Halliday's second-generation smart glasses replace the movable display window used in the first-generation model with waveguide-based displays, marking a fundamental shift in the device's optical architecture. The Verge published a hands-on review on July 21, 2026, reporting significant improvements over the first-generation glasses shown at CES 2025. The Verge

The Gen 2 glasses use a dual-eye monochrome green display with 600 by 300 pixel resolution per eye and a maximum brightness of 1,600 nits. A four-microphone array handles audio input. Halliday told The Verge the glasses deliver approximately 12 hours of typical battery life. The device is priced at $599, not including prescription lens costs.

Notably, the Gen 2 glasses do not include a camera. Halliday described this as a deliberate choice for privacy and battery life, which distinguishes the device from camera-equipped competitors in the smart glasses category.

The software feature set is oriented toward productivity and communication. A Meeting Flow feature provides real-time meeting assistance through three components: Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check. The glasses also generate post-meeting transcripts and summaries. Real-time translation covers over 45 languages.

Beyond meetings, the glasses support captioning, phone call handling, teleprompter functionality, and notecard display for public speakers. The combination of a heads-up monochrome display with teleprompter and notecard modes positions the device as a tool for live presentations, where a speaker can reference notes or scripted content without breaking eye contact with an audience.

The shift from a movable display window to waveguide optics is the most consequential hardware change here. The first-generation Halliday glasses used a small physical display that moved into the user's field of view, a mechanism that worked but carried inherent fragility and bulk. Waveguide displays route light through a thin optical layer embedded in the lens, eliminating moving parts and allowing the display to be always available without a mechanical transition. This is the same underlying optical approach used in more expensive AR headsets, though at a monochrome green resolution of 600 by 300 per eye, the Gen 2 is not attempting to deliver full-color augmented reality. The brightness spec of 1,600 nits should make the green overlay legible in most indoor and many outdoor lighting conditions, though direct sunlight performance remains an open question worth watching in extended testing.

The decision to omit a camera carries tradeoffs that are worth flagging separately. On the privacy front, it removes the single most contentious element of smart glasses. Camera-equipped wearables have faced social pushback and in some cases venue restrictions since the earliest Google Glass prototypes. A camera-free design sidesteps that friction entirely and likely contributes to the 12-hour battery figure, since image sensors and their processing pipelines are among the most power-hungry subsystems in wearable devices. The tradeoff is that the glasses cannot support any computer vision capability. Visual search, scene understanding, object recognition, and photo capture are all off the table. The device's intelligence is audio-centric, relying on the four-microphone array for input and the display for output.

At $599, the Gen 2 sits in a price band that will invite comparison with both simpler smart glasses that offer audio-only functionality at lower prices and more capable AR headsets at higher ones. The Meeting Flow features and real-time translation are the software differentiators that need to justify that price. Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check are specific enough in their meeting-assistance function to appeal to professionals who spend significant portions of their day in video or in-person meetings where discreet access to a live transcript and action-item tracking has genuine utility.

The broader context for these glasses is a wearables category still searching for its defining use case. Multiple companies have attempted smart eyewear over the past decade, and the recurring challenge has been balancing optical capability, battery life, social acceptability, and price in a single device. Halliday's Gen 2 makes specific choices on each axis: waveguide optics for a slimmer form factor, no camera for privacy and battery life, monochrome green for display simplicity, and a software stack focused on meetings and translation. Whether those tradeoffs align with what enough users actually want is the question the market will answer.