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.

Existing image editing models struggle to meet real-world demands; despite excelling in academic benchmarks, we are yet to see them adopted to solve real user needs. The datasets that power these models use artificial edits, lacking the scale and ecological validity necessary to address the true diversity of user requests. In response, we introduce RealEdit, a large-scale image editing dataset with authentic user requests and human-made edits sourced from Reddit. RealEdit contains a test set of 9.3K examples the community can use to evaluate models on real user requests. Our results show that existing models fall short on these tasks, implying a need for realistic training data. So, we introduce 48K training examples, with which we train our RealEdit model. Our model achieves substantial gains—outperforming competitors by up to 165 Elo points in human judgment and 92% relative improvement on the automated VIEScore metric on our test set. We deploy our model back on Reddit, testing it on new requests, and receive positive feedback. Beyond image editing, we explore RealEdit ’s potential in detecting edited images by partnering with a deepfake detection non-profit. Finetuning their model on RealEdit data improves its F1-score by 14 percentage points, underscoring the dataset’s value for broad, impactful applications.1