What I look for in a smart glasses brief

I read the brief before I read who sent it

I get sent a lot of smart glasses briefs. Some come from brand marketing managers who have never worked in this space before. Some come from agency creative directors who have shipped ten campaigns but never one on hardware. Some come from event producers who need something to happen on a stage in six weeks. The name on the email tells me almost nothing about whether the project is going to work. The brief itself tells me almost everything.

I wrote a more structured guide to what a developer needs from a brief in how to brief a smart glasses developer, and that piece is the framework: the physical context, the trigger, the outcome, the constraint. This one is different. This is what actually happens in my head when a brief lands, the signals I check for before I have even opened a call with you, and the pattern that tells me whether to get excited or to write a polite pass.

The first thing I check: does it name a platform

Every brief I read gets scanned for one thing first: has this person named a specific device, or have they written "something in AR"? Those are not the same brief, and they do not get the same response speed from me.

"Something in AR" tells me the client has decided AR sounds interesting but has not yet worked out what the user is doing with their hands, what device they are wearing, or why glasses specifically over a phone. "Snap Spectacles, because our booth staff need both hands free to demo the product" tells me the client already made the decision that matters most. I can start scoping the second brief before the call even starts.

Noodle, the spatial AI workbench we built at MIT Reality Hack 2026, only exists because the brief we gave ourselves named the platform before it named anything else: Snap Spectacles, hand tracking only, no keyboard. That single constraint is what forced the node-based interface into existence. I go into more detail on that build in building Noodle: how we won MIT Reality Hack 2026. The lesson carries over directly to client briefs: name the platform and the reason, and the rest of the concept gets easier to design, not harder.

A fixed date tells me more than a mood board

A brief with no date attached is usually a brief that has not been greenlit yet. It is a conversation someone is having internally, not a project someone has committed budget and a team to. I do not say that to be dismissive. Early conversations are fine. But I need to know which kind of email I am reading.

A trade show date, a product launch window, a campaign flight, even a loose "we need this live before the holidays" gives me something to work backwards from. Ice Fishing, the Snap Spectacles build I wrote about in Ice Fishing on Snap Spectacles: behind the build, had a fixed delivery window from day one, and that constraint shaped the scope as much as the hardware did. A date is not paperwork. It tells me how much of the interaction model I can afford to explore versus how much I need to lock down in week one.

Naming a feeling beats naming a metric

"Engagement" is the word that shows up in almost every brief I read, and it is close to meaningless on its own. Engagement with what, measured how, for whom, feeling what while they do it? A brief that stops at "we want engagement" has not decided what success looks like. It has decided that success should be measurable, which is a different thing entirely.

The House of the Dragon brief for HBO did not ask for engagement. It asked for people to feel like they had discovered something hidden, not that they had downloaded an app. That one sentence is the reason the lens anchored a sleeping dragon to a real hill fort and triggered on proximity, rather than shipping as a generic filter you activate from a menu. The feeling drove the mechanic. The metric came after, as a result, not as the brief.

Existing brand assets are a tell

I do not expect a finished 3D asset library on the first call. But a brief that arrives with a logo file, a product model, approved footage, or even a rough brand guideline attached tells me the client has already done internal work to get this project moving. A brief with nothing attached, just a paragraph of ambition, tells me the first two weeks of the engagement will be spent chasing sign-off on things that should have been decided before I was contacted.

The easyJet uniform try-on used the airline's actual cabin crew uniform as the base for the body-tracked 3D garment, and that asset existing already meant the build could focus on the interaction, the name tag customisation, and the cabin environment, instead of starting from a blank reference. Assets are not a nice-to-have. They are evidence the brand has already made decisions internally that a studio does not need to re-litigate.

Budget has to match the platform, not the ambition

This is the one I flag back most often. A brief will name Snap Spectacles as the platform and then attach a budget that would comfortably cover a Snapchat or Instagram filter and nothing more. Those are not the same cost, because they are not the same amount of invention.

A social AR filter lives inside a platform that already has a camera, a lens carousel, and hundreds of millions of people with the app open. You are designing content for an existing distribution system. A Snap Spectacles build means designing the interaction model from close to zero, on hardware almost none of your users have ever worn before. That is not a bigger version of the same job. It is a different job.

If the number does not match the platform named, that mismatch is usually the first thing I write back about. It is not a deal breaker. It is a sign the brief was written before someone checked what the platform actually costs, and that gap needs to close before we can talk about scope.

What makes me say yes

A few things, together, usually mean I clear my calendar for a call.

What makes me pass

The inverse is just as reliable. If a brief hits all three of these, I usually reply with questions rather than a proposal, because a proposal at that point would be a guess dressed up as an estimate.

None of these are fatal on their own. Most first briefs are missing at least one. What tells me something is closer to ready is that the client can answer the gap when I ask, quickly and specifically, rather than needing to go back and invent an answer from scratch.

What I actually want from the first email

I am not looking for a finished creative treatment or a shot list. I want four sentences: the platform and why, the date, the feeling you want the audience to leave with, and whatever assets already exist. That is enough for me to tell you honestly whether we should talk further, and it is enough for me to start thinking about the build before the call even happens.

You can see what that looks like in production at ar.rbkavin.studio, where the live demos are the closest thing to proof that these signals turn into something real. And if you want the fuller picture of what we build on wearable hardware, that is at our wearables and smart glasses page.

I have been doing this for six years now, across HBO, Snap, easyJet, and the hackathon build that became Noodle. The brief has never once been the part I resented reading. The vague ones just take longer to turn into something I can actually build.

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