How I helped Brilliant Labs launch developer SDKs for the Frame wearable smart glasses. If you want to build something for the best smart glasses I’ve seen in a decade, now it’s easy to get started!
I have an unhealthy obsession with Google Glass, which unfortunately has been a story of unfulfilled promise for over a decade since I got my first Glass Explorer Edition back in 2013. Every year I go to CES to scope out if maybe this is the year someone finally released wearable computer smart glasses that are subtle enough to wear in real life and doesn’t wind up being vaporware. There have been some promising attempts over the years, but they always ended in disappointment (notably the Focals by North which sadly never actually released a developer SDK and then abruptly shut down after being acquired by Google, and remotely bricked all existing devices).
So, when I heard about Brilliant Lab’s new Frame “AI Glasses” this spring, I was excited. They are subtle and openly hackable, a combo which I haven’t seen actually available for sale in the decade since Google Glass.
While the early version of the Frame is not impressive from a technical point of view, it’s very impressive from the point of view that I can actually wear it in social situations without upsetting people, and I can program it to do whatever I want. So I started trying to do just that, only to be met with somewhat confusing documentation and limited hand-holding for someone who is used to higher-level development. Doing anything with the Frame required manually sending bytes over Bluetooth LE. I worked my way through it, but it was tedious, especially since the docs could have best been described as a work in progress.
But! Brilliant Labs has a very hacker-friendly ethos where everything is open-sourced and everything is open to the community. So I collaborated with the team and took it upon myself to build a better way to develop for Frame. Which leads me to today…
I am excited to share the new Frame Software Development Kit for the Frame smart glasses! Currently available in Python and Flutter, and coming soon for Swift and Kotlin, these new SDKs wrap all the hard stuff and make it super easy for anyone to build apps for their Frame, even if you have no experience with BTLE, low-level programming, or hardware. It’s hard to describe how much simpler it makes the development process, but suffice to say it eliminates weeks of developing and testing your own boilerplate to get off the ground.
As proof of how simple it makes development, over this week I helped run the official Frame Launch Hackathon, and in just a few hours we had people go from unboxing a Frame device to building all sorts of cool apps, from a pong game to a teleprompter, an AI-powered Pokemon card generator for the people you meet (an homage to Niantic who generously let us use their space for the event) to a tool for dementia patients to help remember faces and conversations in partnership with a care provider. All in an afternoon!
So if you want to build something for the best smart glasses I’ve seen in a decade, it’s easy to get started. Check out the documentation here, the Python and Flutter packages, and examples for Python and Flutter. Ping me if you have any questions, and please share with me if you build something cool!