Another year, another Google I/O keynote filled to the brim with AI. The search giant today previewed a future that's equally cool and anxiety-inducing. From a supercharged Gemini Pro that's morphing into the de facto search experience to new generative audio and visual tools — including ones that can code apps and games or mix full music tracks and cinematic films with a prompt — it’s scary just how close AI is to replicating human creativity.

It’s no secret Google wants Gemini in everything, starting with your smartphone and web experiences. But later this year, it’s expanding to smart glasses with the Android XR platform, which has been in preview for months.

Although Google was one of the first at bat with a pair of smart glasses known as Google Glass, in a way, it’s playing catchup to Meta and its stylish AI-powered Ray-Ban glasses, which are already on the market and integrate a camera, microphone, and speakers to deliver a multimodal AI experience. But Google’s Android XR platform seems poised to push the bar for what’s possible by not only incorporating each of those elements but also adding augmented reality through an overlaid display. (Meta is said to be working on an updated pair with similar mixed reality features, which may launch in 2025.)

Google’s edge lies in the increasingly impressive and ambitious Gemini. Not to discount Meta AI, but Google seems to be developing its platforms with much broader and deeper capabilities and at a much more rapid pace.

For now, Android XR’s toolkit seems mostly similar to Meta’s. It can view the world through its lenses and respond to queries about the objects, text, places, and even people you see. You can also capture POV photos and video, have Gemini translate your conversations in real time, get guided navigation directions with visual cues, and initiate any other general query you want. Meta AI has picked up more useful features in recent months, such as the ability to remember where you’ve parked and other life-changing conveniences.

Imagining what all of this could look like after a few years of maturation, I see creatives using the cameras on these devices to visualize the world in new ways. One idea that comes to mind is a director of photography using the camera at potential shoot locations to conceptualize and visualize scenes based on real-world locations.

With Gemini’s 3D modeling feature, you could perhaps use your voice to snap captures on-device and ask Gemini to recreate the scene you’re looking at as a stylized backdrop for an AI-generated film, or even recreate it as a 3D environment that you can use for projects like games or animated films. It’s unlikely that those types of operations can happen on-device, but theoretically, you could snap the photo or video and conveniently feed it to Gemini to play with later.

Unlike the original Google Glass I fell in love with over a decade ago in 2013, Google is partnering with luxury eyewear brands such as Warby Parker and Gentle Monster to develop stylish frames that you won’t be uncomfortable wearing, solving one of the biggest pain points that stymied the original. Tech brands such as Samsung and Xreal are also working on hardware, with the latter freshly announcing a pair called Project Aura.

The bulk and general geekiness of the original Google Glass made them difficult and embarrassing to use in public. Not only were they annoying to wear, but people always looked silly as they constantly strained their eyeballs mid-conversation to view whatever filled the tiny off-centered heads-up display.

I vaguely remember how some Google Glass wearers would use them while driving, while pedestrians sometimes strolled into busy crosswalks haphazardly. Granted, this was during a trip to Google I/O featuring a heavy concentration of opulent developers and journalists who’d just bought a $1,500 pair. The design wasn’t inherently unsafe, and the rectangular prism they used for a display didn’t block your frontal or peripheral vision enough for concern, but no amount of foolproofing can account for the human natures of curiosity and wandering attention.

Google Glass also prompted contentious debates about personal privacy in public spaces. It wasn’t always obvious whether someone was recording you, and that angered some folks to the point of violence. Some even coined a term for those who used the glasses so much or so invasively that they actually became a nuisance to society — meet the Google Glassholes.

Eventually, I lost interest in Google Glass. As much as I liked them, they were beautifully ugly, exorbitantly expensive, and not useful enough to people who were unready and unwilling to live 90 percent of their lives surrounded by cameras. Joke’s on them: everyone is blatantly recording everything now, so society has collectively given up on that fight.

Needless to say, I’m lusting hard for a pair of Android XR glasses. I also still want whatever Meta’s cooking for its next magic trick. The race for consumer-ready wearables is firmly between the two right now, and I’m eager to see how each plans to expand. Meanwhile, top competitors Microsoft and Apple are still happy to toil away on mixed reality platforms for headsets that are a lot more powerful, but that no one should be caught walking around in public with.

The future of smart glasses and other XR wearables interests me so much that I’m willing to try wearing the contacts I’ve been deathly afraid of all my life to use them. (My weirdly strong prescription is seemingly impossible for Ray-Ban to fill, and I fear meeting the same fate with Google’s partners.)

Finally, I can upgrade from my shattered iPhone 12 Pro Max. Apple has just announced the iPhone 16 series, including both sizes of the base model and both of the Pro models. Preorders for the phones begin Friday, September 13th, with the release date slated for a week later, on September 20th. I won’t jump into the specifics of all that’s new — you can get a deeper breakdown from my friends at The Verge — but I do want to opine why I think this may be the first iPhone upgrade that makes sense (for me and other serious creatives, anyway) in years.

The iPhone 12 Pro Max was my first reentrant into Apple’s mobile ecosystem since ditching the iPhone 8, which preceded a years-long situationship with Samsung’s flagship Galaxy smartphones. You can imagine how jarring the reunion was. The hardware was sleek and powerful, but more impressively, iOS has gradually grown on me as a dynamic and capable platform that handily supports my professional endeavors and creative pursuits. I still can’t do much to inject the suave software experience with relics of my personality, perhaps save for changing the wallpaper and a ringtone, but it’s such a joy to use now that I haven’t been compelled to jump ship.

I found also that there just wasn’t much incentive to. The iPhone 13 Pro was a relatively pedestrian upgrade. We got slight and marginal camera improvements to go along with a 120Hz refresh rate display, but neither impacted my experience enough to warrant another $1,000-plus purchase.

The list of meaningful improvements to the iPhone 14 was even shorter. It introduced the pill-shaped camera cutout that Apple smartly built new software features around, but I immediately sussed out the Dynamic Island as a gimmicky bandaid to cover what I considered a wart. After the fanfare and that “new feature smell” wore off, that’s exactly how it turned out.

Otherwise, there wasn’t a ton more to care about until the iPhone 15 launched. We finally got USB-C, Apple upgraded the camera system on the Pro variants with more substantive recording options (such as its impressive high-dynamic-range ProRes Log color profile), and we even got a multifunction button to replace the increasingly useless mute switch. To boot, we later learned that it’d be the oldest iPhone you can buy that’ll support Apple Intelligence.

Still, I waited. It turned out to be a win-win decision. If the iPhone 16 materialized as another routine update, I could save a bunch of money on a refurbished iPhone 15 Pro Max and call it a day. If Apple changed the world as we know it with the iPhone 16, I could happily expand my budget and join the preorder craze for the first time.

I don’t think it’s anywhere near world-changing, but the iPhone 16 Pros, specifically, are probably worth the added splurge for creatives. The camera system received an upgraded 48-megapixel “Fusion” camera (seemingly Apple’s unique label for its pixel binning technique) and a new 48MP ultrawide sensor to go along with the 5x telephoto. More substantially, the A18 Pro chipset bears a new image signal processor that’s pulling more weight. You can record 4K at up to 120 frames per second, complete with Dolby Vision and HDR throughout the range to help maximize the delightful color you can achieve with ProRes Log.

Apple even introduced a dedicated capacitive button that not only adds a physical and haptic mechanism for snapping photos but also allows sliding your finger to quickly swap between its three optical focal lengths. You’ll get half-press locking for focus and exposure after a post-launch software update. Apple is too cool to call it a shutter button like all the other drab cameras, of course, so it’s landing on Camera Control. There’s also a newly updated four-microphone system that supports spatial audio recording. I don’t know if it’ll work as well as it sounded during Apple’s demo, but I’m rather happy to have it at all.

As someone deeply interested in consolidating my content creation tools down to as few devices as possible, the iPhone 16 Pro reveal left me salivate and wanting. If you’re just recording trendy TikTok dances or snapping a shot of your dinner for the gram, feel free to stay where you are. But serious creators likely won’t find a better suite of recording options in a pocket-sized slab. I’ll update this space with further feelings in a few short weeks.