Two Roads To Usable AR Glasses

After years of false starts, augmented reality glasses are edging toward everyday use. Two companies, HarmonEyes and Kopin, are addressing the biggest obstacles from opposite directions out of the public eye, but very much on the proverbial radar screen of investors. One is using AI to make AR comfortable for people. The other is using microLED technology to make it usable in daylight. Together they represent complementary advances in human and optical engineering that could make displays for AR glasses less expensive and more useful.

“We’re focused on understanding the state of a user in real time and predicting how it will change,” said Adam Gross, co-founder and CEO of HarmonEyes. “If you know a person is about to hit cognitive overload or fatigue, you can intervene before it becomes a problem. No one else is doing that predictive part.”

Gross and co-founder Dr. Melissa Hunfalvayspent years building FDA-cleared medical eye-tracking tools for doctors, athletes, and the military. That business created what they describe as the largest validated eye-tracking dataset in the world, including data from studies on fatigue, stress, and diseases like Parkinson’s and Lyme. When cameras in phones and headsets became good enough, the company pivoted from hardware to software.

The result is the Theia SDK, a camera-based system that runs on any device. Developers can integrate it to measure cognitive load, fatigue, or motion sickness without adding special sensors. “Theia runs on commodity cameras,” Gross explained. “We’ve built a conversion engine that normalizes data from different lenses and sampling rates, so it’s interoperable across webcams, headsets, and phones.”

The company calls its approach a “focused foundational model” trained only on eye-movement behavior. “In XR, most eye tracking is still about foveated rendering,” Gross said. “We’re interested in what those movements mean about the person.”

In pilot training or industrial repair, the software can detect when a user stops processing information and prompt them to re-engage. In consumer settings, it could delay notifications during moments of deep focus or overwhelm. “If I know you’re at a high level of mental effort, I don’t pop up an alert,” Gross said. “That’s how you make smart glasses people actually want to wear.”

While HarmonEyes reads the human side of the interface, Kopin is reengineering the physical one. The Massachusetts-based display maker recently received a $15.4 million award from the U.S. Army’s Industrial Base Analysis and Sustainment program to develop full-color microLED microdisplays in the United States. “This is about creating a sovereign color microLED,” said CEO Michael Murray. “Built here, designed here, for AR and VR applications used by the Army, but ultimately for everyone else too.”

Kopin’s microLED push underpins what Murray calls the “NeuralDdisplay,” a panel that can track gaze and pupil size through its own pixels, eliminating external cameras. “We use an inverted pixel inside the microdisplay to do grayscale eye tracking,” he said. “That means size, weight, and power all go down. Compared with a Vision Pro-class headset, ours is half the weight because there are no cameras.”

The company is demonstrating the technology now. In live demos, a user can control a drone or adjust brightness and contrast just by looking. “You could control a drone while looking down a weapon sight just with your eyes,” Murray said. “It works. We’re showing it now.”

Defense applications are only the start. Automotive heads-up displays, surgical systems, and consumer AR devices all need the same thing: bright, lightweight, power-efficient optics. “How many displays in U.S. cars are built here?” Murray asked. “Zero. If China stopped shipping microdisplays tomorrow, that’s over a trillion dollars of GDP at risk. We’re fixing that.”

Both companies are solving for the same outcome: AR that works in the real world. HarmonEyes manages the biology, preventing cognitive fatigue. Kopin handles the optics, making displays visible in sunlight. Their paths may never cross, but together they point to an industry maturing from prototypes to products.

“Understanding the user is the missing layer,” Gross said. “If you can predict discomfort before it happens, that’s when AR stops feeling like a prototype.”

“Our job,” Murray added, “is to make it bright enough, light enough, and smart enough to disappear. When that happens, AR won’t be something you wear—it’ll just be part of how you see.”