HTC began selling its $499 Vive Eagle smart glasses in the US in September, aiming to carve out a niche in a market dominated by Meta. The glasses offer familiar features—cameras, frame speakers, and an embedded AI assistant—but HTC is leaning heavily into privacy as a differentiator. The company explicitly acknowledges the controversy around Meta's camera glasses and wants to show that smart eyewear can be built without treating wearers and bystanders as data sources.
Key privacy measures include a bright indicator light that cannot be disabled without stopping recording, voice commands that let nearby people halt recording, and video stored encrypted on the device rather than auto-uploaded to the cloud. The AI assistant, which can use OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, requires no login, so users remain de-identified. HTC also says it does not train AI models on glasses data. The tradeoff is that personalization features are limited by default.
The glasses offer up to 4.5 hours of continuous music playback and 36 hours on standby, with an optional $49 clip-on battery pack. AI Plus is free for two years, then costs $2.50 per month. HTC's enterprise sales head, Dan McDowell, argues that because HTC is not a social media company, it has no incentive to collect user information. Still, the article notes that the Vive Eagles look similar to Meta's glasses, which may make it hard for HTC to escape the privacy stigma attached to the category. HTC hopes that more players with stronger privacy practices will shift public perception, but Meta remains the market leader. The source is a single WIRED review, so no independent comparisons are available.{