These New Smart Glasses From Ex-OnePlus Engineers Have a Hidden Cost

Lots of smart glasses have AI bots inside them now. The one in L'Atitude 52°N’s glasses is called Goya, named after Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish artist who painted renowned masterpieces of romanticism.

CEO and founder Gary Chen, who has worked on wearable devices for companies like Oppo, OnePlus, and HTC, says his company’s glasses are focused on travelers, with AI features that act like a tour guide and talk about all the paintings in famous museums.

“Basically, you can say, ‘Hey, Goya, what is the story about Mona Lisa?’” Chen says. “You can ask anything and, with your permission, they will take a photo to analyze what’s in front of you.”

I ask if you could quiz it about perhaps the most famous Goya painting, the terrifying, Gothic horror-esque image of Saturn devouring his own son.

“Yes, yes,” Chen says, “It can also give you some recommendations about restaurants.”

Berlin-based L'Atitude 52°N is a new player in the smart glasses space, selling its first pairs on Kickstarter in September 2025, where the campaign surpassed its funding goal and raised more than $400,000. There have been some bumps since then, as shipments were delayed from an originally announced release date in February 2026, and one model in development was scrapped outright. Now, L'Atitude 52°N has announced an official release date for its smart glasses.

Preorders for one model, called Berlin, start on May 19. The glasses actually go on sale on May 26. This might be a disappointment for Kickstarter backers, as the most recent official update from the campaign came in March and said shipping would begin on April 15 for Berlin units and June 7 for the second model, called Milan. L'Atitude 52°N still hasn’t set an official launch date for the Milan, except to say that it will be “arriving in the second quarter of 2026.”

The Berlin glasses cost $399. Add another $50 for the photochromatic lenses. There is one very big catch: The AI features enabled on the device will only work for 12 months, which L'Atitude 52°N calls an “AI feature trial.” After that, customers have to pay for a subscription service, or will be limited to the base features, like playing music and capturing media.

How much will that subscription service cost? Chen says he doesn’t know.

“Right now, we don't have a final plan for the subscription,” Chen says, adding that it will take maybe six months after people buy and use the device before they make that call.

He is not yet sure about how exactly the company will calculate the costs, but is relying on people to buy the glasses so the company can figure out how to charge them based on user behavior.

“If you go to the British Museum, you can buy a tour guide, maybe $3,” Chen says. “Most of the features will still be free. That is our principle. And some more advanced features, we will plan to charge.”

The L'Atitude 52°N glasses are aimed squarely at competing with Meta, which has all but dominated the nascent smart glasses market. L'Atitude 52°N’s Berlin glasses offer many very similar features. There is a 12-megapixel camera with a wide-angle lens that can capture up to 107-degree viewing angles. It can record 1080p video. (Meta’s new Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses can capture 3K video.) The glasses have 32 GB of onboard storage for storing photos and videos. They come in two color options (“obsidian” and “dune”) and have the choice of regular gradient sunglass lenses or photochromatic lenses that darken when exposed to light.

They are enabled with onboard AI features, powered by Google’s Gemini, which can be triggered with the “Hey Goya” voice commands picked up by microphone arrays on the rim. Berlin can also play audio through open-ear stereo speakers on the rims and pick up voice commands via a microphone.

The ability to point a camera at a painting and ask an AI chatbot about it isn’t exactly a new feat. Phone apps like Google Lens have had these features for a while. Smart glasses are a newish medium for tech to enter, and they're already available in devices like Meta’s glasses. Google has already shown off this capability in its upcoming Android XR glasses.

The Berlin glasses have decent privacy features, like an indicator light at the temple that flashes when recording or snapping a picture. L'Atitude 52°N says that when media is captured on the glasses, it is offloaded to the connected phone app, but not stored in a cloud or anywhere else. The L'Atitude 52°N press release acknowledges that, “While some user interactions may generate cloud records, these are anonymous.” (People have proven rather adept at circumventing security measures on Meta glasses, so we’ll see how these fare.)

Chen wants to distinguish these as smart glasses specifically geared toward travel. Hence the emphasis on the AI tour guide. But if the AI tech that enables those useful travel features will only be available on the device for one year, people are probably going to feel cheated when they are asked to pay more for the service.

Some Kickstarter backers had been assured “lifetime access to AI,” but the press release for the Berlin glasses says that anyone else won’t get the same deal, saying, “Lifetime AI access for Kickstarter backers is tied exclusively to the device purchased through the crowdfunding campaign and cannot be transferred or upgraded.”

2026 is bound to be a big year for smart glasses, especially as big companies like Google and Apple make moves toward building out their efforts. There are lots of other developers using Google’s Android XR platform to build out their smart glasses efforts as well, though L'Atitude 52°N is not among them.

Talking with Chen, I pose a question. If his Kickstarter got delayed twice, one model got canceled, and now he's saying the company will eventually charge an unspecified amount more for a service it's advertising as the key feature of these glasses, how will people feel about that? Is that track record going to encourage them to pay money for this device?

“I have to say, we really underestimated this kind of product,” Chen says, insisting that the company will ship its Kickstarter orders within the next couple of weeks. “We will keep communicating with our Kickstarter users. I'm sorry for waiting, but I'm sure that will be a good product.”