# Brilliant Labs

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/brilliant_labs
> Updated: 2026-08-01
> Categories: AI Companies, AI Hardware, Open Source AI
> License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), the free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Reuse freely with attribution to "AI Wiki (aiwiki.ai)".

Brilliant Labs is a Singapore hardware startup that builds open source display glasses and the Noa AI assistant that runs on them. The operating entity is Brilliant Labs Pte. Ltd. (UEN 202316146G), at 68 Circular Road #02-01, Singapore 049422 [1][2]. It has announced three products: Monocle, a 15 gram clip-on display launched in March 2023 at $349; Frame, glasses with an integrated display that opened for preorder on 2024-02-08 at $349; and Halo, announced on 2025-07-31 at $299 and still not in customers' hands a year later, now priced at $399 [3][4][5][6][26]. What separates it from the rest of the [AI glasses](/wiki/ai_glasses) field is that it publishes firmware, schematics and client libraries under permissive licences. It is also tiny: chief executive Bobak Tavangar told EE Journal in May 2026 that the company had five core team members [7].

## Company and funding

Brilliant Labs dates from 2019 [3]. Tavangar, a former Apple program lead, co-founded it and remains chief executive [3][8]. TechCrunch reported in June 2023 that it was still run entirely by its three co-founders; the other two are not named in the sources consulted here [3].

The company has raised very little by the standards of the category. A $3 million seed round was announced on 2023-06-27, led by Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe, with Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky and Plug & Play Ventures also participating [3]. On 2024-02-08, alongside the Frame launch, TechCrunch reported an undisclosed investment from Niantic chief executive John Hanke that brought total financing to $6 million [4]. No further round has been announced as of 2026-08-02; news-index searches, the company's site and TechCrunch's Brilliant Labs tag show nothing after February 2024. For scale, [Even Realities](/wiki/even_realities) raised $150 million in a single round announced on 2026-07-06 [27], and Brilliant Labs' entire disclosed funding is under a fifth of the $32,273,128 [Vuzix](/wiki/vuzix) lost in fiscal 2025 alone [28]. Tavangar told TechCrunch in 2023 that Monocle sold for "almost 3x" what it cost to make, and declined to give unit sales [3]. No shipment or revenue figure for any Brilliant Labs product has ever been published, by the company or by an analyst firm.

## Monocle

Monocle, launched in March 2023, is a self-contained module that clips to ordinary eyewear or is held up to the eye [3][9]. The store page put it at 15 grams [26]. It carries a 0.23 inch micro OLED running 640x400 through a 20 degree field of view optic, a 5 megapixel OmniVision camera, a microphone, a Gowin FPGA for graphics and vision acceleration, and a 70 mAh battery, and it ships with a charging case holding a further 450 mAh [9]. It runs MicroPython and is programmed over Bluetooth from a web interface, with no cable and no proprietary toolchain [9].

Monocle found developers rather than consumers. It went viral in March 2023 when Stanford students used it to build rizzGPT, a real-time conversation prompter driven by [GPT-4](/wiki/gpt-4) and [Whisper](/wiki/whisper) [3]. Brilliant Labs' boilerplate calls it "the world's first open-source wearable AI device", a claim that comes from the company rather than any independent registry [10].

## Frame

Frame put Monocle's optics into round nylon spectacles. Preorders opened on 2024-02-08 at $349 with April shipping promised; units reached reviewers by May 2024 [4][11][12]. The store listed Frame at just under 40 grams with a roughly 20 degree diagonal field of view and no speaker; TechCrunch reported 39 grams at announcement [4][13]. Inside, a Nordic nRF52840 is paired with a Lattice CrossLink-NX FPGA driving the display and a 720p camera, plus one MEMS microphone and a 210 mAh battery [14].

Frame's optic is not a [waveguide](/wiki/waveguide_display). Display metrologist Karl Guttag analysed it in May 2024 and classified it, like Monocle, as a "look through the beamsplitter" birdbath built from a non-polarising 50/50 beam splitter and a curved mirror: the same optical family as [Google Glass](/wiki/google_glass), and distinct from the birdbath [XREAL](/wiki/xreal) uses or the waveguides Vuzix manufactures [12]. Guttag calculated that at most about 25% of the panel's light reaches the eye, so the widely repeated 3,000 nit figure, which is the Sony microdisplay's own rating, means no more than roughly 750 nits actually seen [12]. The design also front-projects, producing eye glow visible to bystanders.

Reception was poor. 9to5Google's Ben Schoon, who took delivery in May 2024, called Frame "a disappointing stepping stone to something better": over-flexible plastic, very reflective lenses, an Android app that would not get past sign-in on a Pixel 8 Pro, no setup instructions in the box, and a beam splitter prism in his line of sight that gave him a headache. He also found the marketing images misleading, since they showed a display invisible in the lens, and noted that output was white text rather than the colour of the teasers. The free tier gave 2,000 AI "credits" a month, a unit the company would not define [11].

## Halo

Halo was announced on 2025-07-31 with preorders at $299 and shipping promised for Q4 2025 [6][15]. Brilliant Labs called it the "world's thinnest AI glasses"; Tom's Guide reported that as the company's claim, not a measurement [16]. It weighs just over 40 grams [5].

Halo drops the in-lens prism. A 0.2 inch full-colour OLED-on-silicon microdisplay from Guozhao Optoelectronics, with a 640x480 panel and a 256x256 pixel drawable area, sits at the top of the frame and is read by glancing downward; looking straight ahead, the image is out of view [17]. Tavangar likens the apparent size to an iPad at arm's length [7]. The optic adjusts from +2 to -6 dioptres and the frame targets an interpupillary distance of 58 to 72 mm [5].

The processor is an Alif Semiconductor Balletto B1: an Arm Cortex-M55 with an Ethos-U55 neural processing unit, running Zephyr with a Lua virtual machine over Bluetooth LE 5.3 [17]. Brilliant Labs and Alif announced a partnership in March 2026 to co-develop silicon for later glasses [18]. Other parts include a PixArt 640x480 global-shutter camera, dual microphones with a 20 microamp always-on audio activity detection mode, stereo bone conduction speakers, and two 150 mAh cells [17]. Vendor-claimed battery life is up to 14 hours [6][18]. Tavangar says Halo is mass-produced by Foxconn [7].

The store page calls the front sensor a "low-power optical sensor for AI inference"; the hardware manual names it as a PixArt PAG7982J1, a 640x480 colour camera with a global shutter and an 81.2 degree horizontal field of view [5][17]. Halo has no capture indicator light of the sort Road to VR noted on [Ray-Ban Meta](/wiki/meta_ray_ban_ai) and Xiaomi's AI glasses, and it does not natively make photos or video available to the wearer either [6]. Tavangar's explanation is architectural: sensor data becomes embeddings on the paired phone and only those go to the cloud [7]. The privacy policy says Brilliant retains no raw audio, video or full transcripts beyond immediate processing, and erases memories within 30 days of account deletion [1]. None of that addresses whether bystanders can tell the camera is on, the concern catalogued under [smart glasses privacy](/wiki/smart_glasses_privacy).

### Slipped dates and a rising price

Halo has missed every ship date it has given. Archived versions of the product page, plus one contemporaneous report, track both the schedule and the price.

| Date | Price | Stated shipping |
|---|---|---|
| 2025-07-31 [15] | $299 | Q4 2025, "before the holidays" |
| 2025-12-15 [19] | $349 | Beta units December 2025, general availability January 2026 |
| 2026-03-03 [8] | $349 | Q1 2026 |
| 2026-08-02 [5] | $399 | First units "rolling off the production line now", shipments beginning early August |

That is a slip of roughly nine months, a 33% rise over the preorder price, and a wait of more than twelve months for anyone who ordered at $299. Brilliant Labs also pulled its earlier products around the Halo announcement: the Frame store page was still live in early July 2025 [13], and both it and the Monocle page return 404 as of 2026-08-02, leaving Halo as the only item in the catalogue [5].

## Noa and the subscription tiers

Noa is the multimodal assistant shipped with the glasses. At the Frame launch it was a cloud service routing to third-party models: [Perplexity](/wiki/perplexity) for search, Stability AI's Stable Diffusion for images, OpenAI's GPT-4 for text and Whisper for speech [4]. That server code is itself published, under ISC [21].

For Halo the architecture changed. Audio activity detection runs on the glasses, speech and image models run on the phone's neural accelerator, and only embeddings reach the cloud [7]. On 2025-09-15 [Liquid AI](/wiki/liquid_ai) announced that Brilliant Labs had licensed its vision-language models, with Halo using LFM2-VL-450M for scene understanding [10]; on 2026-03-03 Neuphonic was added for on-device text to speech and TheStage AI for the inference engine that runs those models on the phone [8]. Halo also introduces Narrative, a long-term memory system, and a "Vibe Mode" for building small apps by describing them aloud, which the current store page calls Miniapps [16][5].

Noa is split into a free tier and a paid one. At announcement, Basic was to be free, cost-optimised and capped daily, with realtime conversational dialogue reserved for Plus at a price to be announced [6][15]. By December 2025 the store listed Noa Plus at $19.99 per month [19]. The current product page names neither tier, saying only that the features are "included free out of the box with daily usage caps" [5]. The boundary has therefore moved twice in a year: realtime conversation was reserved for Plus at announcement, had moved into the free tier by December 2025 with $19.99 buying only a larger daily allowance, and is now offered with no paid tier named at all [15][19][5].

## What is actually open source

The store says flatly that "Halo is totally open source, design files and code are on Github" [5]. That is accurate for Frame and Monocle, and not yet accurate for Halo.

| Artefact | Frame | Monocle | Halo |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firmware source | Published, ISC [20] | Published, ISC [21] | Not published; docs say "coming soon" [22] |
| FPGA RTL | In frame-codebase, ISC [20] | Separate repo, CERN-OHL-P-2.0 [21] | No FPGA in design |
| Schematics | PDF published [14] | PDF published, plus charging case [9] | Not published [17] |
| Mechanical models | STL meshes and dimensioned drawings [14] | STEP solid model, STL and dimension PDFs [9] | Two STL files sit in the docs repository, both byte-identical to Frame's, and nothing links them [29] |
| Board layout, Gerbers, bill of materials | Not published | Not published | Not published |
| Host SDK | brilliant_sdk, BSD-3-Clause [23] | ar-studio-for-vscode, ISC [21] | brilliant_sdk, BSD-3-Clause [23] |

The licences are real and permissive: mostly ISC, BSD 3-Clause for the SDK monorepo, and CERN-OHL-P-2.0 for the Monocle FPGA accelerator, which is an actual open hardware licence [20][21][23]. What is published is source code, schematic PDFs and mechanical models: Frame comes with STL meshes of the frame, the charging cradle and the prescription clip, and Monocle adds a STEP solid model [14][9]. Gerbers, PCB layout files and bills of materials are absent, so a third party can read the Frame circuit and print its housing but cannot fabricate the board from what is on GitHub.

Halo is the hole in the claim. As of 2026-08-02 the GitHub organisation has 21 public repositories and none is the Halo firmware; the live Halo hardware manual has no schematics section, unlike the Frame and Monocle manuals; and the Halo SDK page still reads "Find the official firmware on GitHub (coming soon)" with an empty link, while the one live GitHub link on that page points at a repository, brilliantlabsAR/frame-2-firmware, that returns 404 [17][21][22]. What does exist is the SDK monorepo, the Lua API reference and the Bluetooth protocol specification: enough to write applications, not enough to modify the device. Hackaday noted the same gap at announcement, observing that Halo "doesn't have full SDK or hardware details shared yet" and predicting the company would publish them [24]. A year later it had not. The SDK monorepo, meanwhile, carries a copyright line naming the community developer CitizenOneX rather than the company, and that developer wrote most of its commits [23].

## Community and assessment

The Brilliant Labs Discord listed 13,826 members on 2026-08-02, against the "close to 2,000 developers" Tavangar cited in June 2023 [3][25]. For a five-person company that community is the main asset, and it is why Hackaday and similar outlets treat Brilliant Labs as the default hacker-friendly option in a segment where alternatives built on [Snapdragon AR1](/wiki/snapdragon_ar1) and its successors ship locked firmware.

The niche is genuine: no other vendor of consequence in the [AI glasses market](/wiki/ai_glasses_market) has published firmware and schematics for a product it shipped, and Brilliant Labs has consistently undercut comparable display glasses on price. The tradeoffs are plain. The optics are deliberately cheap, with brightness and eye-glow penalties an independent analyst has documented; the first two products reviewed badly; the third has slipped nine months, risen a third in price, and has not published its own source; and no unit sales figure has ever been disclosed. Against Meta's [Ray-Ban Display](/wiki/meta_ray_ban_display), Xiaomi or even [Rokid](/wiki/rokid), the gap is one of kind rather than degree: five people and $6 million [4][7]. The useful comparison is with earlier open [augmented reality](/wiki/augmented_reality) efforts, and with the [open-source AI](/wiki/open_source_ai) norm of releasing artefacts that others can rebuild.

## References

1. "Privacy Policy." Brilliant Labs, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://brilliant.xyz/pages/privacy-policy
2. "Terms and Conditions." Brilliant Labs, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://brilliant.xyz/pages/terms-conditions
3. Rita Liao. "Brilliant Labs puts AI in front of your eye with its tiny open source AR lens." TechCrunch, 2023-06-27. https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/27/brilliant-labs-puts-ai-in-front-of-your-eye-with-its-tiny-open-source-ar-lens/
4. Rita Liao. "AR glasses with multimodal AI nets funding from Pokemon GO creator." TechCrunch, 2024-02-08. https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/08/ar-glasses-with-multimodal-ai-attracts-funding-from-pokemon-go-founder/
5. "Halo." Brilliant Labs store, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo
6. Scott Hayden. "Brilliant Labs Unveils All-day Smart Glasses with Color Display, Pre-orders Launch at $300." Road to VR, 2025-08-01. https://www.roadtovr.com/brilliant-labs-halo-smart-glasses-price-release-date/
7. Max Maxfield. "AI+AR Glasses That Remember Where You Left Your Keys." EE Journal, 2026-05-14. https://www.eejournal.com/article/aiar-glasses-that-remember-where-you-left-your-keys/
8. "Brilliant Labs, Neuphonic and TheStage AI partner to bring privacy-first, cloud-free AI to smart glasses." Tech.eu, 2026-03-03. https://tech.eu/2026/03/03/brilliant-labs-neuphonic-and-thestage-ai-partner-to-bring-privacy-first-cloud-free-ai-to-smart-glasses/
9. "Monocle Hardware Manual." Brilliant Documentation, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://docs.brilliant.xyz/monocle/hardware/
10. "Brilliant Labs Partners With Liquid AI to Bring Vision-Language Tech to Your Glasses." Liquid AI, 2025-09-15. https://www.liquid.ai/press/brilliant-labs-partners-with-liquid-ai-to-bring-vision-language-tech-to-your-glasses
11. Ben Schoon. "Hands-on: Frame by Brilliant Labs is a disappointing stepping stone to something better." 9to5Google, 2024-05-31. https://9to5google.com/2024/05/31/brilliant-labs-frame-hands-on/
12. Karl Guttag. "Brilliant Labs Frame AR with AI Glasses & a Little More on the Apple Vision Pro." KGOnTech, 2024-05-09. https://kguttag.com/2024/05/09/brilliant-labs-frame-ar-with-ai-glasses-a-little-more-on-the-apple-vision-pro/
13. "Frame." Brilliant Labs store, archived 2025-07-04. https://web.archive.org/web/20250704214427/https://brilliant.xyz/products/frame
14. "Frame Hardware Manual." Brilliant Documentation, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://docs.brilliant.xyz/frame/hardware/
15. "Halo." Brilliant Labs store, archived 2025-07-31. https://web.archive.org/web/20250731143246/https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo
16. Darragh Murphy. "Brilliant Labs unveils Halo, the 'world's thinnest AI glasses'." Tom's Guide, 2025-07-31. https://www.tomsguide.com/computing/smart-glasses/brilliant-labs-unveils-halo-the-worlds-thinnest-ai-glasses-and-it-wants-to-be-your-everyday-specs
17. "Halo Hardware Manual." Brilliant Documentation, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://docs.brilliant.xyz/halo/hardware/
18. Nick Flaherty. "Brilliant Labs and Alif Semiconductor partner on AI silicon for smart glasses." eeNews Europe, 2026-03-16. https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/brilliant-labs-and-alif-semiconductor-partner-on-ai-silicon-for-smart-glasses/
19. "Halo." Brilliant Labs store, archived 2025-12-15. https://web.archive.org/web/20251215200253/https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo
20. "frame-codebase." GitHub, brilliantlabsAR, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/frame-codebase
21. "brilliantlabsAR repositories." GitHub organisation listing, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://github.com/orgs/brilliantlabsAR/repositories
22. "Halo SDK." Brilliant Documentation, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://docs.brilliant.xyz/halo/halo-sdk/
23. "brilliant_sdk." GitHub, brilliantlabsAR, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/brilliant_sdk
24. Donald Papp. "Brilliant Labs Has New Smart Glasses, With A New Display." Hackaday, 2025-08-04. https://hackaday.com/2025/08/04/brilliant-labs-has-new-smart-glasses-with-a-new-display/
25. "Brilliant Labs Discord server." Invite metadata, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://discord.com/invite/vDS9X7gdwg
26. "Monocle." Brilliant Labs store, archived 2023-05-18. https://web.archive.org/web/20230518130447/https://brilliant.xyz/products/monocle
27. Kate Park. "Smart glasses maker Even Realities hits $1B valuation with $150M funding led by Meituan, Tencent." TechCrunch, 2026-07-06. https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/06/smart-glasses-maker-even-realities-hits-1b-valuation-with-150m-funding-led-by-meituan-tencent/
28. "Vuzix Corporation Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025." US Securities and Exchange Commission, 2026-03-12. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1463972/000110465926027163/vuzi-20251231x10k.htm
29. "docs, halo directory." GitHub, brilliantlabsAR, retrieved 2026-08-02. https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/docs/tree/main/halo