is how Halo handles vision. Instead of a traditional camera, it uses a low-resolution image sensor that gives the glasses visual context without being able to take photos or record video. Brilliant Labs describes it as visual note-taking: Halo can see, understand, and remember what you see, but the images are processed privately on the device, immediately discarded, and never stored.
Openness is the other pillar. Halo and its AI companion, Noa, are built on a fully open-source hardware and software foundation. Developers, creators, and the wider community can inspect, extend, and remix the platform, which Brilliant Labs says keeps things transparent rather than leaving everything in the hands of a single company.
So what do the glasses actually do? Noa is a personal AI companion that builds long-term memory around what matters to you, carrying context forward instead of resetting after every conversation. The experience breaks down into three parts:
- Ask: Talk to Noa like a personal assistant. Memory carries over, so conversations pick up where they left off and your preferences stick.
- Make: Build mini-apps and custom workflows by voice alone, no code needed, and share them on the Halo App Store.
- Play: The flagship experience is Narrative, which Brilliant Labs calls a new category of adaptive gaming. It turns the real world into an open-world game that evolves with your choices, actions, and discoveries.
On the hardware side, Halo has a full-color microOLED display, microphones, bone conduction speakers, optical-grade lenses, and Bluetooth 5.3, with up to 14 hours of battery life. At just over 40 grams, they’re meant to be worn all day. Brilliant Labs designs and builds the whole system itself, from the industrial design and sensors to the battery and AI stack.
The company is backed by Goodwater Capital, with participation from Brendan Iribe and other investors.
Pricing and availability: Halo Glasses launched on October 27, 2026 for $399 and are available now at brilliant.xyz.
