If the tech prophets are to be believed, the Next Great Computing Platform will be on your face. It will come as a pair of glasses, as powerful as your iPhone with the panache of your favorite frames. It will pipe your preferred virtual assistant into your ear and give you super-human vision like the Terminator. It will change the way you think of computers, and the way you see the world.

The race to make that first pair of commercially successful augmented reality glasses is on, with companies big and small lurching to become the AR platform you wear all the time. It could be Snapchat, with its second iteration of Spectacles. It could be Toshiba, with its new eyewear aimed at enterprise users, or Google, with a remake of Glass. It could be Vuzix or ODG, Intel or Bose, Realmax or Magic Leap. The list goes on and on.

"The holy grail is something that not only resembles a normal pair of, say, Gucci glasses, but has functionality that augments your life in a meaningful way." Ari Grobman, CEO of Lumus

Some of these smart glasses come close to taking the power and convenience of a mobile phone and resting it on the bridge of your nose. But none of the current designs will make you look like you're walking bravely into the AR future. Instead, they will make you look like you forgot to take off the 3-D glasses before leaving the movie theater.

For all the hype, no company has come close to creating a pair of AR glasses that actually look good when you wear them. But before the augmented reality revolution can really begin—before glasses can usher in the next wave of personal computing—these devices have to look like something people actually want to put on their face. And that isn't as easy as it sounds.

Face Value

Every company making glasses knows that a winning design has to incorporate both a sense of fashion and an understanding of ergonomics.

"All the major tech companies working on this want to reduce friction or resistance to adoption because the plan is that AR glasses will become our universal interface in our everyday lives," says Ari Grobman, the CEO of Lumus, an Israeli company that makes the see-through displays for smart glasses and is currently developing connected eyewear of its own. "The battle is between immersive functionality and non-dorky, even cool-looking design. The holy grail is something that not only resembles a normal pair of, say, Gucci glasses, but has functionality that augments your life in a meaningful way."

Right now, that demands a trade-off. The best AR displays require bulky optical hardware to optimize resolution and provide a wide field-of-view. That makes it possible to do all kinds of cool things in augmented reality. But early versions, like the Meta 2 AR headset, look more like an Oculus Rift than a pair of Warby Parkers. Slimmer AR displays, like the used in Google Glass, feel more natural to wear, but they sit above or next to the normal field of vision, so they're are less immersive and less functional. Adding other features to the glasses—a microphone, a decent camera, various sensors—also increases bulk and makes it harder to create something comfortable or stylish.

This tension has split the field of AR glasses into two extremes. On one end, you get hulking glasses packed with features to show off the unbridled potential of augmented reality. On the other end, you sacrifice features to make a wearable that looks and feels more like normal eyewear.

Vision Quest

In the maximalist camp, there's Osterhout Design Group. Its latest smart glasses, the ODG R-8 and R-9, have dual 1080p OLED displays, run Android, and utilize smartphone-class Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 chips. The R-9, the slightly more powerful model, has an impressive 50-degree field of view and a 13-megapixel camera capable of recording 4K video. It also looks like someone glued two pairs of 3-D glasses together.