A new wave of smart glasses bets professionals will pay $599 to skip the camera

Halliday's $599 G2 Glasses Skip the Camera but Not the Recording

Halliday's G2 smart glasses cost $599, are scheduled for first shipment in September 2026, and make a straightforward pitch: no camera, no creep factor. The frames listen to your meetings, transcribe what people say, and use AI to summarize the conversation, surfacing highlights through a display embedded near the top of the lens 1. The target buyer is what Halliday calls "high-performance professionals": founders, CEOs, anyone willing to spend $599 on frames plus a subscription that runs $10 to $99 per month 1. A free tier covers 120 minutes of recording 1.

The camera-free design is a deliberate counter to Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses, which dominate the category and earned the "pervert glasses" label after people used the built-in cameras to secretly photograph and film others, mostly women, who didn't know they were being recorded 1. Halliday leans into the contrast in its press materials, calling the G2 "a professional tool for real-world work and social environments" and saying the absence of a camera makes the glasses "better suited for meetings, client conversations, secure workplaces, and other spaces where recording devices may be unwelcome" 1.

But the G2 has no indicator light. No LED, no chime, no visual cue of any kind to alert people in the room that the microphones embedded in the frame are recording 1. When WIRED asked about this, a Halliday media contact wrote: "The user should disclose to the room that the recording is in progress, as it is required by any other recording device" 1. That self-disclosure obligation is the entire privacy architecture. There is no hardware-level safeguard.

The problem Meta's Ray-Bans exposed was never really about cameras. It was about capture without consent: a person being recorded without their knowledge. Halliday solved the half of that problem everyone can see. The microphones capture conversations, feed them to an AI service called Meeting Flow, and produce transcripts, summaries, and extracted action items through features named Thread Tracker, Decision Confirmation, and Commitment Check 1. Full transcripts are stored in a companion app 1. A person sitting across the table has no way to know any of this is happening unless the wearer volunteers the information.

The G2 even ships with what Halliday calls "Stealth mode," which dims the display in dark rooms so the glasses attract less attention 1. The mode controls the screen, not the microphones. But the branding signals something about the device's design philosophy: build it to blend in.

Halliday isn't alone in betting that camera-free means privacy-safe. Smart glasses brand Even Realities launched its own camera-free G2 glasses last year with a similar pitch 1. The difference is that some wearables at least try to signal capture. Bee's Pioneer, another wearable device, emits a light when it records 1. The G2 does not.

Halliday's first-generation glasses debuted at CES 2025 to mixed reviews and landed in WIRED's "Don't Bother" category 1. The G2 raises both the specifications and the price as Halliday tries to establish a foothold before Samsung, Google, and Apple enter the category in force 1.

The G2 does offer a legitimate accessibility use case: the display can render real-time subtitles for spoken conversations and translate 45 languages, a function that could help people who are deaf or hard of hearing 1. But the core business proposition is meeting capture sold as productivity.

The wearables industry studied the "pervert glasses" backlash and concluded the fix was removing the lens. The G2 keeps recording audio, includes no indicator light, and leaves disclosure to the wearer. It doesn't close the privacy gap Meta opened. It narrows the surveillance from video to audio and moves it from a public street to a conference room.

Professionals are being asked to pay $599 for that.