HTC VIVE Eagle Smart Glasses Go on Sale in Australia at A$799

SYDNEY - HTC Corp.’s VIVE division put the VIVE Eagle AI smart glasses on wider sale in Australia on Monday at A$799, with stock listed through VIVE.com, Amazon and selected Harvey Norman stores after an earlier preorder window, expanding the company’s wearable push beyond virtual-reality headsets into everyday AI eyewear.

The glasses, which start at about 48.5 to 49 grams with lenses fitted, ship in Pantos and Square frames across colorways including Charcoal Black, Clear Brown, Navy, Brown, Black and Berry, with ZEISS options for UV400 clear or sunglass lenses and UV380 adaptive glass. Australian commercial boxes include a Lenswap voucher covering common prescription ranges, according to local launch materials. Hardware pairs Qualcomm’s Snapdragon AR1 Gen 1 platform with 4 gigabytes of memory, a 12-megapixel ultrawide camera that can record vertical video up to about 3K resolution, open-ear directional speakers, a four-microphone array and an IP54 dust-and-splash rating. A 235 milliamp-hour battery is rated for roughly 4.5 hours of continuous music playback, more than three hours of calling and up to 36 hours on standby, with magnetic fast charging that HTC says can reach about 50 percent in 10 minutes; an optional 8-gram VIVE Power Boost pack priced at A$79 adds about 80 percent more runtime.

Photo: techAU

Software is the sharper differentiator. Through the VIVE Connect app on iOS and Android, wearers can choose Google Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT for heavier queries while basic commands such as photos, music and calls stay on-device. HTC says more complex prompts are de-identified and encrypted before they reach the selected model, that customer data is not sold or used to train VIVE AI, and that the stack carries ISO 27001 and ISO 27701 certifications. Privacy hardware includes an outward LED that lights whenever the camera is active and dims or brightens with ambient light; HTC says capture stops if the glasses are removed or the LED is covered, and that bystanders can end a recording by saying “stop filming.” Photos and video stay encrypted in 32 gigabytes of onboard storage until the user chooses to move them to a phone.

Photo: HTC VIVE

Feature claims for the Australian build include live speech translation across roughly 90 to 96 languages depending on the plan tier, image-to-text translation for more than 70 languages, an AI memory bank for lists and locations, and VIVE AI Notes for transcripts and summaries. Eligible purchases include 24 months of VIVE AI Plus. Cher Wang, HTC’s co-founder and chairperson, said in a statement accompanying the launch that the product aims to “tap into powerful AI tools and free your hands so you can be more present in the moment.” Whether those safeguards and dual-model flexibility are enough to make face-worn cameras socially acceptable will be tested as the glasses move from preorder pages onto Harvey Norman shelves this week.