The Vive Eagle glasses can get 4.5 hours of battery life on continuous music playback. They can last 36 hours on standby. HTC also sells a companion clip-on battery pack called Power Boost that costs $49. It clips right onto the frame and is noticeable but not as obnoxious as you might think.

Don’t forget the AI assistant, Vive AI, which can utilize OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini. It doesn’t require a login, so users are “de-identified” in a way that keeps the services from retaining personal information. (That also means, by default, you won’t be able to enjoy many of the personalization features these chatbots offer by gleaning information from your emails and messages.) The glasses come with Vive’s AI Plus, free for the first two years. After that, users must pay a monthly $2.50 subscription fee.

Right by the cameras is a bright indicator light. If you cover the light, it won’t record. If someone around you says stop recording, that will stop the recording. Video footage you capture is encrypted and stored on the glasses—it’s not automatically sent to the phone or cloud. If you want to import photos or videos, you have to do it manually in the app.

Meta has faced scrutiny over the indicator light before, as some users have blocked the LED with stickers or broken into the hardware to turn it off. Meta has responded with software updates that disable the camera if someone tampers with the indicator light, along with other privacy-focused measures.

I ask McDowell how HTC, and really any smart glasses maker, can get past the “trust me, bro”–style privacy promises companies tend to make.

“We’re not a social media company,” McDowell says. “There’s no benefit to me to have any of your info. We don’t train our AI model or any third-party AI models with any of the information that is used on the glasses.”

The real problem may be that with cameras on the frames, smart glasses are hard to distinguish between brands. The Vive Eagles look a lot like Meta glasses, and people worried about those privacy issues may not know that the Eagles are different and not tied to Mark Zuckerberg’s company. I’ve had friends see me wearing them and ask if they’re smart glasses. Yeah, I replied, but not the ones they’re thinking of. That didn’t seem to dispel any of their suspicions.

The hope, at least how HTC frames it, is that more players with better privacy practices will help shift cultural disdain for smart glasses. A bunch of other companies are going cameraless, like Even Realities, Viture, and Halliday. Others are building theirs with privacy shields or focusing on virtual displays instead of capturing the world around you. That said, no one has captured the market quite like Meta.

“We’d like to make sure that our technology adapts to society’s expectations, not the other way around,” McDowell says. “I hope that everybody that’s making products like these takes steps in the right direction.”