🎯 Not a review of the app store 0:00
The framing is stated in the first twenty seconds and it changes the whole review: he is not reviewing the G2 as a product but as a piece of hardware to write software for. The stock apps and the Even Hub ecosystem barely interest him — "I think these things work best when you build your own software for them".
The motivation is the thing that has changed this year. If most of your work is now typing English into an agent and reading English back, then the computer you need is a screen and a microphone — not a desk, a chair and a keyboard.
He is explicit that nothing was gifted: "not sponsored, I bought these with my own money", and the test was whether they could become the primary interface to his work for months. He also draws the category line that matters: these have a screen and microphones but no camera, unlike the Meta-style glasses — which is a design decision about social friction, not a missing feature.
🕶 The hardware: 36 grams of almost nothing 1:38
The design philosophy is that the glasses do almost nothing, and that is why they last. They are a Bluetooth peripheral to your phone: audio goes up, text comes back, and all the networking, compute and battery cost of being online lives on the phone.
| Spec | Video | Official spec sheet | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weight | "40 grams" | 36 g | He rounds up; Even's own site and support page both say 36 g |
| Frame materials | — | Magnesium alloy frame, titanium temples | Explains the weight |
| Display | Green waveguide, "like a fighter pilot HUD" | Binocular Micro-LED waveguide, 640×350, 27.5° FoV, 60 Hz, 1,200 nits, 98% passthrough | Same thing, with numbers he doesn't quote |
| Camera / speakers | No camera | No camera, no speaker on the glasses | Four microphones instead |
| Connectivity | "Standard Bluetooth" | BLE 5.4 to the phone | Correct; the glasses have no Wi-Fi |
| Battery | "All day, or close, with a couple of quick charges" | 192 mAh eyewear, ~2 days regular use; 2,000 mAh case, ~7 full recharges | His estimate is conservative; microphone use dominates drain |
| Ruggedness | — | IP65 | Not in the video |
| Controls | Touch strips on both arms: tap, swipe, hold, combinations | Same, plus optional R1 ring reproducing the gestures | He skipped the ring |
Because the glasses are just a BLE peripheral, the lock-in is unusually thin. He notes that people have reverse-engineered them to the point where you do not need the Even Realities app at all, pointing at open-source alternatives — and that as a piece of hardware "there's not really a lot of lock-in".
🔆 The display: a green fighter-pilot HUD 4:03
The optics are a waveguide: a structure inside the lens that reflects light projected from tiny projectors in the frame sides, so you see bright green text floating in the lens while still looking through ordinary glasses. The virtual screen sits above your eye line, which is why it is easy to ignore — glance up to read, look below to be present.
The comparison that makes it concrete is with prism-style glasses (he also bought the Vitruvian Pros to test): those give a full-colour screen but you have to wear a tinted lens and you are effectively locked into a lightweight VR headset. The G2 asks the opposite trade — clear lenses, monochrome green, glanceable text — and he is unambiguous about which one suits a working day.
👁 Ergonomics and the convergence fight 5:22
The most technically interesting passage in the video is about where the image appears to focus. Almost all smart glasses project a virtual image some distance away, and he estimates the G2's virtual focal distance at roughly 3–5 metres — which is why it is relaxing compared with a laptop screen held 50 cm from your face.
Then the subtlety no review usually mentions: focus and convergence are different mechanisms. Your eyes both focus at the image distance and converge on it, and convergence depends on the distance between your pupils. The lenses are fixed, so the optical focal distance is identical for everyone while the convergence cue differs — a slight mismatch between what your brain expects from the geometry and what the optics ask for.
| Effect | What he found |
|---|---|
| Vergence–accommodation conflict | Barely noticeable; the brain adapts quickly |
| Vertical position | Software-adjustable, and the waveguide is taller than the image precisely to allow it — because the height of your eye above your nose bridge differs per person |
| Edge falloff | Pushed too low, the image fades out at the bottom |
| Long-term comfort | He lowers the image a little and pushes the glasses slightly forward on his nose — less eye travel for hours of use |
The practical advice is unusually good for a review: he bought his first pair without a prescription to use Even's 14-day return window and confirm comfort, then sent them back to have his prescription put in for the cost of shipping. If you have never worn a waveguide display, that is a cheap way to find out whether your visual system tolerates it.
📐 The display in detail: ten lines and sixteen greens 7:12
Here the review becomes genuinely useful, because these are the constraints any G2 application must design around.
| Property | Video | SDK documentation |
|---|---|---|
| Field of view | Roughly a 55-inch TV seen from a sofa 2.7 m away — deliberately not immersive | 27.5° FoV, 640×350 per eye |
| Text capacity | "Only 10 lines of text at a time" using the native text display | Full-screen text container holds roughly 400–500 characters; no font size control |
| Colour depth | "16 different levels of green", tonal not black-and-white; invert images to look natural | 4-bit greyscale = 16 levels; text brightness is a separate 5-level setting (0–4) |
| Refresh | 60 Hz, but bandwidth-limited: text changes are instant, an image takes "a good few seconds" | 60 Hz panel; a full-screen image refresh measures ~800 ms in Even's testing |
| Images vs text | Text is sharper and faster — always prefer native text rendering | Images are ≤288×144 px, LZ4-compressed, paced at 100 ms per send, no concurrent sends |
| Drawing model | — | No HTML, no CSS, no pixels: a container model — up to 4 image and 8 other containers per page, absolute coordinates on a 576×288 canvas |
His advice follows directly: if you are paging through the output of a Claude Code session, use the real text display and refresh it — that is instant. Rendering text into a bitmap to get more characters buys you smaller glyphs, a softer image and a slower update, which is a bad trade on a 16-level monochrome screen.
🎛 Pagination and the controls 9:37
The glasses have a native scroll — send more than ten lines and you can swipe to scroll the text. He bypasses it entirely: his software only ever sends ten lines and pages between them, and he reuses the scroll gesture as a page-up/page-down command. The macro pad does the same job with fewer hand movements.
The optional R1 ring is dismissed on value grounds rather than engineering ones: it reproduces tap, hold and swipe, it is genuinely one-handed and always available — but it is expensive and carries health features he does not want. He wanted an input device, not a wearable ecosystem.
Brightness gets an entire paragraph of praise: usable in full sun with clip-on lenses, and because the glasses sit on your face you can use them lying down — which is a surprisingly hard thing to do with any other computer, and the reason he frames the whole device as an ergonomic intervention rather than an AR gadget.
🚫 The claim every other reviewer gets wrong 11:50
This is the argument the video exists for. Reviewers, he says, repeat the myth that you can read the display while doing something else.
That distinction is worth internalising because it reframes the category. A "glanceable" display is not ambient information design — it is a display you choose to look at. Any application that assumes split attention (live navigation while walking through a crowd, a teleprompter while making eye contact) is asking for something the visual system does not supply, no matter how transparent the lens is.
🧑💻 Your own software is the product 12:39
His wider argument, and the reason this review belongs in a series about agentic engineering: the roles of hardware and software are inverting. Making your own specific tool is now faster than adapting someone else's general one, so the thing you buy is hardware, and the software is yours.
He lives this way already. No mobile app ecosystem: everything is a progressive web app running on an always-on Mac mini, reached over Tailscale from any device. The phone is a browser with a modem; the glasses become one more client of the same apps.
That last sentence is the honest cost. There is no cursor, no window, no keyboard, no scrollback — so the small-screen, dictation-first, macro-pad interface is a translation layer you must design yourself. He calls the result a mini operating system: a to-do system, email, messages via the Beeper API (which reaches WhatsApp and the channels that are otherwise painful), and tmux sessions with Claude Code inside them, all navigable through a grid-tree of his own making.
🧱 The stack he actually built 19:30
Assembled from across the video, the pipeline for one key press is this:
| Step | Component | Transport |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Custom macro pad | BLE GATT to the phone — deliberately not HID, so it works while the phone is locked |
| 2 | His own Android app on the phone | Receives the GATT events |
| 3 | Mac mini | Over Tailscale |
| 4 | tmux sessions, one real Claude Code session each | Using his normal Claude subscription, not an API key |
| 5 | Lightweight web view app inside the Even Realities app | Reads the endpoints, pushes ten lines to the glasses |
| 6 | G2 | Text on the waveguide, voice back via the microphones |
He scrapes the Claude Code TUI inside tmux to know the state of a session, and uses the transcript as the main body of text to page through. Even with six hops the round trip is "more or less instant" — no perceptible delay between a macro-pad press and the change on the lens.
📶 The Bluetooth caveat 15:58
The one bug he found, and the kind of thing you only learn by building: when the glasses' microphones are live and streaming to the phone, another Bluetooth device connected to that phone interferes with the audio stream. His macro pad therefore disconnects itself the moment the mic goes live — a flag in his software, not a fix in the hardware.
🛠 Developing for the G2: what the SDK allows 16:52
His summary of the development model is accurate and worth stating plainly, because it is simpler than people assume. Your real application runs on a desktop somewhere. A lightweight web app inside the Even Realities app talks to your endpoints, takes the data and tells the glasses what to display. That is the whole concept.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| SDK | @evenrealities/even_hub_sdk — TypeScript; apps are plugins written in HTML/CSS/JS/TS (Vite, React, plain JS all fine) |
| Simulator | @evenrealities/evenhub-simulator — exactly how he records what the lens shows |
| CLI | @evenrealities/evenhub-cli; evenhub qr --url pushes a build to the glasses for testing |
| Input | Gestures exposed from the hardware; exactly one container per page has isEventCapture: 1 and receives all input |
| Device data | Gestures and GPS position (from phone status) available in the web view; plugin permissions gate the phone's camera and album |
| Font | A single LVGL font baked into firmware — no font choice, no sizing, characters outside the set silently dropped |
| Two hard "no"s | No arbitrary pixels (container model only) and no full colour — the display is monochrome green, 16 shades |
He reports that Claude Code "cake walks this stuff" and keeps pace with SDK updates, that stability has improved massively over months of firmware updates, and that the image-display bug he used to hit is fixed. The full stack sits behind his channel membership — his point is not the code but the shape of it: everything is understandable, and the environment is open enough that a single developer can own the whole pipeline.
🛒 Who should buy them 18:44
The verdict is narrow and consistent with everything before it.
| Buy if | Don't buy if |
|---|---|
| You are a developer willing to build your own interface | You expect the bundled apps to make you productive off the shelf |
| You work with AI agents frequently and want to be away from the desk | You want a general-purpose AR or media device |
| You will treat ten lines of text plus voice as the interface | You need colour, images, video or multi-window work |
| The ergonomics alone justify it: distance focus, outdoors, lying down | You expect it to replace a laptop screen for reading long documents |
He mentions their terminal mode as the closest off-the-shelf path — you pipe it through their desktop app — but says it is not a native setup compared with his own tmux arrangement. On price he only says they are not cheap; published reviews at launch put the G2 at around $599 and the R1 ring around $249, with prescription and frame options moving the total. That is a lot for a device that only pays off if you write the software.
📦 Just ship us the hardware 20:52
The closing argument widens out from glasses to everything: we want hardware, not hardware bundled with an app-store ecosystem, a subscription and lock-in. His examples are personal — a 2017 12-inch MacBook that is "more than enough" because the real work happens on a Mac mini he reaches over the terminal, and a photo library he hosts himself instead of paying for iCloud storage.
And the prediction that makes it more than a rant: as AI lowers the cost of writing your own software, this posture stops being a developer eccentricity. People who have never written code will start choosing hardware for its openness, because the software is now cheap enough to make themselves — which is a strange and plausible inversion of the last fifteen years of product design.
✅ Claims checked
| Claim | Verdict | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Glasses weigh 40 g | Corrected: 36 g | Even Realities product page and support spec sheet: 36 g, magnesium frame, titanium temples |
| Green waveguide display, binocular, invisible to others | Correct | Official: binocular Micro-LED waveguide, 640×350, 27.5°, 1,200 nits, 98% passthrough |
| No camera, microphones present | Correct | Official: no camera, no speaker; four microphones |
| Battery lasts all day, "or pretty close" | Officially better | Even rates ~2 days regular use, 192 mAh eyewear, 2,000 mAh case with ~7 recharges |
| Display shows 10 lines of text | Consistent | SDK docs: a full-screen text container holds roughly 400–500 characters, no font-size control |
| 16 levels of green | Correct | SDK docs: 4-bit greyscale, 16 levels; text brightness is a separate 0–4 scale |
| 60 Hz panel, but images are bandwidth-limited | Directionally right | 60 Hz panel; a full-screen image refresh measures ~800 ms in Even's testing, sends paced at 100 ms — his "few seconds" is worse than the documented figure |
| Images are softer and slower than native text | Correct | Images ≤288×144 px, greyscale, LZ4-compressed; text updates are in-place and flicker-free |
| Vertical image position adjustable; waveguide taller than the image | Correct | Position is a container coordinate on a 576×288 canvas; frame geometry differs per face |
| Virtual focal distance 3–5 m | Speaker estimate | Not published in Even's spec sheet; the relaxation effect he describes is real, the exact figure is his approximation |
| 14-day return window when bought without prescription | Company policy, unverified here | Consistent with Even's try-then-prescribe flow; confirm terms in your region before ordering |
| Open-source route that bypasses the Even app | Exists, with a name correction | The project is MentraOS (formerly AugmentOS), not "Mantra OS"; plus OpenEvenSdk and community BLE bridges |
| SDK is easy; simulator available; Claude Code handles it | Correct | TypeScript SDK + evenhub-simulator + evenhub CLI; Even Hub opened to developers in March 2026 |
| Bluetooth accessory interferes with live mic audio | Speaker-reported | His own observation on his own phone and pad; no vendor documentation either way — test before relying on it |
| GATT rather than HID so the pad works when the phone is locked | Correct | Standard BLE behaviour; HID peripherals are suspended with the host locked |
| Around $599 for the glasses, ~$249 for the ring | Secondary source | Launch-review pricing; he only says "not cheap". Configuration and region change the total |
| You cannot use the display while doing something else | Plausible and clearly explained | Attention and peripheral-vision argument; consistent with how waveguide HUDs are used, and with Even's own "glanceable" positioning |
Transcript notes. "Mantra OS" is MentraOS; the model name is consistent throughout. Specs were checked against Even Realities' product page and support spec sheet, and SDK limits against the Even Hub developer documentation (last updated 9 October 2026). Where the video and the docs disagree — weight, image refresh time — the docs are quoted alongside his figure rather than overwriting it.
🔑 Key takeaways
- It is a text terminal you wear, not a small computer. Ten lines, monochrome green, voice in — the value is in what you build on top, not in the bundled apps.
- Hardware does almost nothing, and that is the engineering. No Wi-Fi, no camera, no speaker: BLE to the phone, and two days of battery as the reward.
- The display's genius is opt-in, not immersive. It sits above the eye line so you can ignore it by looking slightly down — that is what makes eight-hour wear possible.
- You can switch between screen and world instantly; you cannot do both at once. Every "ambient computing" claim built on split attention is false on this class of device.
- Choose the text container, not images. Native text is sharper, faster and flicker-free; a bitmap on a 16-shade screen is a downgrade in every dimension.
- Design for the container model. No HTML, no CSS, no arbitrary pixels: up to 4 image and 8 other containers on a 576×288 canvas, one of which captures input.
- The translation layer is the real work. Every desktop app needs a bespoke ten-line, dictation-first interface — that is why off-the-shelf software cannot make you productive here.
- Own the pipeline end to end: macro pad over BLE GATT (works with the phone locked) → your phone app → Tailscale → tmux and Claude Code on an always-on Mac → a web view that pushes text to the lens.
- Test Bluetooth contention before you ship. A live microphone in the glasses can fight another BLE device on the same phone; his macro pad disconnects itself when the mic opens.
- Buy the hardware trial first, prescription later. The 14-day no-prescription return window is the cheap way to test whether your visual system tolerates a waveguide display.
- An ergonomic device, not an AR device. Distance focus, outdoor use, and reading lying down may matter more to your body than any feature list.
- "Just ship us the hardware." As writing software gets cheap, openness becomes a purchasing criterion — first for developers, eventually for everyone.
🔗 Resources
- The source video — Ben Vallack, "Even Realities G2 Review (From a Developer's Perspective)", 22:45, 2 November 2026
- Even Realities G2 — official product page with full optical and hardware specs
- Even Realities spec sheet — dimensions, materials, battery, IP65
- Even Hub developer documentation — SDK, simulator, CLI, submission flow
- Display & UI System — the container model, 576×288 canvas, 16 shades, image and text limits
- Even Hub FAQ — what you cannot do: arbitrary pixels, full colour, video, custom fonts
- even-realities/everything-evenhub — official developer kit bundling SDK, CLI, simulator and docs
- evenhub-templates — four official starter templates (minimal, ASR, image, text-heavy)
- awesome-even-realities-g2 — community index of SDK references, BLE bridges and demos
- MentraOS for Even Realities — the open-source alternative the video calls "Mantra OS"
- Beeper developer API — the cross-platform messaging layer he reads and replies from
- Tailscale — the mesh network that makes an always-on Mac reachable from any device