Halo Glasses Launch With Privacy-First AI and Real-World Play

Brilliant Labs launched Halo Glasses on October 27, 2026, a new pair of privacy-first smartglasses that the company is selling now through its own site for $399. The glasses run a personal AI companion called Noa and a game called Narrative, and they are built on hardware and software that Brilliant Labs has released as open source. According to Brilliant Labs, the point of that design is trust: core functions run on the device itself whenever possible, so less personal data has to travel to the cloud.

Chief executive Bobak Tavangar said the glasses were built to protect that trust while using intelligence to help people engage more deeply and playfully with the world around them. That framing sets up the product as much as any single feature does. Rather than asking buyers to accept a camera on their face, Halo Glasses ask them to accept a companion that watches the world in low resolution and forgets what it sees.

A game that follows you into the street

Narrative is the flagship experience on Halo Glasses, and it is the part of the launch that looks least like a conventional gadget feature. The game turns the real world into an open world that keeps changing with each player, so ordinary moments become chances for discovery, collaboration, and play. It responds to what the wearer does, decides, and finds in real time, and it keeps adapting as those choices pile up over weeks and months.

Noa sits at the center of that loop on Halo Glasses. The companion builds long-term memory around what matters to each user, learns from patterns over time, and answers conversationally in real time. Because memory carries forward from one interaction to the next, conversations build on earlier ones, preferences are remembered, and play can pick up where it left off instead of starting over each time.

What owners can do with them

Brilliant Labs describes the day-to-day use of Halo Glasses through a set of experiences that all run through Noa. Owners can ask questions, explore ideas, and get context in the moment, talking to Noa the way they would talk to a personal assistant that stays with them through the day. They can also build mini-apps and custom workflows using only their voice, then share what they make with the Halo community through its app store, with no code or technical setup required.

Play is the third of those experiences on Halo Glasses, and it is where Narrative lives. The game treats daily routines as material, turning a walk, a commute, or a meetup with friends into part of an ongoing game that shifts with the player. The company presents this as a new category of adaptive gaming, one that depends on the glasses being worn all day rather than picked up for a session in the living room.

Hardware built for all-day wear

As a piece of hardware, Halo Glasses carry a full-color microOLED display, microphones, bone conduction speakers, optical-grade lenses, Bluetooth 5.3, and on-device AI. Battery life runs up to 14 hours, and the glasses weigh just over 40 grams, a weight the company says was engineered for balance and comfort during continuous wear. Brilliant Labs designs and manufactures the glasses from the ground up as one integrated system, covering industrial design, sensors, battery performance, and system intelligence.

The privacy design extends to how Halo Glasses see the world. A low-resolution image sensor gives the glasses visual context without working as a traditional camera for photography or video. Brilliant Labs describes the approach as visual note-taking: the glasses can see, understand, and remember what the wearer sees, while the images themselves are processed privately on the device, immediately discarded, and never stored.

Why the company is betting on openness

Brilliant Labs is an integrated AI hardware and software company founded in 2019, focused on intelligent wearables designed for play in the real world. The company says the open-source foundation of Halo Glasses invites developers, creators, and the wider community to extend, remix, and shape the platform over time, instead of leaving every decision to a single studio. The launch is backed by new funding from Goodwater Capital, with participation from Brendan Iribe and other partners, according to the company announcement.

That open approach is also the clearest answer to the hardest question facing any face-worn device, which is whether people will trust it enough to wear it. A closed system asks buyers to take its privacy promises on faith. An open one lets outsiders check the work, and Halo Glasses stake their appeal on that difference for buyers who want an AI companion without handing over a feed of their lives. Readers following how tech platforms are changing what users see can also read about YouTube custom feeds that let viewers type what they want and the expansion of ChatGPT ads to more countries.

The Halo Glasses launch leaves the usual questions for any first-generation wearable unanswered, including how Narrative holds up after the novelty fades and how many developers take up the open platform. What is certain from the announcement is the shape of the bet: glasses that play a game with the world, an assistant that remembers, and a promise that the watching stays private. Sources for this article include the Brilliant Labs announcement on Business Wire and Morningstar's copy of the release.