VueBuds: Visual Intelligence with Wireless Earbuds

TL;DR

VueBuds introduces the first camera-integrated wireless earbuds capable of real-time visual understanding within strict power and size constraints, enabling advanced egocentric vision applications.

Contribution

This work presents a novel low-power, camera-equipped wireless earbud design that integrates vision language models for real-time scene understanding.

Findings

VueBuds achieves comparable response quality to Ray-Ban Meta in visual question-answering tasks.

The system operates with cameras drawing under 5mW power and provides comprehensive forward coverage.

User studies with 90 participants validate VueBuds' effectiveness against smart glasses.

Abstract

Despite their ubiquity, wireless earbuds remain audio-centric due to size and power constraints. We present VueBuds, the first camera-integrated wireless earbuds for egocentric vision, capable of operating within stringent power and form-factor limits. Each VueBud embeds a camera into a Sony WF-1000XM3 to stream visual data over Bluetooth to a host device for on-device vision language model (VLM) processing. We show analytically and empirically that while each camera's field of view is partially occluded by the face, the combined binocular perspective provides comprehensive forward coverage. By integrating VueBuds with VLMs, we build an end-to-end system for real-time scene understanding, translation, visual reasoning, and text reading; all from low-resolution monochrome cameras drawing under 5mW through on-demand activation. Through online and in-person user studies with 90 participants, we compare VueBuds against smart glasses across 17 visual question-answering tasks, and show that our system achieves response quality on par with Ray-Ban Meta. Our work establishes low-power camera-equipped earbuds as a compelling platform for visual intelligence, bringing rapidly advancing VLM capabilities to one of the most ubiquitous wearable form factors.