Vienna Startup Soma Reality to Launch Eye-Tracking Glasses in 2027

Vienna-based Soma Reality is stepping out of the lab and into consumer hardware. Under the Luchs Eyewear name, the company plans to launch its own glasses in 2027, with a waitlist already open for anyone who wants in early.

The pitch is simple enough to explain, even if the underlying math is not: the glasses watch involuntary eye movements such as blinks, fixations and pupil response, then translate those signals into a running read on attention and mental effort. Over time, the company says, that creates a picture of how someone’s cognition shifts across hours, days and weeks.

Four measures sit at the center of the system: cognitive load, cognitive fatigue, cognitive performance and attention. A companion app is meant to show trends and let users tag parts of the day so the numbers have some context. Soma’s point is not clinical theatre. It is everyday self-observation, done quietly in the background, without prompts and without a subscription.

The privacy pitch is the sharpest part of the story. Luchs Eyewear leaves out the outward-facing camera entirely, which puts it on a very different track from the smart glasses now drawing heat in public. The sensors look inward. The company says the data belongs to the user, and even Soma only sees it with explicit consent. That is a neat answer to a messy category, especially after the criticism aimed at camera glasses and the security patch Meta pushed after tampered LEDs raised alarm.

Soma Reality itself is not starting from zero. Founded in Vienna in 2019 by Adrian Brodesser, it already sells software that derives cognitive states from eye-tracking data in real time. Its tools are hardware-agnostic and work with systems from Tobii, Pupil Labs and ViewPointSystems. Customers so far come mainly from aviation, healthcare, professional sports and research, with the Medical University of Vienna using the tech in surgical training.

The company says it has raised roughly 5.6 million euros so far and brought in more than 2 million euros in B2B revenue since 2024. The consumer push will run alongside its business software and longitudinal studies on cognitive health. That is a sensible hedge: if the glasses do not become a hit, the company still has a living business. If they do, Vienna gets another reminder that not every pair of smart glasses needs to spy on the street.