AI-Powered Smart Goggles Transform Novice Scientists into Experts

Imagine standing at the laboratory bench, working on an experiment, when, as you finish one step, a display on the inside of your lab goggles tells you what to do next. A small camera in the frame watches your hands closely. If you reach for the wrong tube, the display flashes a warning. Before you can make the mistake, the system tells you how to get back on track.

Laboratory safety goggles have finally joined the ranks of smart devices. That’s the promise behind LabOS, an AI “operating system” for scientific laboratories built by the Stanford-Princeton AI Coscientist Team. Powered by NVIDIA’s vision-language models, the system guides experiments and prevents mistakes in real-time, training new scientists to expert levels.

The scientific community has long grappled with a problem known as a “replication crisis.” LabOS aims to bridge the physical-digital divide in scientific experiments by offering real-time guidance and training to scientists.

“From a robotics and human-computer interaction perspective, this work highlights a promising direction,” says Kourosh Darvish, a scientist at the University of Toronto.

The AI Coscientist Team is pushing this technology beyond the research bench, introducing MedOS to assist surgeons with anatomical mapping and tool alignment. The broader ambition is to turn every scientific research lab—and soon, every clinic—into an AI-perceivable and AI-operable environment, improving human outcomes.

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