Smart but independent: design becomes smart and expands what eyewear can do

Optical Insights by Alessandra Salimbene.

When eyewear becomes smart, the question is not whether the industry will change. It is who will lead the change.

At MIDO 2026 I sat down with Francesco Caretti. Dante’s son, raised in one of the most coherent and rigorous contexts of Italian independent eyewear. And he talked to me about artificial intelligence. It was not really a surprise. For a few years I had seen this conversation approaching: I felt it in the air at trade fairs, in the side comments at presentations, in the ever more concrete curiosity of the opticians I meet in my work. What struck me this time was the way Francesco framed the question. Not as a choice between opposite worlds, but as a ground on which eyewear, the real thing, the kind that is designed and worn, can still play a central role.

The product we talked about is called Even Realities, distributed in Italy by Sublimeyewear. Smart glasses with augmented reality and integrated artificial intelligence. Built by a team of engineers. Sold, more and more, in the best Italian independent optical practices.

The wearable future is already in the practice

In recent years the narrative on wearable devices has swung between the enthusiasm of tech evangelists and the scepticism of those who work in the field. Google Glass, the commercial failure of the first headsets, the long season of smartwatches perceived as second-tier accessories. It seemed the human body resisted digital colonisation. Then the Ray-Ban Meta arrived. And things started to move.

Not because the technology had become miraculous, but because someone had finally understood that form matters. That a wearable device has to want to be worn. That the line between technological object and object of style is not an aesthetic detail: it is the very condition of its success. Glasses are at the centre of this transformation. They are for practical reasons, they sit on the face, close to the eyes, close to the ears, in a privileged position to collect and return information. And they are for cultural reasons we know well in our industry: eyewear has always been an object of identity, not only of function. How much this category weighs for the big groups is something I describe in my analysis of the EssilorLuxottica 2025 report.

Design as a condition, not an option

Francesco says it clearly during the interview: "Glasses are the first thing others see of us when they meet us". It is a simple sentence, but it carries considerable weight in a conversation about technology. Because it tells of an awareness that is by no means taken for granted in the tech world: wearable technology cannot afford to ignore aesthetics. Not as a concession to the market, but as a structural requirement. A product nobody wants to wear does not get worn. And a product that is not worn does not exist.

The Even Realities project comes from a team with a strongly technological background, but it has incorporated design as a primary dimension, not a decorative one. This, in my view, is the difference from many previous attempts: nobody tried to add technology to an existing object, or to convince people to wear an electronic device. The work was done on the glasses as such, on their shape, their balance, their relationship with the face. It is not yet handmade research eyewear. But it is a product that respects the object.

An accessibility we had not considered

There is a passage of the interview that stopped me. Francesco tells of a deaf young woman who was one of the first to try these glasses, and who kept coming back to the practice to give feedback, because those glasses gave her real-time subtitles of what was being said around her. It is a powerful image. Not because the technology is new in absolute terms, applications that transcribe audio to text already exist, but because it makes it wearable, discreet, integrated into daily life without the stigma of a special device.

Add instant translation: at a trade fair, when travelling, in an international professional context. The possibility of taking visual notes, of finding your way without looking down at the phone. Functions that seem convenient but that, in certain contexts, substantially change the quality of the experience. This dimension, eyewear as a tool of accessibility and autonomy, is still little explored in our industry. And it is, in my opinion, one of the strongest arguments for anyone who wants to position this kind of product seriously.

The independent optician as protagonist

The question that interests me most, though, is another: what does all this mean for someone running an independent optical practice? The most comfortable answer would be to wait. Watch how the market moves, wait for the product to consolidate, step in when the risk has decreased. It is an understandable logic, but it is exactly the logic that over time has eroded the independent’s space in favour of chains and online platforms.

A technological product creates in the practice something the online channel cannot easily replicate: a moment of wonder. As Francesco describes, there is a phase in which the customer tries the glasses on, remains "stunned for a moment", and from there a new conversation begins. New in the literal sense: it is not the conversation about the frame, nor the one about progressive lenses. It is a conversation about how technology can improve their day. This opens up new customers, including people who do not wear prescription glasses, because the product works without prescription lenses too. And it builds a new kind of relationship with the regular customer, who comes back to the practice with a different question.

Whoever seizes this opportunity now builds a positioning. Whoever waits will find themselves chasing.

Coexistence as a conscious choice

Francesco is very direct on one point: he would not want to live in a world where there is "only one side or the other". He is convinced, and so am I, that smart eyewear and design eyewear do not exclude each other, but sit side by side. That the same customer can wear both, at different moments and in different contexts. This coexistence, however, is not automatic. It requires a choice by whoever runs a practice: deciding to carry both, to know how to tell both, to build an offer that makes sense as a whole.

The alternative, sticking to tradition out of fear of technology, or embracing technology while forgetting the value of design, produces a loss in both cases. Of positioning, of customers, of identity. Handmade research eyewear and smart eyewear are not competing for the same customer at the same moment. They are two answers to different needs, which can coexist in the same space, if whoever runs that space has the vision to hold them together. It is the same entrepreneurial vision his father talks about in Being independent in 2026.

In the video on this page you will find the full interview with Francesco Caretti. Digital tools, and how to bring them into the work of the optical practice, are the theme of the webinar The state of the art of digital for optics and of the digital marketing for optics area; the first self-guided step is Trade Up Online in Italy, and The Charismatic Practice elsewhere.