FORM is a Canadian tech firm on a mission to provide smart data for swimmers with their augmented reality (AR) smart swim goggles. If you keep asking "How can I swim faster?" and think this sounds like the future for triathletes, then read on. You'll be swimming faster and smarter.
FORM smart swim goggles
Price: £149
Available to buy at
Originally conceived in the late 2000s, FORM's original design for smart goggles was sound, but the tech was just too big to fit on a pair of goggles without attracting some very strange looks at your local pool. Instead, they shifted the tech to ski goggles, teaming up with Oakley to make it work.
Fast forward to 2019, and processors, gyroscopes, and various other macguffins have become small enough for FORM to realise their original vision. The result is smart swim goggles.
What are FORM smart goggles?
FORM smart goggles are a premium set of swimming goggles with a readout that floats in front of your eye (either right or left), showing your swim metrics like time, distance, stroke count, as you swim. The readout can be customised, linked up to compatible watches, and can incorporate heart rate data (you need a separate monitor for this).
Smart goggles? Why?
In swimming, technique is everything. At the beginning of our triathlon journey, one of our problems with swimming was that we couldn't make the link between what we were doing with our body and whether it made us faster or slower.
This was because we couldn't measure our swimming performance (speed, strokes, etc) until we stopped at the wall of the pool. It's the lack of moment-to-moment feedback that, in swimming, seemed to be our Achilles heel. And because it's so technique orientated, it's the tri discipline that needs that feedback the most.
We got our hands on a pair of their smart goggles, and over several weeks, put them to the test.
Setup and testing
In the box, you'll find the goggles themselves, plus 7 different nose clips to fit your face, along with a charger and an attachment clip for a heart rate monitor. A great little carry case (complete with drainage holes to keep the goggles dry) completes a slick package.
After unboxing them, giving them a quick bit of juice, and powering them up, we downloaded the companion app to our phone. The instructions in the app are super easy, with some nice animated menus, and after six minutes, we were paired with our phone and ready to swim. The app syncs companion apps like Strava, so your swims will be uploaded to your feed, just looking a lot snazzier.
So, paired up, ready to become the Tony Stark of South East England, we took them to our local pool to try them out.
What we like
First, and most importantly, we discovered these smart goggles actually work as goggles. Comfy, no leaks, no problem. We took some time to select the correct nose bridge from the 7 different options provided, and this was time well spent, as they fitted our face pretty well.
After 10 lengths, there was not a hint of steaming up, and they weren't sucking our eyes out either. Just a comfortable, functional pair of goggles.
The real standout, as we'd hoped, was the tech itself or, more accurately, the execution of it.
The readout comes from a projector unit attached to the right lens (they are reversible if you prefer it on your left eye). The readout is made of large, yellow pixels, with no attempt to display uber hi res readouts. This is a smart design choice because the data is then smack bang in your near field vision with no need for looking around the readout to find tiny, hi-res data fields. Additionally, these large yellow pixels make for a readout that is very easy to read, due to the size of the font and the yellow being a perfect contrast to the blue of the pool.
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| FORM goggles' readout is easy to see in pools. |
The navigation of the goggles' menu is done with two buttons, one to cycle through options, one to select. After a few tries, we had trained our thumb in this process and it felt very easy to navigate the menus.
As always with triathlete tech though, the true value is measured in how well it enhances training and racing (these aren't really racing goggles though; more on this later). Now, our first use of the goggles was during a fairly tough CSS set, and we were hoping for something pretty good. We were astonished, though, at how good they are. How intuitive they are.
Once we'd pressed start, we didn't need to touch the goggles again. Seriously, not once. They tracked when we were swimming, turning, and resting faultlessly, informing us of this at the top of the display. The goggles just knew. It's brilliant. It's also clear that the way the data is presented was designed with input from a swimmer. In swimming, reps are usually done 'off' a certain time; if you did your 100m reps 'off' 2:30, and the rep takes you 2 minutes, you get 30 seconds recovery. Stick with us here.
When we finished our 100m reps, the goggles changed our status to resting but kept the timer running. This meant we could stick to our recovery time, and although you can set this system of training up on some watches, having this time ticking away in front of your eyes is much more motivating than waiting for your watch to beep.
Brilliantly (and completely naturally) during our front crawl stroke cycle, we focused on the readout as our faces were exhaling into the water, but as we turned to breathe, our vision shifted to our external environs, blurring out the readout to focus on the middle distance. For practical purposes, the readout completely vanished. It happened completely naturally and persisted throughout the swim, and meant that we could keep some of our vision on the world around us while breathing. This represented a superb system of visual give and take, as the moment we put our faces in the water again, the display popped into focus. It just felt utterly natural.
Our next set was a drills session, mixing varying length reps with a mixture of technique drills. For this, it's a simple matter of pressing the pause button and selecting 'drills', at which point the watch just starts a timer and lets you crack on with your drills. No distractions here, just a timer. It's terrific.
Once you're done, you hit the main select button to pause, and then exit your drills, upon which you return to your normal swim mode. There's an option to then input how far you swam during your drills. This is important because you'll have to adjust some drill data, not others. For instance, when we were doing single-arm lengths, the goggles measured this perfectly. However, when we were doing push and glides and walking back to our start point, the goggles massively overestimated how far we had swum. It wasn't a problem though, because the intuitive interface just allowed us to reduce the distance with no problem.
Our next big test was an endurance set involving two 1000m reps. For this set, we set the goggles to display our distance, current stroke rate, and overall stroke rate.
Again the goggles performed faultlessly, tracking the distance so we didn't have to spend time thinking about how far we've gone and could focus on our technique. Displaying both current and overall stroke rate was fantastic, as it meant we could see if our technique was falling apart (it did, a lot). As soon as our current strokes per minute began to rise, we were able to refocus on technique to lower it again, and having an overall stroke rate displayed meant we were motivated to try and push the stroke rate down throughout the set.
Battery life
We were a little concerned that such a high-tech piece of gear would have a battery life of about 3 minutes. However, we were pleasantly surprised. One 1500m swim used four percent of the battery, and after 5 swims, we were still chugging along at 72%. No battery worries at all.
App and data
Regarding tracking and data, the app is superb. Trawling through data after a workout is, let's be honest, a triathlete's favourite thing to do other than race. And if you like data you're in for a treat with FORM's app. Available on iOS and Android, it captures mountains of data. Seriously, we were quite excited when we saw our numbers.
The data is a rabbit hole of info. We won't bore you with all our personal numbers here, but trust us, you can see every metric, for every length. As a training aid, that is the stuff of dreams The data for drills is presented beautifully, with color-coded graphs showing when we were doing reps, rests, or drills. It just makes your swim set so much more motivating to see it presented like this. If you're a swim or tri coach, data analysis for your athletes just got better.
As well as syncing to Strava and other apps, it also syncs in reverse. A triathlon swim we did on our Garmin that synced to our Strava popped up on our FORM app even though we didn't use them. It's superbly executed and is everything a good sports app should be; slick, rich, well presented, and full of the data we need.
What we didn't like
Let's get this straight; these aren't for racing in open water. Training, sure, but not a race. The swimming stage of a triathlon needs your attention, and on-screen data is likely to distract you in a live field of play where there are visual priorities like marshals, buoys to sight, and other triathletes. These goggles also lack any kind of polarising or tinting in the lenses, so sunny early morning triathlon swims are likely to be problematic. Again, this is probably deliberate design, but it's important. Simple answer? If your triathlon has a pool swim, then they're amazing. Open water? Stick to your Zoggs.
We also found the goggles track swim movement well (let's be honest; perfectly) but get a bit confused on terra firma; they had a bit of a brain fart if we left them running whilst hopping out of the pool to grab a drink from poolside. Not a biggie, but a point of note nonetheless. We'd just recommend that you pause them during your swim if you need to grab gear or drinks, or need a prolonged rest between sets. Just don't forget to unpause them when you start back again!
Verdict: 5/5
Every swim we did with the goggles was made more motivating, easier to follow, and more satisfying. Every person who tried them on or listened to us talk about them poolside was absolutely blown away by them. Every drill was easier to implement because we could see the difference it was making in real-time.
We also love the psychological effect of these goggles. Swimming can feel like a lonely experience sometimes, but the goggles genuinely felt like a companion, always visible, always supporting us, always reminding us what we had to do. There's just something incredibly motivating about having your data in front of your eye all the time. The yellow readout floating in front of your eye in FORM goggles almost says "No slacking. Rest over. Get going. And we'll be there every step (stroke) of the way". The app will get you genuinely excited if exercise data is your thing, and the battery life is superb.
They are clearly the perfect brainchild of someone who understands swimming and someone who understands technology, and given how readily triathletes invest in cycling and running, FORM goggles are here to tell us that investing in swim tech is just as worthwhile. The message is simple. Get them. You'll wonder how you ever managed without them.
We thank the nice people at FORM for sending us a pair of smart swimming goggles to test. This did not affect the outcome of our review, which was conducted after 10 swims and around 15,000m of swimming.
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