Even Realities G2: why a camera-free pair of smart glasses just became a unicorn

Raag Harshavat landed in China without speaking a word of Chinese, switched on live translation, and left it running for twelve hours.

Not for a meeting. For the day.

What stayed with him afterwards was not the staff meeting where he understood every introduction, though that part worked. It was the taxi. The thing the driver says when you get in, and the offhand comment as you get out. Nobody translates those. With a phone, or with anything you have to wake up and point at a problem, you decide in advance which moments are worth the effort, and small talk never makes the list.

“I get to feel like I’m actually part of everyday life,” he told me on the podcast.

That sentence explains more about Even Realities than any spec sheet does.

What is Even Realities and what does the G2 do?

Even Realities is a Shenzhen-based smart glasses company founded in 2023 by Will Wang, who worked at Apple on the Apple Watch and iPhone. In July 2026 it raised $150 million in a pre-Series B round led by Meituan and Tencent, reaching a $1 billion valuation.

Its product, the Even G2, is a pair of display glasses that starts at $599. It weighs about 36 grams, runs a monochrome green micro LED waveguide display in each lens, pairs to your phone, and is controlled either by touchpads on the temples or by the R1 ring, which doubles as a health tracker. Battery life is roughly two days of normal use, and the charging case holds another seven charges, so about two weeks away from a plug.

It has no camera. That is the part everyone leads with, and it is the part worth slowing down on.

I sat down with Raag Harshavat, who leads the developer ecosystem at Even Realities after stints at Snap and Meta, for an episode of Metavertising. What follows is the short version.

Why Even Realities built smart glasses with no camera

I asked him directly whether the missing camera was a constraint or a choice. He did not hedge.

“It’s a choice,” he said. Then he gave two reasons, and the second one is the interesting one.

The first is personal. Camera glasses are heavier, because a camera drags a power budget and a thermal problem onto your face with it. And there are rooms Raag does not want to walk into wearing one. He mentioned the gym.

The second reason is about everyone else. “Even if you yourself choose that I’m okay with a camera following me around and being with me at all times, you didn’t really get buy-in from everyone else around you.” The person across the table from you never opted in. Removing the camera removes the negotiation.

The commercial argument arrives on its own from there. Meta, Snap and Google are all shipping cameras and all absorbing the privacy backlash that comes with them. Even Realities does not have that conversation, which turns out to be a decent position to hold in 2026.

The constraints are the product

This is the part I find more interesting than the camera, honestly, because it is less quotable and more revealing.

The G2 is aluminum, with screwless hinges, and it is dust, drop and water resistant. Even Realities builds its own prescription lenses in its own factory, which almost nobody else in this category does, and covers prescriptions from -12 to +12. Raag’s first week at the company was spent in a course on eyewear. Not on displays. On what makes a pair of glasses comfortable, and how frames have changed over the last century.

“There’s a lot of people trying to build tech for the face first, and then throwing them into a pair of glasses haphazardly,” he said. “This is a really good pair of glasses first.”

The display follows the same logic. Monochrome green instead of full color, because green micro LED is bright enough to read next to a window and cheap enough in power terms to run all day. The waveguide pattern angles light downward, so unless someone is standing below you, they cannot see what you are reading. Most people who notice the lenses assume they are bifocals.

Every one of those decisions costs the product a feature. Together they buy the one thing the category has never had, which is a device people actually keep on their face. Even Realities says its users wear the G2 eight to ten hours a day.

Quiet tech and ambient computing, explained without the jargon

Raag prefers the term ambient computing to quiet tech, and the distinction he draws is about availability rather than capability.

“What good is a feature if it’s not there when you need it?”

He said this half-apologetically, as if it were a controversial thing to say about an industry that mostly competes on feature counts. It is the whole thesis of the company in nine words. You do not know in advance when you will need translation. If you live in Los Angeles, or Rotterdam, or anywhere with more than one language on the street, the need shows up unannounced. A device that gives you four hours of battery makes you ration it. A device that gives you two days does not.

The G2 does not try to replace your phone, either. It pairs to it and borrows its compute. The phone stays in your pocket and does the heavy work; the glasses handle what you would otherwise pull the phone out for.

Building for the Even G2: the developer path

Even Hub, the app platform, launched in April 2026 with around 50 apps. When we recorded, Raag put the number past 400.

The stack is deliberately unexotic. You go to hub.evenrealities.com, install the SDK from npm, and build what is effectively a web app that runs inside the Even Realities phone app and renders into the glasses’ display containers. It is JavaScript. There is a simulator so you can watch the green display update in your IDE before you touch hardware. There is a Discord where the community answers the questions the docs do not.

At the bottom of the documentation there is a link to a Claude skill you can drop into your coding tool. Raag says a meaningful share of what is on the store now is vibe coded, often by people who bought the glasses as customers, wanted one specific thing, and built it for themselves. Someone built a sales app that feeds you cues during calls. A gym membership salesman wears it all day.

There is an ebook reader wired into Project Gutenberg. There is a navigation app that turns the display into a walking HUD. There are timers and weather apps, which sound boring until you consider that a weather app you can read without breaking eye contact is a different product from a weather app on a phone.

The audience is unusual, too. Raag says the glasses sell through around 300 high-end optical retailers. Even Realities has said roughly a third of surveyed users identify as company executives, and the typical customer is a professional between 30 and 50. For an independent developer, that is a small user base with an unusually high willingness to pay, which is not a combination that comes along often.

Here is the thread I could not get closed. Even Hub has no monetization yet. Raag was straightforward that it is coming, along with enterprise tooling, but there is no date and no revenue share to point at. So the honest position for a developer today is that you are building for reach and for a seat at the table early, not for income. Whether that turns into a real business depends on decisions Even Realities has not announced. I asked. He could not say, and I do not think he was dodging so much as genuinely not knowing yet.

Q&A

Does the Even Realities G2 have a camera? No. The G2 has no camera by design. It uses microphones as its primary input and a monochrome green micro LED display in each lens as its output.

How much does the Even G2 cost? Pricing starts at $599. Prescription lenses and the R1 ring add to that.

How long does the Even G2 battery last? Around two days on a single charge under normal use. The charging case provides roughly seven additional charges, or about two weeks between wall outlets.

How much does the Even G2 weigh? Approximately 36 grams.

Can you get the Even G2 with a prescription? Yes. Even Realities manufactures its own prescription lenses and supports prescriptions from -12 to +12.

How many languages does the translation support? Up to 35, with automatic language detection, through the Conversate app.

How do you build apps for the Even Realities G2? Through Even Hub. Register at hub.evenrealities.com, install the SDK via npm, build a JavaScript web app, test it in the simulator or sideload it to your glasses by QR code, then submit it to the store. There is also an official Claude skill in the documentation for AI-assisted development.

Is Even Realities profitable? The company has said it has been profitable since its first product launch. It reached a $1 billion valuation in July 2026 after a $150 million pre-Series B round led by Meituan and Tencent.

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation with Raag Harshavat is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

• 00:00 Intro: who is Raag Harshavat
• 01:03 From Snap and Meta to Even Realities
• 03:28 Why Even Realities, and what unicorn status signals
• 05:33 What the Even G2 and R1 ring actually do
• 09:08 Quiet tech and ambient computing explained
• 13:31 Running live translation for 12 hours in China
• 17:15 No camera: constraint or choice
• 20:12 Why the display is monochrome green
• 21:45 400+ apps on Even Hub and what people are building
• 29:02 How to ship your first G2 app
• 33:50 What is next for Even Realities and its developers

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