Amazon’s smart glasses may be the first of their kind with an actual purpose

Amazon is a company delivering billions and billions of packages every single day, so they know their business well and like any good business are always working on ways to make processes faster, better and safer. Today, at their “Delivering the Future” event in San Jose, Amazon revealed a bunch of new initiatives across robotics and innovation, as well as showcasing how they keep their drivers safe through extensive driver education and training.

Look at me, Slipping around on fake ice learning to walk – just like Amazon delivery drivers do.

But then there’s this – the Amazon Smart Glasses for their delivery team. These are the latest in a long line of “smart glasses” we’ve seen – but perhaps are the most useful of all.

Smart Glasses are not new, if you want to know how far we’ve come – look at these from Epson more than 12 years ago

So yeah, I think we can all agree that Meta with their Ray Ban Displays and Amazon with their Smart delivery glasses are doing amazing things.

Amazon’s take is simple – a set of glasses a driver can wear to help navigate to places, sort and pick items and validate deliveries with the most information but without having to constantly reach for their phone.

I drove as an Amazon Flex delivery driver several times a few years ago, and what Amazon has built with their app for drivers is amazing, guiding you place to place as you need it and ensuring you don’t deliver the wrong parcel or to the wrong place.

But now I can see the vision (pardon the pun) for Amazon’s smart glasses. Never need to touch that phone. Grab a parcel from the car – boom, they scan it as you look at it and you get a tick that it’s the one and you move on.

Notifications of annoying dogs, or key codes required, all in the glasses.

Even a small map showing where to go.

Plus, when it’s delivered, snap a photo.

The glasses are powered by a battery on the worker’s vest, taking weight off the actual glasses and your head, and they are controlled by another simple dial and button unit on your vest.

These units attach to the glasses using magnetically attaching plugs and boom, you’re off and running.

This will be amazing for those workers, and no doubt will need a lot of testing and fine tuning, but it’s yet another sign of the things to come.

And as far as smart glasses go, it’s the best implementation of real world use of such a product we’ve seen.

Trevor Long travelled to San Francisco as a guest of Amazon Australia – we disclose our all our travel and commercial partnerships here