Guys, I’m trying. Right now, as I type these words, I am trying on multiple levels. Trying to understand, trying to be fair, and I’m trying really, really hard to breathe through my nostrils, given the enormous weight of our AR glasses future resting uncomfortably on my nose.

The thing is, you shouldn’t need to try hard to justify wearing AR smart glasses. Any pair that doesn’t just work is dead on arrival. I want the future, and the AR glasses that come with it. but unfortunately, with the $900 Inmo Air 3, trying is the best I’m going to get, and that, dear reader, is what I’d call a major drag.

Inm-oh my God, please help

Let’s start from the top. Inmo is a Chinese purveyor of smart glasses that recently launched its Inmo Air 3 via Kickstarter, a pair of Android-powered AR glasses that tout a few enticing ideas and features. One of those selling points is a full-color screen that is 1080p, and the other is a novel input method for navigating UI inside the glasses using a smart ring. Both of those ideas caught my attention during IFA 2025, which is why I chose to write about them in September. Those features, coupled with the fact that you can run pretty much any app in 2D by just downloading it from the Google Play Store via the glasses UI felt like they could be a winning combo.

But in the world of gadgets, there are hits, and there are misses, and then there are complete and total whiffs, and the latter category is where Inmo’s Air 3 smart glasses fall for me, and the problems started almost immediately out of the box.

Before we get to my list of grievances, I’ll start with a small positive, which is that the packaging is impressive, and so is the selection of stuff that comes with the smart glasses. In addition to the smart glasses, there’s a touch-sensitive ring with multiple buttons, a garage door-like touch controller if you don’t feel like using that, a magnetic cable for charging the ring, and magnetically attachable shades for when you want more contrast. That’s a lot of stuff, which is welcome, but that’s where the positive impressions stopped for me, because the first thing that jumped out when I put the smart glasses on was… I couldn’t see anything.

I quickly discovered that it wasn’t a problem with the waveguide display inside the smart glasses; it was actually an issue with how they sit on my face. Like some other folks out there, I have a bump on my nose, which is a polite way of saying I have a big schnoz. Because of that, I have to wear glasses closer to my face (resting above the bump in my nose) as opposed to in the middle, where other folks might wear them. On one hand, that’s a physical thing specific to me. On the other hand, I am not the only person out there with a nose like this.

Because of the way the Inmo Air 3 sit on my face, I actually can’t see two-thirds of the display when the smart glasses are in a comfortable, natural position on my nose. So, in order to see the full screen, I have to move them down my nose to where the smart glasses (and the nose pads) actually press my nostrils in, making it hard to, um… breathe. It’s really, incredibly, almost laughably not fun. And before you ask—no, you cannot adjust the position of a single screen on your face to fix it, and these smart glasses are far from lightweight, so, to avoid mouth-breathing for extended periods, I decided to test them out by holding them in the strange, unnatural position on my face that I could see best in. I did feel justified when two of my other colleagues put the Inmo Air 3 on and reported that the screen is faint and difficult to make out, so I’m not the only one. “They hurt my eyes,” was the exact first impression of Gizmodo Senior Editor of Consumer Tech, Raymond Wong, when he put them on.

Needless to say, that’s not a great start, but it gets worse.

I will not be putting a ring on it

As I mentioned, one of the things I was most excited about was the inclusion of a smart ring for controlling the UI inside the smart glasses. It’s a pretty clever method for input that I haven’t yet tried, and felt (on the surface) like something that could catch on if executed properly. I say if here because novel hardware is a lot harder to make than it sounds on paper, and there’s always a chance that it doesn’t work right. And boy, does Inmo’s ring (called the Ring 3) not work right.

The Ring 3, which connects to the Inmo Air 3 smart glasses via Bluetooth, has quite a bit of latency, which makes using it a little aggravating. While I got more adept the longer I used it, the touch surface is rather small, and combined with the lag, I found it to be imprecise at best. Nah, let’s be honest, it was a nightmare. Luckily, though, I was relieved from having to use the Ring 3 fairly quickly. While attempting to adjust the size by bending the plastic part that wraps around your finger (this is how the ring is intended to be resized), it started to break, separating from the hard plastic where all the touch-sensitive hardware and buttons live. Not realizing, I attempted to adjust even further (I wasn’t applying Hulk-like force here, I promise), and it started to crack.

So, that was that for the ring for me. I couldn’t resize it to fit properly on my finger without breaking it further, so I did the rest of my testing using a combination of the Inmo Air 3’s touch-sensitive surface on the right side of the smart glasses (similar to how Meta’s Ray-Bans work) and the garage door remote-like controller that I mentioned earlier. The latter worked fine, but it feels incredibly cheap and is far from perfect.

I wouldn’t describe the touchpad on the front of the device, where you use your thumb to direct a cursor, as being super responsive, but it gets the job done. You’ll wind up having to tap things multiple times to register a “click” in the UI, but I suppose it’s better than trying to use a broken smart ring if just by virtue of the fact that it technically works. There are some physical buttons on the non-ring touch controller that allow you to go back, go home, control the volume, and pull up the camera, which is nice if you get tired of not having your taps registered.

And if both those controllers fail, there are touch and tap controls on the right arm of the smart glasses and volume buttons on the left arm.

But what about that 1080p display?

Once I was able to navigate the Inmo Air 3 properly, I could start actually using them. That, in theory, should have been the exciting part, but the highs weren’t exactly what I would call soaring. First, there was the irksome part of getting the AR smart glasses online, which I had to do entirely through the Inmo UI. While there is an Inmo app for iOS and Android, my app wouldn’t register the smart glasses and connect, so any added functionality through the app was unusable. So, to enter Wi-Fi credentials, I had to select my network in the Air 3 and painstakingly punch in passwords one character at a time using the garage door remote. I managed to do that without giving up, luckily, and was able to download some apps in the Google Play Store.

The first place I went was YouTube, where I loaded up some cooking content. The experience was pretty nice, though I definitely wish the smart glasses weren’t crushing my nose while I was watching. I could see, on someone whose face fits the smart glasses, that watching things could be enjoyable in the Inmo Air 3, if not altogether groundbreaking. Sure, the Inmo Air 3 are more lightweight than a VR headset, but they’re nowhere near as immersive as watching in a Quest 3 and much less premium than an Apple Vision Pro, though that’s admittedly a tough comparison.

I also downloaded TikTok and scrolled through some videos for good measure, and that experience was also fine, though I can’t say it was preferable to just pulling out my phone and zoning out that way. The screen is definitely the strongest part of the Inmo Air 3; it’s sharp, and watching content feels surprisingly hi-fi given it’s just some waveguides displays shoved into a pair of glasses. The brightness isn’t the best, though. While Meta’s Ray-Ban Display tops out at an impressive 5,000 nits of brightness and works well in full natural light, the Inmo Air 3 reaches just 600 nits. Even just using the AR smart glasses in my office on a sunny day was enough to kill contrast, though a magnetic attachment that gives the lenses shade does help. But, to be honest, that’s not the only reason I wouldn’t wear Inmo’s Air 3 outside…

Not the look I’m looking for

If you saw Inmo’s Air 3 in renderings like I did and thought, “those look like smart glasses I could wear on the subway,” you may want to think again. The Air 3 are big smart glasses. The frames are thick, which is bad for someone like me who has a relatively small head, though even if you don’t look as dumb as I do when you wear them, you might feel dumb just because of the weight. The big lenses also don’t pass for normal glasses, and there’s a non-zero chance someone might assume you have a visual impairment if you walk around with them on.

I think what’s more aggravating about the size is the fact that battery life doesn’t seem to be particularly great. After every session (about 20 to 30 minutes), I felt like I should charge the Inmo Air 3 up since a significant chunk of the battery was gone. While Inmo doesn’t offer official battery life estimates, there’s a 660mAh battery on board, and in my estimate, you can expect between 1.5 to 2 hours max with continuous use. That’s not great, obviously, but all of that 1080p goodness is going to come at a cost.

If you’re not bringing the smart glasses outside with you, it kind of renders some features useless, like the ability to take pictures. That’s mostly okay, though, because I took some snaps with the Inmo Air 3 and they were not very high-res. While it technically has a higher megapixel camera than the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and Gen 2 (the Air 3 has a 16-megapixel sensor, and Meta’s smart glasses have a 12-megapixel sensor), the quality somehow looks worse.

Inmo’s Air 3 seem kind of stuck in a liminal space between display-free smart glasses and thicker AR smart glasses like Snapchat’s Spectacles. Clearly, Inmo thinks this is a product you’d want to walk around with on your face, based on its marketing, but in practice, they still feel like a stay-at-home gadget due to the not-so-great battery life, the chunky size, and the general lack of convenience. Maybe your level of comfort with them will vary, but from where I’m sitting, style is not the Inmo Air 3’s strong suit. In fact, I don’t know that a strong suit exists…

Good ideas that don’t come together at all

There’s more that you can do with these smart glasses, but unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to test it all because of the hiccups with the hardware. One area that I would have liked to test was cloud gaming, since the idea of being able to play on a big virtual screen (like you can do in a Meta Quest 3) is kind of awesome. I wasn’t able to really do that, though, since the Inmo Air 3 don’t sit properly on my face, and I basically had to hold them up with one hand while I tested. And as we all know, holding a typical controller historically requires two hands.

There’s also a multi-window mode where you can have up to three different windows open simultaneously, but that mode requires the use of the Ring 3, which as I’ve already established, was basically unusable for me. It’s a shame, in a lot of ways, that Inmo’s Air 3 is as rough as it is, because there are a lot of interesting ideas. I love the idea of a ring-based wearable (but it has to not crumble in your hands), being able to download any app and use it in 2D is freeing (but only if you can see the apps), and wearing the smart glasses around would be like having a real computer on your face (but you have to actually want to feel comfortable putting them on for that to work).

Unfortunately, for people interested in AR, the Inmo Air 3 just feel like more trouble than they’re worth. Yes, they’re a crowdfunded gadget, and you should expect some wonkiness from that category, but at $900 (that’s early bird pricing, the future MSRP is actually $1,100) I don’t think lack of polish to this degree is something anyone should put up with. If nothing else, It makes you appreciate the refinement of glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Display, and even if they don’t do quite as much on paper. So, while I wouldn’t ever recommend paying for AR smart glasses like this, sometimes just knowing how bad things can get is its own kind of reward, and in the name of that crucial knowledge, I tortured my nose and face so you don’t have to.