HTC’s AI eyewear has reached Australian shelves, with the VIVE Eagle arriving at A$799 alongside a magnetic battery puck.

Retail runs through VIVE.com, Amazon and selected Harvey Norman outlets, and the VIVE Power Boost accessory carries an A$79 price. The country launch follows Taiwan and a US and Europe rollout earlier this month.

The Eagle’s pitch is that it refuses to pick an assistant for you. A companion app for iOS and Android lets owners set Google Gemini or OpenAI’s GPT as the default and swap between them in a couple of taps. Light tasks such as photos, music and calls stay on-device, while anything heavier is stripped of identifying data and encrypted before HTC hands it to the chosen model through enterprise accounts, a design meant to keep providers from building ad profiles out of prompts.

HTC has also leaned on privacy as a differentiator. The frames are certified to ISO 27001 and ISO 27701, and the camera switches off automatically when the glasses come off. Features include Total Memory Recall, live translation across up to 96 languages on the Pro tier, and image-to-text translation for menus and signs.

Australia has become a busy market for wearable cameras, with local councils and event organisers weighing restrictions as Meta’s Ray-Ban line spreads. At A$799 the Eagle undercuts several rival frames already on shelves there.

Source: techAU