Smart Glasses: Eye tracking needs a standard. Who is measuring this?
Updated: Aug 26
The first consumer glasses with built-in eye tracking were unveiled in March and are now in production for a December ship. By June, reference designs were on show at AWE that let any manufacturer add it without developing it from scratch: sensor, IR illumination and tracking stack pre-integrated, ready to drop into a frame. Gaze has stopped being an input method and become a context signal, and the next generation will act on what you look at before you ask it to.
Impressive engineering. It is also a quiet inversion of what eyewear has always been.
For a century the job of a lens was subtractive. Block UV. Cut glare. Manage transmission. ISO 12312-1, ISO 16321-1, EN 166, ANSI Z87.1, every one of them is written around what the lens keeps out.
Eye tracking puts near infrared emitters, typically around 850 nm, fifteen millimetres from the cornea and runs them for as long as the glasses are worn.
The limits do exist, and they are better than people assume. IEC 62471 sets a separate retinal thermal limit for weak visual stimulus precisely because near infrared triggers no aversion response. The standard has thought about this.
What it has not thought about is fifteen millimetres, twelve hours a day, in a moving frame on a moving face. 62471 was written for lamps and measured at lamp distances. IEC 63145 covers eyewear displays, but it is a measurement series, optical properties and image quality, not a safety standard. And if a design uses VCSELs rather than IR LEDs, 62471 does not apply at all. That is IEC 60825-1: a different standard, a different lab, turning on an emitter choice the buyer never sees.
Then there is the part nobody tests at all. The emitter as-built, through the actual tint and coating stack the wearer receives. Type approval tells you a design is compliant, not whether unit 400,000 off the line still is. And with reference designs in play, the same emitter geometry now propagates into dozens of unrelated products built by manufacturers who never designed it and cannot characterise it.
None of this makes eye tracking dangerous. It makes it unmeasured at production scale, which is a different problem and a solvable one.
We have supplied eyewear quality testing equipment across Asia, the USA and Europe since 1989, and we work with manufacturers on smart lens inspection and production. Smart glasses are our specialism. We are fortunate to sit on several national standards committees, so this is not a view from the sidelines. If you have comments on any of the above, send them to us and we will carry them into the discussion.
If you are building smart eyewear, supplying into it, or working on the rules for it, get in touch.