One hundred conversations about what people expect to be wearing in three years, what they expect everyone around them to be wearing, and what they'd rather nobody wore near them.
My work is with audio and wearable companies, so the future of this category comes up in most of my conversations. The problem is that every piece of evidence I had was tied to one client and one form factor. A study on open-ear earbuds tells you about open-ear earbuds. Nobody was asking people about the whole category at once, and nobody was asking the person standing next to the wearer.
So I ran 100 conversations with a cross-section of U.S. adults and asked three things: what will you be wearing in three years, what will the people around you be wearing, and what would you rather nobody wore near you. Then I asked each person to design their perfect wearable from a blank sheet.
I wanted to test whether there's a gap between what the large platforms are building and what people would choose. There is, and it's wider than I expected.
Underneath those: the smartwatch is blocking new health devices, the standalone recorder is the deadest category in the study, and the AI phone is the one AI device almost nobody objects to.
Sample. 100 completed sessions, recruited through Prolific, U.S. adults, quota-balanced to 25 people in each of four age bands: 18 to 29, 30 to 44, 45 to 59, and 60 and over. 63 women, 34 men, 3 who didn't say. All sessions ran in text.
Instrument. Each person saw the same list of ten devices and answered four pick-list questions and one scaled question, then had a short moderated conversation about their answers, then answered one open-ended design prompt.
The device list: standard earbuds, open-ear earbuds, smartwatch, health-tracking band or patch, smart ring, audio-only smart glasses, smart glasses with a camera and audio, smart glasses with a camera and display, a standalone wearable recorder, and an AI-first phone.
Moderation. An AI moderator ran the conversation between Q5 and Q6, asking each person about the gaps in their own answers: why they expect a device to be common but don't plan to use it, why they'd rather not be near something they expect to see everywhere, and what they think other people get out of a device they don't want themselves. 272 participant turns across the 100 sessions. I read all of them.
Analysis. Counts and cross-tabs on the pick lists. Hand-coded themes across the conversations and the design prompts. Every quote in this report is verbatim.
A note on n. One hundred people is enough to see the shape of a category and to hear why people answer the way they do. It isn't enough to put decimal points on anything. Read the percentages as "roughly half," not "exactly 57."
What people own, in order: standard earbuds (69), an AI-capable phone (60), a smartwatch (45), open-ear earbuds (22), a health band or patch (16), a smart ring (10). Then a long drop: camera-and-audio glasses (3), audio-only glasses (3), camera-and-display glasses (2), and a standalone recorder (0).
Three years out, the picture shifts at the edges. Standard earbuds are the only category that shrinks: 15 current owners don't expect to be using them, and only 10 non-owners expect to start. Open-ear earbuds grow from 22 to 30, rings from 10 to 20, health bands from 16 to 26. Camera glasses pick up 14 to 16 new intenders each, from a base of 2 or 3.
The gap between what people expect for themselves and what they expect for everyone else is large for every device, and I don't read much into it. Q3 asks about a whole population, so it's naturally bigger. The number worth looking at is on the other side: what people expect to see and would rather not.
Among devices people don't already own, smart glasses with cameras are the ones most expected to be common in three years: 45% for the camera-and-audio version, 43% for camera-and-display. They're also the devices most people would rather not be near: 57% and 54%. Only 16% and 17% plan to wear them.
Forty-two people expect a device to be common and would rather not be near it, for the same device, and camera glasses account for most of that. Seventy-four of 100 people flagged at least one capture device on Q4. Forty-six flagged both kinds of camera glasses.
Why they expect them. Thirty-two people expect camera glasses to be common but don't plan to wear them. I asked all of them why. The answers fall into three groups, and none of them is a use case.
The first group pointed at marketing and visibility: "Meta glasses... collaborations with celebrities such as Kylie Jenner," "I've heard and seen people wear them," "more people out in the world, I do not know anybody who owns them."
The second group pointed at other people's vanity: "People like to be first," "showing off their fabulous lifestyle," "document their life for social media."
The third group had no reason at all: "Just a guess, really," "I have no idea what they would use them for."
The only use anyone offered was assigned to somebody else: "handy for people with visual difficulties." Nobody described a moment in their own life where the glasses would help.
Why they don't want them nearby. The objection is that you can't tell when the camera is on. A phone is obvious. Glasses aren't.
"It's bad enough when others are using a camera but that's typically obvious. Glasses with cameras aren't obviously filming."
Man, 60+"People are known to already remove the LED that lets people know the glasses are recording, so people are being recorded without knowledge nor permission."
Man, 30 to 44"That they are staring at you extra hard and won't look away."
Woman, 45 to 59, asked what she pictures when someone near her is wearing them"What if I am disclosing something sensitive and private and then it gets posted on TikTok later without my knowledge?"
Woman, 18 to 29That last person owns camera glasses. She plans to keep wearing the audio pair. She'd rather nobody wore the display pair near her. When I asked how she holds those two positions together, she said:
I square it with it being more common.
That's not enthusiasm. She expects the thing she's worried about to happen anyway, so she's stopped arguing with it. Several people in the study sounded like that, and none of them sounded like a customer.
The blank-sheet check. When I gave people a blank sheet and asked them to design anything, three drew glasses. One said "glasses with AI." One asked for "a smart lens with translation function." One, an 18 to 29 man who plans to wear both camera types, wrote the only real spec: lightweight glasses that look like normal glasses, with navigation, calls, music, quick photos and an assistant. Then he spent the second half of his answer on conditions: "clear control over when the camera or microphone is active and what data gets saved," with "battery life and privacy" mattering more than features. A fourth person asked for a holographic display and led with "no glasses."
So 45 expect to see them everywhere and 3 would design them. The one person who described the product in detail also wrote its consent policy without being asked.
What this means if you're building in the category. The product is designed for the wearer and judged by the bystander, and the bystander has no way to opt out. That's the risk to the category, and it doesn't get solved by better hardware. The fixes people named, unprompted, are all about making the device legible: a recording indicator that can't be removed, control over when the camera is on, data that stays with the wearer. Nobody in this sample is waiting for more features.
I asked how a device running on AI would change their interest, on a five-point scale. Twelve said much less, 18 said less, 55 said no change, 12 said more, 3 said much more. Thirty cooled, 15 warmed.
The age pattern runs the opposite direction from what I expected. Among 18 to 29 year olds, 14 were less interested and 3 more. Among people 60 and over, 3 were less interested and 6 more. Mean scores by age band, youngest to oldest: 2.44, 2.76, 2.80, 3.04.
The people who disliked the AI label also rejected more devices overall: 3.3 devices flagged on Q4, against 1.9 for everyone else. The youngest group was also the most hostile to camera glasses, at 68 to 72%, and the most price-sensitive.
Their reasons:
"I'm already glued to tech far too many hours of my day."
18 to 29"I don't want anything I am saying being listened to by a non-human entity."
18 to 29"AI steals from artists."
18 to 29"Contributing to the dumbing down of the population."
60+, for balanceEvery wearable launch this year leads with AI, and the people it's aimed at are the ones the word puts off. On this evidence, AI belongs in the spec sheet rather than the headline, at least for anyone under 30.
The last question was a blank sheet: design your perfect wearable, or tell me you'd rather not wear anything.
About 30 people said they'd rather not wear anything. Of the roughly 70 who designed something, about 35 described passive health monitoring: heart rate, blood sugar, sleep, vitamin deficiency, "monitor my blood sugar and step count." About 30 used the language of form and jewelry. Six designed a safety device, which I come back to below. AI came up three or four times. A conversation with the device came up exactly once: "something that attaches to my purse that can hear me and is linked to my phone."
What people want is a device that does its job and leaves them alone:
"Monitor everything without me having to interact with it."
"A battery that lasts for more than a year."
"Only connects remotely to my phone, or doesn't connect to anything at all."
"It would only record the info I needed, not anything additional."
Who the non-designers are. I expected the 30 to be phone-only holdouts. They aren't. Twenty-two of them own standard earbuds, 13 own a smartwatch, and only 5 own nothing at all. On the three-year list, 21 expect to be using earbuds, 13 a watch, 8 a health band, 22 an AI phone. Only 4 expect to be wearing nothing. Their AI score (2.6) and their rejection count (2.6) both match the sample average.
The skew is age. Twelve of the 30 are over 60, against 7 each in the two youngest bands and 4 in the 45 to 59 band. Seventeen are women, 13 are men.
Three in ten people, most of them current earbud and watch users, can't picture a wearable they don't already own. That's a compliment to the earbud and a problem for anyone selling something new: the ask isn't just to buy a product, it's to imagine one first.
A note on mood. Unprompted, a few people asked for something the category doesn't sell yet. One wanted "a wearable that helps with anxiety and existential dread." Sound for sleep and sound for focus have already found a market in devices that regulate rather than measure, and the blank sheets suggest that appetite goes further.
Audio-only smart glasses have no camera. Thirty-one percent would rather nobody wore them nearby. For every device that isn't glasses or a recorder, the rejection rate sits between 3 and 8 percent. The smartwatch is at 3. Open-ear earbuds, which are as visible as anything you can put on your ear, are at 8.
Five people rejected the audio-only glasses while accepting one of the camera versions. That only makes sense if people are reacting to the object rather than to what it does. Something about a computer on your face reads as wrong before anyone asks what it's for.
Three people in the sample are ruled out at the object level: they don't wear glasses and don't want to start. One ran into the physical conflict directly: "do not like the Shokz on top of my ear when I wear glasses."
The ear is barely rejected at all, and it's where the category is actually growing. Standard earbuds are the only device in the study that shrinks over three years. Open-ear, ring and health band all grow.
A cluster of the blank-sheet designs, almost all from women, are safety devices:
"A sensor while I'm walking to alert me if someone is approaching me from behind."
Woman, 60+"Any perceived altercation to be able to trigger a video/audio recording and automatically contact 911."
Woman"I am crossing the street and a car is coming. This gadget would alert me."
One 60+ woman picked open-ear earbuds specifically so she could hear what's around her: "guys sneaking up on me in the woods when I'm alone (been done)."
The part that stopped me is what those same people rejected. The woman who wants a sensor for someone approaching from behind flagged both kinds of camera glasses as things she'd rather not be near. The woman who wants altercation-triggered recording rejected the standalone recorder and the audio glasses. And camera rejection barely moves by sex: 60% of women, 53% of men.
So this isn't women versus cameras. Four things separate the camera people want from the camera they reject. Whose it is, whether it's running, where it's pointed, and who keeps the footage. The rejected camera belongs to a stranger, runs constantly, points at me, and the footage goes somewhere I'll never see. The wanted camera is mine, stays off until something happens, points at the threat, and the footage stays with me. Closest existing product: a dashcam.
Women supplied the use case because women described being followed. The design rule underneath it applies to everyone. A camera people will accept on a body is one where the person being filmed can tell it's on, and the person doing the filming carries the consequences.
The smartwatch is blocking new health devices. Fourteen people called health bands, rings or patches redundant with the watch they already own. "I don't know specifically what those provide that the Apple Watch doesn't." Anyone selling a new health form factor is competing against a device that's already on the wrist and already paid for.
Two kinds of no. Young people's rejections are about the product: principled, and often about price. Older people's rejections are about their bodies. A metal allergy. "Never worn jewelry or glasses." A watch that's "already kind of a burden." Yet the 60+ group rejects the fewest devices overall and is the most positive about AI. Nine of the 21 people who flagged nothing at all are over 60.
The recorder is dead and the AI phone is safe. Nobody owns a standalone wearable recorder. Fifty-three would rather nobody wore one nearby. The AI-first phone, which can do most of the same things, is expected by 62% and rejected by 4%. The phone gets away with it because everyone can see it, everyone already has one, and it lives in a pocket rather than on a face.
Expectations are running on assumed status behavior. When people explained why a device would become common, they talked about other people's motives (vanity, being first, social media) far more than about anything the device does. That's a thin foundation. Status behavior moves on.
Conversation themes, by number of sessions mentioning them. Privacy and recording, 42. Form and physical discomfort, 31. Other people as trend-chasers, 20. No need, 19. Redundant with my watch, 14. Cost, 13. Don't know enough about it, 12. Data being sold to companies, 8.
Data control as a purchase condition. Seven or eight of the blank sheets came with conditions about where the data goes: "only gave the data to me," "doesn't connect to anything at all," a platform-independent app. Small in number, specific in wording, and stated as a requirement rather than a preference.
The outliers, for the record. A 40-year-old calculator watch trusted over a smartwatch. Someone avoiding EMF who picked a smartwatch and then took it back. A 60+ AI enthusiast who already owns camera glasses and wants "a wearable camera with audio that looks like a piece of jewelry." Someone who asked for a "SOLID GOLD WATCH."
The platforms are building for the face. This sample accepts the ear, the wrist and the finger, and rejects the face at four to ten times the rate of anything else, camera or no camera.
The platforms are leading with cameras and assistants. Given a blank sheet, people asked for sensors that watch their health and don't ask anything of them. Three out of a hundred drew glasses. One drew a conversation.
The platforms are putting AI on the box. Twice as many people cooled at the word as warmed to it, and the coolest group is the youngest.
And the platforms are designing for the wearer, while the person who decides whether the category is welcome in a room is the one sitting across from them, who never agreed to any of it.
None of this says camera glasses can't work. It says the expectation around them is currently running on marketing rather than demand, and the people who will decide the outcome aren't the ones being sold to. The brief in this study is the same from the first conversation to the last: make it obvious when it's on, give me control over it, keep the data mine, and leave my face alone.
The Smart Wearables Index is built to repeat. Same ten devices, same four questions, same blank sheet, run again with a fresh sample so we can see which numbers move. The one I'll be watching is whether the 45 and the 57 move together or apart.
If you build in this category and want to see the full conversation set, or want a wave run against your own device list, get in touch.
Todd Reily is the founder of RightThing.io, an innovation studio for audio, wearable and robotics companies. He led the Bose vision team for close to a decade. Earlier he led design and research at two startups building new categories: industrial smart glasses in 2012 and social robots in 2015.
RightThing runs studies like this in five days. If you want a wave against your own device list, get in touch.