No, AirPods With Cameras Aren’t Smart Glasses for Your Ears

It’s been a big week for Apple leaks, and arguably at the center of all that is a forthcoming pair of AirPods . Not just any AirPods, though— AirPods with cameras . Let me step back in case you haven’t been keeping tabs.

Apple has long been rumored to be working on a pair of AirPods with cameras in them, but until this week, basically all of that info has come from reporting by Bloomberg —from noted Apple leaker Mark Gurman, in particular. Gurman is fairly reliable, to be sure, but it’s one thing to have someone describe what Apple is doing and another to actually see it for yourself. And thanks to recent leaks out of macOS Tahoe, that’s exactly what we got.

Here is your first look at AirPods with Cameras in action using Visual Intelligence.

In this video mined from Apple’s software, you can see, in an apparently official demonstration, how the company is envisioning its camera-clad AirPods. Clearly, they’re a conduit for computer vision, or “visual intelligence,” as Apple likes to call it, meaning they can see your surroundings and then use AI to interpret them. And naturally, given that emphasis on computer vision, AirPods with cameras are being compared to another increasingly popular category: smart glasses .

Smart glasses, Meta’s AI glasses in particular, also include computer vision as one of their foundational features. They can parse your surroundings to translate languages, give you advice, etc… But before you go dubbing AirPods with cameras as smart glasses for your ears, let me stop you for a second.

According to MacRumors and a tip from one of its eagle-eyed forum members, we have some additional clues about how AirPods with cameras work, and it’s not quite as smart glasses-y as the concept sounds. One of the biggest differences is the image sensor. While smart glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses can capture pictures and videos in high resolution (up to 3K for videos), the AirPods cameras are, relatively speaking, potato quality. Not only that, but code suggests that those pictures aren’t for personal consumption but are instead designed to inform AI.

Specifically, the MacRumors forum member uncovered a framework in macOS called “AccessorySensorManager,” which appears to provide some insight about the upcoming AirPods’ sensors. That information points to the camera on the earbuds being only 1 megapixel—not exactly high-res.

As MacRumors notes, that doesn’t rule out the inclusion of other sensors, like something infrared, but what this implies to me is that Apple wants the resolution of its AirPods cameras to be good enough for parsing your surroundings, but not so good that they represent a huge privacy liability.

Interestingly, MacRumors says there will be two modes here—active and passive—and the image resolution will depend on which mode is being used. Here’s the breakdown per MacRumors:

In “active” mode, likely triggered by the user via Siri, the AirPods capture a 640×640 image and return a processed 1024×1024 image. “That’s about 0.4 megapixels of sampled image data, and a little over 1 megapixel for the output frame,” mactracker explains.