Smartglasses are gradually emerging as a new category of connected imaging devices. While the market is still in its early stages, manufacturers are already exploring new ways to integrate photo and video capture into lightweight wearable products designed for everyday use.
Unlike smartphones, smartglasses without integrated displays do not allow user to preview or assess the framing or image quality in real time while capturing content. This lack of immediate visual feedback can lead to framing inaccuracies, exposure inconsistencies, and other perceptual shortcomings that directly affect the user experience.
At DXOMARK, drawing on more than 20 years of expertise in image quality evaluation and anticipating emerging imaging for image capture, we are beginning to assess smartglasses devices. In this article, we explore the various challenges this new product category must overcome to become a true alternative to smartphones.
Why smartglasses are different from smartphones
Although smartphones and smart glasses can both capture photos and videos, the technical realities behind these devices are fundamentally different.
Smartphones benefit from larger camera modules, more advanced stabilization systems, and highly optimized image processing pipelines. Smart glasses, by contrast, must integrate miniature imaging systems into lightweight frames (ideally below 50g) that remain comfortable enough for extended wear. These constraints directly impact image quality performance, especially in dynamic real-world conditions.
The capture experience itself also changes significantly. Smart glasses record content from a first-person perspective and are often used spontaneously while walking or moving. As a result, head motion becomes directly visible in the recorded footage, creating new challenges for stabilization, exposure adaptation, shutter management, and overall viewing experience.
Unlike smartphones, smartglasses without integrated displays do not allow user to preview or assess the framing or image quality in real time while capturing content. This lack of immediate visual feedback can lead to framing inaccuracies, exposure inconsistencies, and other perceptual shortcomings that directly affect the user experience.
Another major challenge lies in the field of view. Because smartglasses capture scenes from the wearer’s natural point of view, users would most likely expect the recorded image to closely match what they see with their own eyes. Achieving this requires a sufficiently wide field of view, but increasing the viewing angle introduces optical compromises such as flare, distortion, reduced sharpness at the edges and greater stabilization complexity. Balancing immersion, image quality and device compactness therefore becomes a critical aspect of smartglasses camera design.
First observations from our initial evaluations
At DXOMARK, we have recently conducted an initial series of evaluations on smartglasses camera systems. These early tests revealed encouraging progress, but also highlighted several recurring image quality limitations, particularly in real-world usage conditions where motion, lighting changes, and first-person perspective all interact simultaneously.
A strong existing gap vs. smartphones
One of the primary ambitions of smartglasses is to offer a credible alternative to smartphone cameras for everyday capture. While progress is clearly visible, our first observations show that a substantial gap still remains between the two product categories, especially in video performance.
In favorable lighting conditions, such as outdoor scenes with stable illumination and limited dynamic range, the best smartglasses can already approach the image quality of premium smartphone ultra-wide cameras. However, the differences become more apparent in challenging situations.
Apart from favorable outdoor conditions, smartglasses still face significant challenges. High-contrast scenes, indoor environments, and low-light situations remain particularly difficult due to the smaller sensor formats typically used in wearable devices, which limit light capture capabilities. Combined with more constrained processing resources, this often results in higher noise levels, reduced detail preservation, and lower overall image quality compared to modern smartphones.
Video is particularly challenging because natural head motion introduces complex stabilization constraints. Maintaining smooth footage, controlled motion blur, and stable exposure simultaneously remains difficult for most devices.
Our evaluations also revealed strong disparities between brands. More established players already demonstrate better tuning and overall consistency, while newer entrants still face noticeable challenges in exposure, color rendering, stabilization, and low-light performance.
Skin Tone rendering and face reproduction
One of the most visible challenges concerns how faces are rendered in uncontrolled lighting environments.
In these scenarios, skin tones can appear inconsistent or less natural than expected, especially when moving between different lighting environments such as indoor mixed lighting, shaded outdoor areas, or backlit scenes. Small changes in angle or illumination can strongly impact color rendering, leading to perceptual shifts in facial appearance.
We tested several smart glasses and compared them with a smartphone. An example comparison is shown below.
Exposure stability and highlights preservation
A second key challenge relates to exposure behavior in high-contrast scenes.
Smart glasses operate in fully dynamic environments where lighting conditions can change abruptly as the user moves. This often leads to loss of highlight detail in bright outdoor areas, face exposure variations depending on background brightness, and visible exposure adjustments during movement. The most sensitive situations are typically backlit scenes, where the camera must balance environmental brightness and correct exposure of the face or main subject.
Optical Flare and Stray Light Sensitivity
We also observed noticeable flare artifacts in certain optical conditions. When strong light sources enter the lens at specific angles, some smart glasses devices exhibit visible flare patterns or internal reflections. These can reduce contrast or introduce unwanted bright artifacts.
Smartglasses cameras often combine ultra-wide fields of view with largely uncontrolled first-person capture scenarios. As a result, bright light sources may be present within the frame or in peripheral regions of the optical path, increasing sensitivity to flare, ghosting, and stray light artifacts compared with traditional smartphone use cases.
Building Evaluation Methodologies for Wearable Cameras
At DXOMARK, we are developing dedicated evaluation methodologies to better characterize real-world smartglasses performance across a wide range of image-quality attributes. Combining controlled laboratory measurements with perceptual evaluations in natural scenes, our approach is designed to cover diverse lighting conditions and real-life use cases representative of everyday wearable capture.
Stay tuned on dxomark.com for upcoming smartglasses evaluations and benchmark results.
