Google announced Android XR glasses coming this fall and they sound really cool. During the demo, they showed Google Maps on the glasses, and it used the camera to make your location more accurate and give context to the directions with things around you, like it said the destination building was coming up on the right. I think this has the potential to be very useful for the blind since it might make it easier to find your destination at the end of the root, or make directions easier to follow if it says "turn right in this upcoming parking lot" or things like that. Also I've read an article that said it might know your direction of travel a lot better, so it will tell you to turn around or turn slightly right or left if you get off course. It also seems that Google Maps will be more integrated with Gemini, so you can just tell the glasses where you want to go and it will create a route. It would also be very cool if you could ask things like "Which side of the street is my destination on?" or "Which direction do I need to cross before making this turn?" and things like that, like if Gemini could use both your camera and Google Maps to answer specific questions and help you.
Something else very interesting is the glasses can apparently control apps on your phone. During the demo they asked the glasses to make a DoorDash order, and Gemini went through the screens on the phone to do this while the phone remained in the user's pocket. This could be very useful, for example maybe you could ask your glasses to compare the prices for Uber and Lyft and then book the cheapest ride to your destination. The glasses can also interact with messages. The video said that the glasses with work with both Android and iOS, but I am not sure how much of this is exclusive to Android. It seems unlikely that controling apps with Gemini would work on iOS but the Google Maps integration might.
Something else notable about these glasses is I heard they might be using Project Astra as the foundation of their live AI. The video said that Gemini Live is the default way of using Gemini on the glasses, where you press and hold to start a conversation. If its based on Project Astra, this probably means that it will be similar to the AIRA live AI that has been improving over time, which hopefully means it will be good at describing your environment and giving assistance with visual tasks. I am not sure if continuous monitoring will be supported though or if you have to speak every time you want it to talk. Also, it is still not known how developers can use the camera of these audio glasses from their apps, or if its possible to use the glasses camera for any Android app on your phone.
There will be both audio-only glasses and display glasses, with the audio-only glasses being released first this fall. I am not sure the display glasses would be useful at all for a blind person, because it seems like its not for running full Android apps but just for displaying extra information when you interact with Gemini or for other integrations, and you cannot really control the display very much without talking. These display glasses will not run full Android apps or have gestures for interacting with them like the Samsung Galaxy XR headset. To me, all of this makes it seem unlikely that the display glasses will have TalkBack, since there is no interface to navigate, so the audio glasses will probably be equally good. There will be more advanced glasses like this that run full Android apps and should have TalkBack from Xreal, but they seem very impractical since they are connected to both a computing puck and a battery pack.