Julien is a full-time streamer with more than a million followers across his channels. For years, he worked around the same problem: to stay connected with his audience, he had to read live chats. But to read them, he had to stay tied to his desk & another screen.
This is the story of how he stopped working around the problem, and built the answer directly into his Even G2.
Live Four to Six Hours a Day. The Hardest Part Was Never Sitting Down.
Julien goes live for four to six hours a day. He plays, reacts, and talks to a chat window that scrolls faster than he can read. Across channels, the chat is where the viewers and him interact. A question, a joke, a subscription, a reaction that changes the mood of the room before it disappears into the scroll. Reading chats kept him close to his audience. Looking down at chats pulled him away from them. That was the contradiction he had been working around for years.
The harder part is that Julien doesn't stream the way most people picture streamers. He isn't anchored to a desk. A lot of his streams are him moving - walking around his space, building Legos on camera, or even cooking live. There's no second monitor to glance at when you're standing at a stove or three steps away from the desk. The chat became something he had to stop and choose to check, which meant it became something he kept missing. Over a four-to-six-hour stream, those small interruptions add up into something less like a habit and more like a tax.
So Julien tried to build his way out of it. His first attempt was a wrist-worn display made from e-ink - the same material used in Kindles. The idea was to bring chat closer to his hands. The prototype didn't survive contact with reality: the logistics were awkward, and even when chat was strapped to his wrist, it still wasn't where his attention already lived.
The fix, when it came, was on his face.
"I tried to build it myself out of the same material Kindles are made of," Julien says. "It didn't work. The first time I saw chat floating in the corner of my eye, I knew that was it."
Julien Did Not Just Use Even G2. He Built for It.
Julien did not come to Even Realities as a trained software developer, but as a creator with a specific problem and a clear idea of what the solution should feel like.
To build it, he collaborated closely with the Even team for guidance, the docs, and a willingness to push through the parts he didn't know. "It was more intuitive than I expected," he says. "Between the documentation, a lot of help from the team, and a couple of hours of vibe-coding, I had something I could actually wear."
The Even community handled the last mile. "Pieces of the final plugin came from contributors helping me debug and stitch things together," he says. "The version that ended up on my face is genuinely a community effort."
The change he keeps coming back to isn't technical. It's about who gets to build. "The friction at the start used to be enormous. Now anyone with an idea and a couple of weekends can put their own thing on a real device."
A few years ago, Julien might have stopped where most people stop: at the gap between the tool they wish existed and the skills needed to build it. This time, the docs were clear enough, the team was close enough, and the device was open enough that he crossed it. Even Hub gave the app a home. Even G2 made it something he could wear.
A Chat Window That Finally Moves With You.
The result was Twitch Chat, an Even Hub app for Even G2 that lets anyone see their Twitch chat directly from their glasses. Live messages, bits, and subscriptions appear in view.
For Julien, the difference was not that he had another way to check chat. It was that chat no longer had to pull him back to a phone, a second monitor, or the desk in front of him. It could stay with him while he streamed. It could also stay with him when he was out and about, keeping up with friends’ streams and chat without constantly reaching for another screen. That changed the feeling of it. The stream could keep moving. The chat could stay close. And the part of the job that once kept dragging his attention sideways became something he could carry in view.
Twitch Chat is now live on Even Hub, which means other streamers don't have to build the same fix from scratch. One creator's workaround became something the rest of them could just install.
Live Chat Was Only the Beginning.
For Julien, Twitch Chat is still just one app. But watching it run on Even G2 changed how he thinks about what these glasses can become. "For my world, I see Even as a plug-and-play hardware layer for streamers," he says. "Same glasses, every streamer picks their own software stack on top."
This idea can move beyond streaming. Another community would need a completely different tool, but the shape of the product could stay the same: a pair of glasses light enough to wear, with software flexible enough to fit the person using them. This is the part Julien thinks will make the category grow. Not one feature for everyone, but different communities finding their own reason to care. "I think we’re still at the early end of what these things can do," Julien says. "Once a few more communities figure out their own use cases, the category will grow a lot bigger, and fast."
We like to believe that this is where the next useful ideas will come: not from a feature made for everyone, but one community solving the problem they know best.
