While OpenAI is making its big AI announcement over the next 12 days, Google has decided to reveal the full story with the launch of Gemini 2.0. And we got a sneak peek of Google's new prototype smart glasses.

Google claims that Gemini 2 will usher in the “age of the agent,” revealing numerous AI agents and the ability to create its own AI agents. One of the more interesting agent announcements concerns Project Astra, which was first teased and talked about at Google I/O in May.

Project Astra is meant to be a “universal AI agent” that will tackle everyday tasks through a cell phone camera and voice recognition software. This morphs into smart glasses like Meta's Ray Bans. Google CEO Sundar Pichai teased Astra in an X video, and Google posted a YouTube video showing Astra in action.

During I/O, the company showed off Astra's potential capabilities working through smart glasses. While the AI agent will first be on cell phones, the smart glasses teaser actually showed how it might work on other platforms.

Google claimed that Astra can understand and react to the world “like a person would”. Like many AI announced this year, Astra was shown responding to conversations and reacting with conversational language; in the May demo, the model appeared to have impressive spatial understanding and video processing.

Initially, Astra was promised to be released by the end of the year. However, during the October earnings call, Google CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that Astra had been pushed back to 2025. Therefore, there was little expectation that news of Astra would be released before the end of the year.

As part of today's announcement, Google revealed some updates to this model:

Google did not provide more timeline on when people will be able to see Astra in the real world.

However, in Google's announcement post, the company did reveal that its tester program is beginning to evaluate Project Astra with prototype glasses. Are these glasses Samsung's new smart glasses, which are expected to be announced in January, given Google's partnership with Qualcomm for the new XR platform?

These glasses are not supposed to have cameras yet. The glasses featured in the video above appear to be different; Meta may be leading in smart glasses, but other companies are catching up, like Xreal and its new X1-powered AR glasses.

Google adds that it is working on bringing Astra to Gemini apps and other form factors, suggesting more than phones and glasses.