Frequently asked questions

We are in the process of vetting Nika Optics's second generation VHG waveguides. They claim to have 60% yield. Best case scenario: they pass our vetting and we go with their product, because it is waveguide with least visible grating we've seen so far. However, if they couldn't pass our vetting, then we'll be using the same SRG solution that Even uses, and it would look the same as Even G2.

1.Four hours of full brightness, with intermittent screen-off to meet eight hours of working time. 2.Yes, prescription lenses require an additional fee.

300mAh battery provides 4 hours of continuous screen-on time and 8-10 hours of normal use; External TapC charging ring is compatible.

We ship from Shenzhen, China using SF.

We are currently in discussions with prescription lens suppliers and have no further information at this time, but we hope that the prescription lenses will be of high quality and inexpensive.

Yeah, we’re still in the engineering / validation stage. After moving from the RK platform to AR1, a lot of things had to be redesigned — including the main board flex, internal layout, and mechanical structure. So honestly, the workload is almost like starting again in some areas. But AR1 is much closer to what we originally imagined as our ideal second-generation product. After evaluating it, we felt this upgrade was necessary and worth doing, even though it added a lot of complexity. So when you receive the Monako Glasses, it will actually be much closer to what we had in mind for a “Gen 2” product, not just the original first version. The cost has increased significantly because of this upgrade, but we still don’t plan to change the first-batch price. It may not be profitable for us, and could even be a small loss, but we’re still really happy that we were able to push the product to this level. We just want to make sure the first units are good enough before moving forward.

we have indeed tried binocular, it was an improvement for some people, and bad for others becausse their eye and pupil distances didn't align well. VR headsets have this same problem, but for headsets, they have enough space to include a mechanical component to manually adjust eye alignment I think in VR, it is called an IPD slider

Hi Pranav! Monako is dedicated to being a super hackable wearable computer! It does have an h.264 decoder chip onboard, so it can indeed encode and decode videos super quickly. However, our display is monochrome, so watching movies on it wouldn't look great.

Thank you for your continued attention. It is mostly an optimization problem. Most power hungry parts are 1. WiFi and 2. Display, which involves both the MicroLED light engine and GPU rendering. For WiFi, our solution is a BLE GATT driven network adapter (think Bluetooth PAN network from the olden days); Agent harnesses mostly stream text, and BLE is fast enough for that. For the display, our default setting is to have the display sleep in 15 seconds, and light up when a task completes or if there are notifications.

Yes, we do have an IMU onboard, accelerometer + gyroscrope + magnetometer

Yeah, totally fair question. The main reason is that we upgraded the hardware platform from the previous RK platform to Qualcomm AR1. That gives us a much stronger foundation, but it also means a lot of the SDK and simulator work has to be adapted or rewritten. AR1 is originally designed around Android, while MonoOS is Linux-based, so we need to do extra work to make things fit properly into our own system — including hardware interfaces, camera/audio/display behavior, system APIs, and the developer workflow. Another big factor is the NPU upgrade. The onboard AI capability moved from around 1.2 TOPS to around 2.4 TOPS, so the SDK parts related to NPU access, testing, and optimization also need to be rebuilt and re-tested. So the SDK and simulator are delayed because the platform changed in a meaningful way, not because we stopped working on them. We want the developer tools to match the new hardware properly instead of shipping something rushed or outdated. We’ll share more once they’re ready for external testing. Additionally, you can get some extra information from our founder's AMA:https://discord.com/channels/1501149527741300768/1531488677837017238/1531488677837017238

they can connect to a computer wirelessly, or you could run the agent harness natively on the glasses. If you are running a multimodal agent on your harness (e.g. gpt5.4), you can use the camera to show the agent code/designs/phone screens, and agents nowadays are smart enough to know what you are referring to

Yes

Hi Sley, hand tracking supports text selection/cut/paste, but input itself is handled by voice. Hand tracking is very precise, building an in-air keyboard is definitely doable, but we are a bit skeptical about the UX of air keyboards 🙁

C and other scripting languages like Python also work. Our system apps and services are implemented in C/Lua. Primary use case is for running your coding agents while on the go. Coding agents can also build apps that run on the glasses themselves, making it super easy to build apps such as calories analyzer, speech powered note taker, running/biking distance tracker, reading and study companion (ask questions about a paragraph you're reading), etc you could also leverage the onboard NPU to build apps such as object detection and obstacle avoidance for vision impaired people

I recommend choosing a material with a higher refractive index, such as 1.74. This can significantly reduce weight, but the price is relatively higher. We are seeking solutions from prescription lens suppliers.

This is very mild nearsightedness. If you don't usually wear prescription lenses, I suggest you don't need to buy any additional prescription lenses.

Hi there! 1. The first batch is priced at $399 USD. 2. Pre-orders for the second batch are on the way, but we need to ensure the production schedule of the first batch, as it forms the basis for subsequent batches and serves as a testing benchmark. 3. Yes, you can run your own Jarvis; Monako is essentially a Linux computer.

This won't work; the color displayed by the optical engine is a single shade of green.😂

Hi! We have a UI framework implemented in Lua, with CSS support (via Yoga Layout) so Agents know how to write it out of the box. A lot of users have mentioned wanting better support for hardware hackers, so we're brainstorming how we can expose GPIOs from the enclosure So you might not have to take apart the glasses to be able to interface custom hardware