I spent a few days wearing the Leion Smart Augmented Reality Glasses. They are by LLVision, a Beijing-based company with an 11-year history in the AR industry.
And they are doing what China does best – innovating rapidly in both software and hardware.
I wore the Leion glasses for a few days.
And they are interesting.
They do augmented reality, which is putting digital information on the lenses. So, you see physical reality overlaid with generated content and internet information. That can be text, maps, images, and even videos.
AR is a pretty big spectrum of potential capabilities and technical challenges. And Leion is specifically focused on providing real-time translations and transcriptions. Which shows up as bright green text running across your eyeline.
And they lay out four use cases (and settings).
This is the simplest. Whatever it hears, it transcribes on the screen. Like subtitles at the bottom of a tv show.
This is more advanced. It can transcribe and translate both voices in a conversation.
I didn’t use but thought it was interesting. You can give a speech and instead of using a teleprompter you can upload your speech to you glasses and read it from there. It scrolls automatically. Interesting.
The Leion AR Glasses Are Comfortable
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They are comfortable to wear. They are light. They feel pretty much like normal glasses.
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The green text is surprisingly easy to read. It’s not that distracting really. And the color is easy to glance at and understand quickly. It also doesn’t obscure your vision. It’s not distracting. Green is my new favorite color for reading in AR glasses.
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The menu is on screen (also green) is easy to use. You can control by touching the side frame. I mostly just used the Leion app on my phone.
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There is a bit of light leakage. So, people know you’re wearing AR glasses.
I Really Like the Real-Time Translation
I was sitting in a cafe in Futian and a food delivery guy was yelling at the café staff. It was in Chinese, and I usually can’t understand the Chinese in such arguments. They speak too fast and the words they use are too strange. But this time, I sat and just followed their argument on the glasses in real time. Pretty fun. And I learned some pretty creative insults in Chinese.
I would definitely wear such glasses in places where I don’t speak the language.
I would also 100% use these at conferences.
I go to lots of conferences. The big ones have simultaneous translation earpieces. But the smaller and more technical ones don’t. I would 100% go to lots of smaller China tech conferences with these glasses and use them for the talks and panel discussions. I can just read along, like watching a movie with subtitles on the screen.
I Used the Glasses as a Personal Language Tutor
Very quickly I turned off the English translation and just had it show me text in Chinese. So, I was mostly hearing people speak Chinese and then I also saw the Chinese characters. And this is actually how I watch movies and TV in China. I read much better than I listen so it’s more comfortable. Whenever I spoke with someone, I could also see their reply on the screen. And I could see there were words I had missed. It is good training.
And I also discovered I could use these to improve my Mandarin pronunciation.
I started walking around Shenzhen reading various signs out loud. And the Chinese characters would appear on the screen. But if my pronunciation and tones were not correct, then the wrong character would appear. I began repeating and correcting my pronunciation until I had it correct. The glasses were a super helpful speech teacher.
Final Point: Leion Is Well-Positioned for a GenAI Upgrade
These initial use cases are definitely about building the initial capabilities. You have to start somewhere and they stated with text-on-screen. I’m sure they could have easily added the camera and speakers as those are pretty common. But they focused on specific AV capabilities, especially text.
And, coincidentally, GenAI is also really, really good at text.
So that’s an final interesting question. What are the next use cases for these text-based AR glasses once GenAI is plugged in?
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