--- title: "Brilliant Labs" seoTitle: "Brilliant Labs for developers: SDK, app model & distribution (2026)" description: "Brilliant Labs for third-party developers — SDK access, app model, distribution, capabilities & AI, and where it sits in the 2026 smart-glasses landscape." type: reference platform: all vendor: brilliant-labs related: - /docs/ecosystem - /docs/ecosystem/openness - /docs/ecosystem/ai - /docs/ecosystem/distribution - /docs/vendors/meta - /docs/concepts/capabilities --- > **Openness verdict.** The most open platform in the category: OSS multi-language SDKs (BSD-3/MIT) + an on-device Lua VM over plain BLE, a first-party IDE (AR Studio) and a complete open-source reference host app, open hardware/firmware/design files, and an open-source self-hostable BYO-key assistant — with no gatekeeper on either building or shipping, since you distribute your own host app. **Covered here:** Frame (shipping) · Halo (ships week of July 20, 2026). **Not covered here:** Monocle. ## Overview Brilliant Labs is a Singapore/Hong-Kong open-source hardware startup that builds developer-first AI smart glasses. Two models are in scope. **Frame** (shipping) is a lightweight (~40g class) glasses with a monocular **640×400 color micro-OLED** (0.23", 20° FOV), an [OV09734-based 720p color camera](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/frame/hardware/) cropped to 720×720, a single TDK ICS-41351 MEMS mic, a 6-axis MC6470 accel/e-compass, an nRF52840 Cortex-M4F MCU + FPGA for display acceleration, a 210mAh battery, and **Bluetooth 5.3** — no speaker. **Halo** (ships the week of July 20, 2026) is a redesign: a **640×480 full-RGB VGA020 OLEDoS micro-display** (0.2" panel, up to 5000 nit, 10000:1), a PixArt PAG7982J1 global-shutter VGA camera (81.2° H-FOV), **dual T5838 MEMS mics** with audio-activity detection, **stereo bone-conduction speakers**, a Bosch BMA580 accelerometer + QST QMC6308 magnetometer with tap detection, and notably an **Alif Balletto B1 (Cortex-M55 + Ethos-U55 NPU)** for on-device AI, a 300mAh battery, BLE 5.3, [just over 40g](https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo). Halo is $349 introductory ($399 later), sold direct via brilliant.xyz. Both are [fully open source](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/) — hardware design files, firmware (ZephyrOS on Halo), and SDKs on GitHub. Neither is standalone: both are phone/host peripherals over BLE. (n/a: neither is a tethered viewer, controller-driven AR, or MR headset.) ## Access The [Brilliant SDK](https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/brilliant_sdk) is a single open-source monorepo covering **both Halo and Frame** (device type auto-detected on connect), exposing three host bindings — **Python** (`brilliant-ble` low-level BLE via Bleak + `brilliant-msg` for rich objects), **Flutter/Dart** for iOS+Android, and **Web Bluetooth/TypeScript** — plus an **on-device Lua 5.3 VM** with a full [Lua hardware API](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/halo/halo-sdk-lua/) reachable directly on the glasses. Licensing is genuinely permissive: the unified `brilliant_sdk` is **BSD-3-Clause**, the older [`frame-sdk-python`](https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/frame-sdk-python) is **MIT**, and the Noa assistant backend is ISC. Beyond the language bindings there are two more first-party on-ramps the raw-SDK framing understates. First, **[AR Studio](https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=brilliantlabs.brilliant-ar-studio)**, Brilliant's VSCode extension, is a full IDE-integrated on-device workflow — device-file explorer, an interactive on-glasses REPL, auto-run/build that transfers files and soft-resets over BLE, FPGA-binary/firmware updates, and community-project browse/publish; the [Frame SDK docs](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/frame/frame-sdk/) present it as the officially-documented way to "directly write and execute Lua code on Frame" (its lineage is the Monocle MicroPython tool, now extended to the glasses). Second, the complete **[Noa companion app](https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/noa-flutter)** is open-source Flutter and is promoted as the canonical reference — "a great example of how to build your own Frame apps" — so you can start from a shipping production host app rather than raw snippets. Maturity is actively-developed pre-1.0 (the docs note each platform SDK is under active development); Frame's SDK is battle-tested, Halo's ships alongside the July hardware. **Who can build: anyone** — open signup, no dev-mode toggle, invite, partner tier, enterprise contract, or fee. Docs at [docs.brilliant.xyz](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/); source at [github.com/brilliantlabsAR](https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR). ## App model Explicitly phone/host-companion. Per the [Frame SDK docs](https://docs.brilliant.xyz/frame/frame-sdk/): "Rather than installing apps directly on Frame, it typically functions as a peripheral accessory for 'host' apps running on computers or mobile devices," with the glasses running a simple event-handler loop while the host drives logic. Transport is **Bluetooth LE** in every binding; `brilliant-msg` streams rich objects (images, audio, IMU data, rasterized text) between host and glasses. There is a **second dev path**: developers can also write Lua scripts that execute on Frame/Halo directly on the on-device Lua 5.3 VM (authored/pushed via AR Studio), supplementing — not replacing — the host app, so you can move logic on-glasses when latency or offline operation matters, and Halo's Ethos-U55 NPU makes some on-device inference viable. This is a near-exact match for Extentos's phone-companion model: a mobile app owning the primitives over BLE. The divergence is that Brilliant's transport/messaging is its own BLE protocol (not Meta's DAT), and Brilliant additionally exposes the on-device Lua path that Extentos's Meta-oriented model does not. ## Distribution There is **no gatekeeper and no first-party developer app store** for compiled SDK apps. An SDK app is just your own host program — a Python/desktop app, or an iOS/Android app built on the Flutter SDK — that you distribute through ordinary channels (the OS app stores for a mobile companion, or run it yourself); Brilliant reviews nothing and gates nothing, and because the SDK, hardware, and firmware are open source you can fork firmware or flash custom Lua freely. Two first-party *sharing* surfaces do exist, neither a curated native store: **AR Studio** carries a lightweight community browse-and-publish channel ("Access and publish user projects") for on-device scripts/projects — Monocle-rooted, but a real first-party discovery path — and the Noa companion app ships a consumer "Miniapps" system branded **Vibe Mode**, where an end user speaks a natural-language command ("build me a maps app that shows my next three turns") and Noa generates a running app in seconds that can then be shared and remixed by the community (see the [Halo product page](https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo)). Both are authoring/sharing surfaces, not compiled-SDK third-party publishing channels comparable to a reviewed native store. No preview→GA gating, no developer invite waitlist, no enterprise-MDM requirement. Publishing status: effectively **open/unrestricted** for SDK apps, with the caveat that "publishing" means shipping your own host app rather than submitting to a Brilliant-run store. ## Capabilities, limits & AI **Camera:** Frame captures 720×720 color stills to the host via `brilliant-msg`. Halo's PAG7982J1 is a global-shutter VGA color module (81.2° H-FOV); `brilliant-msg` lists image transfer, but Brilliant markets Halo's camera primarily as "AI vision input" and the [product page](https://brilliant.xyz/products/halo) frames it as a low-power optical sensor for AI inference — whether arbitrary photo/video capture-to-host is a supported first-class primitive on Halo is not spelled out in the official hardware docs (see open questions). No documented capture-gating/permission-broker layer — access is direct over BLE. **Microphone/audio capture:** yes — Frame single MEMS mic; Halo dual T5838 mics with audio-activity detection, streamable to host. **Audio output/TTS:** Frame has no speaker (host-side audio only); Halo has stereo bone-conduction speakers you can drive. **On-lens display/UI:** yes, a real first-class surface — you render directly to the color OLED via Lua graphics APIs or host-pushed rasterized text/images (Frame 640×400, 20° FOV; Halo 640×480 RGB OLEDoS). **Sensors:** IMU/accelerometer + magnetometer with tap detection on both; no GPS on-glasses (location comes from the phone host). **Input:** capacitive tap/tap-detection on the frame; Halo adds an optical sensor and a physical button + status LED. No gesture-camera, controller, or neural-band input. **Reserved surfaces:** essentially none — because the assistant, wake handling, gestures, and IMU are all exposed to developer code, there is no locked first-party layer the way Meta reserves "Hey Meta." **AI & the assistant:** Noa is the bundled multimodal assistant, and it is **fully open**: [`noa-assistant`](https://github.com/brilliantlabsAR/noa-assistant) is open-source (ISC), self-hostable, and bring-your-own-key — you supply your own provider credentials in a `.env` and point the glasses at a model you host. The documented runtime flags are OpenAI-centric (`--assistant gpt`, vision via `gpt-4-vision`, web search via `--search-api serpapi`): OpenAI and SerpAPI are the clearly-enumerated providers, and while other models (e.g. a Claude id) appear in code examples they aren't spelled out as first-class selectable provider flags (see open questions). Voice invocation and vision queries are developer-controllable; Halo's Ethos-U55 NPU enables some on-device inference, though the shipped Noa experience is cloud-backed. ## Roadmap **Frame** has been shipping and its Python/Flutter SDKs are mature. **Halo** was announced in 2026 as the successor, priced $349 (rising to $399), with shipping stated to "start the week of July 20" 2026 — the unified `brilliant_sdk` monorepo (Python/Flutter/Web Bluetooth, Lua 5.3, auto device detection) lands with it. Momentum signals: consolidation of Frame+Halo into one open SDK, a move to a modern NPU-class SoC (Alif Balletto B1) for on-device AI, and continued full open-sourcing of hardware/firmware/design files. Announced-but-still-settling at time of writing: Noa's paid "Plus" tier pricing and the exact scope of Halo's on-device (vs cloud) AI. No developer-publishing gate is announced or planned — the platform's trajectory is more-open, not gated. The predecessor **Monocle** (MicroPython clip-on) is legacy and out of scope. ## In the landscape Brilliant Labs is one platform in the third-party [smart-glasses landscape](/docs/ecosystem). See [how open it is](/docs/ecosystem/openness) relative to other platforms, [how AI works](/docs/ecosystem/ai) across them, and the full [platform comparison](/docs/ecosystem).