Google, which has been busy developing a platform for Android XR smart glasses and mixed reality headsets, showed at the TED 2025 conference what it has managed to achieve now.
Google’s vice-president Shahram Izadi, who oversees augmented and virtual reality-who oversees the augmented and virtual reality division-was also wearing augmented reality glasses during his keynote, and he invited the company’s product manager Nishtha Bhatia for a demonstration. In the prototype, Mrs Izadeh was wearing diopter lenses, but the large screen in the room displayed the image shown by the display in his assistant’s glasses. He explained that the display on his glasses showed notes for the report – the device connects to a smartphone and supports the output of all its apps.
The key feature of the smart glasses running Android XR, of course, is the Google Gemini artificial intelligence model connected to it. Nishta looked around at the rack standing on the stage, turned away and asked the voice assistant to compose a haiku – a Japanese trivirsh. She then asked the AI what was on the rack. Gemini” from memory “reported the name of the standing book and added where the key card from the hotel forgotten” by the hostess.
The voice chatbot demonstrated the ability to translate in real time both from Spanish to English and from English to the more exotic Farsi. When asked in Hindi, Gemini also gave an immediate response in Hindi. Next, the AI was shown a vinyl record cover, and the system ran one of the songs from that album at the user’s request, having discovered it in Google’s library. At the end of this part of the demonstration, Gemini volunteered to guide Nishta to the specified destination.
The second part of the demo didn’t use smart glasses, but rather Samsung’s Project Moohan mixed reality headset, which is scheduled for release this year. The AI again showed what it can do: it opened a map of Cape Town in Google Maps Immersive View mode, recognised a ski resort on a 360-degree video from YouTube, described a picture from a video in the spirit of a horror film and gave some tips when running a game.