L'Atitude 52°N smart glasses introduce subscription model for AI features after one-year trial

These New Smart Glasses From Ex-OnePlus Engineers Have a Hidden Cost

Lots of smart glasses have AI bots inside them now. The one in L'Atitude 52°N's glasses is called Goya, named after Francisco Goya, the famous Spanish artist who painted renowned masterpieces of romanticism. CEO and founder Gary Chen, who has worked on wearable devices for companies like Oppo, OnePlus, and HTC, says his company's glasses are focused on travelers, with AI features that act like a tour guide and talk about all the paintings in famous museums. "Basically, you can say, 'Hey, Goya, what is the story about Mona Lisa?'" Chen says. "You can ask anything and, with your permission, they will take a photo to analyze what's in front of you." I ask if you could quiz it about perhaps the most famous Goya painting, the terrifying, Gothic horror-esque image of Saturn devouring his own son. "Yes, yes," Chen says, "It can also give you some recommendations about restaurants." Berlin-based L'Atitude 52°N is a new player in the smart glasses space, selling its first pairs on Kickstarter in September 2025, where the campaign surpassed its funding goal and raised more than $400,000. There have been some bumps since then, as shipments were delayed from an originally announced release date in February 2026, and one model in development was scrapped outright. Now, L'Atitude 52°N has announced an official release date for its smart glasses. Preorders for one model, called Berlin, start on May 19. The glasses actually go on sale on May 26. This might be a disappointment for Kickstarter backers, as the most recent official update from the campaign came in March and said shipping would begin on April 15 for Berlin units and June 7 for the second model, called Milan. L'Atitude 52°N still hasn't set an official launch date for the Milan, except to say that it will be "arriving in the second quarter of 2026." The Berlin glasses cost $399. Add another $50 for the photochromatic lenses. There is one very big catch: The AI features enabled on the device will only work for 12 months, which L'Atitude 52°N calls an "AI feature trial." After that, customers have to pay for a subscription service, or will be limited to the base features, like playing music and capturing media. How much will that subscription service cost? Chen says he doesn't know.

Smart Glasses Are Eyeing the One Thing People Hate More Than Being Spied On

If you don't like the idea of someone recording you discreetly, you probably don't like smart glasses. Video and photo capture are easily some of the most divisive aspects of the form factor, if not the most divisive. However divisive the recording part is, though, there are unifying aspects of smart glasses with camerasâ€"things that fans and critics can hate together. Take subscriptions, for example. As noted by Wired, L'Atitude 52°N, a smart glasses company that successfully crowdfunded last year, just launched its Berlin model of AI specs, which is set to go on sale May 26, and they have one tiny little quirk that I haven't seen yet, or at least not to this extent: the AI features on the smart glasses (a good deal of the stuff that might actually convince you to buy them) will all be paywalled after a year's trial. Per Wired, which spoke to L'Atitude 52°N CEO Gary Chen, there's no word on how much the $399 smart glasses' subscription will cost, but if you don't pay up, Berlin will be limited to "base features," which include playing music and capturing media. I guess anyone interested in buying Berlin will have to be okay with a looming, unknown cost down the road. It's an interesting choice for a company that positions its smart glasses as being ideal for travel, pitching stuff like an "AI tour guide" that uses computer vision to provide information on your surroundings as a centerpiece of that travel functionality. Outside of a tour guide, the Berlin smart glasses also appear to lean into translation and a voice assistant in the AI department. On the bright sideâ€"call it transparency if you wantâ€"at least Chen is being honest about future ambitions to squeeze recurring profits out of anyone who buys the company's smart glasses. A lot of the time, that's just an unacknowledged minefield customers unknowingly step onto when buying any gadget with a cloud service. If you're okay with potentially having to cough up a monthly sum to get the most out of your smart glasses, the Berlin look like a decent pair, but not quite the best. There's no screen, but there's a 12-megapixel camera, which is the same as the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, though there's a significant difference in capture resolution. The Berlin have a max recording resolution of 1080p, while the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses can record in 3K. They do look stylish, or at the very least unique, and if they can compete on open-ear audio, they might be a worthy consideration even with that very annoying subscription caveat. I'm skeptical that smart glasses are practical enough to justify paying for monthly, but I guess the only way to find out is by adding to everyone's already Sisyphean monthly subscription budget.

These upcoming smart glasses are adopting one of the worst trends in tech

Kickstarter backers will get lifetime AI access, but post-launch buyers will face an as-yet-unknown recurring charge. Smart glasses are still very much a niche category of wearable that most people are currently happy to watch from a safe distance. Some people understandably think they're a bit creepy, but even for those who find them intriguing as a concept, you probably need a pretty good reason to actually buy a pair. One company may have just offered the opposite, as the new L'Atitude 52°N Berlin smart glasses only include their AI features for 12 months before a paid subscription kicks in if you want to keep them.