Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are having their Super Bowl moment

It’s game time for Meta’s wearables: The tech giant has bought two ad spots for its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses during Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast, including one that has Chris Hemsworth and Chris Pratt wreaking havoc on Kris Jenner’s art collection.

The star-studded spot is part of a bigger push to bring AI-powered wearables to the masses. Last week, Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the company had sold more than one million of its high-tech Ray-Bans in 2024, and hinted at plans to sell many more in the near future. “This will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions and eventually billions of AI glasses,” he told investors during the company’s Q4 2024 earnings call.

To that end, Meta plans to introduce new versions of its smart glasses later this year, including a high-end model that reportedly includes a small display capable of showing notifications and real-time translation. And the competition is not waiting around. Samsung has hinted at plans for developing its own AI glasses, and Chinese startups are looking to target U.S. consumers with Ray-Ban copycats this year.

All this means that millions of people could soon walk around with cameras on their faces, challenging our understanding of privacy, and inevitably leading to friction.

An AI wearable that sees what you see

Meta released a first version of camera-equipped glasses in cooperation with Ray-Ban maker EssilorLuxottica in 2021, followed by a second-generation model in the fall of 2023. At first glance, the glasses look very similar to a typical pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, save for a camera and a recording indicator that are visible upon closer inspection. The glasses also have dual speakers integrated into their temples, and an array of five microphones that can be used for both voice control and communication.

Ray-Ban Meta glasses can take photos, record short video clips, and livestream via Instagram when paired with a smartphone. They can also be used as a replacement for wireless earbuds, allowing wearers to listen to music or podcasts, or take phone calls when paired via Bluetooth to a smartphone.

The feature set that Meta leans into most these days is the ability to directly query the company’s AI assistant: Ray-Ban owners can ask Meta’s AI assistant to tell them about anything they’re looking at, which results in the glasses taking a photo and uploading it to the cloud. They can ask Meta AI what a street sign says, have it translate text, and even ask it to come up with recipes based on what the camera can spot in their fridge.

Earlier this year, Meta even added the ability to have continuous conversations with its AI assistant using its Ray-Ban glasses. During those chats, video of everything the wearer is seeing is sent to the cloud and analyzed, allowing for complex back-and-forth interactions with follow-up questions while browsing store shelves, looking through record collections, or shopping at the farmer’s market—a pretty impressive feat, despite Meta AI still occasionally getting confused by very basic objects.

Surprisingly little backlash, so far

Inevitably, these features can also lead to bystanders getting captured by Meta’s glasses. When Google pioneered camera glasses in 2013, it faced a huge public backlash against this perceived invasion of privacy. Users of the Google Glass device were being called “glassholes” by critics, and the company discontinued the device soon after.

Meta has gone to great lengths to avoid a similar fate. The glasses include a visible recording indicator, and second-generation Ray-Ban Metas block any photo and video capture if a user tries to cover that indicator light in any way. Meta also advises Ray-Ban wearers to respect other people’s privacy, and for instance not to wear them in public bathrooms, schools, or houses of worship.

That hasn’t stopped some Ray-Ban owners from accidentally getting into trouble. Last fall, a Ray-Ban owner reported on Reddit that they had gotten thrown out of a movie theater over piracy allegations. “I wear RaybanMeta with prescription lenses so I can see,” the user in question wrote. “I did not live stream or anything, but apparently they’re banned from cinemas.”

Other users have said they have gotten reprimanded for wearing their Ray-Bans in airplanes; two Harvard students made waves when they combined the glasses with image recognition technology to figure out the identity of random people on the street (a feature that the glasses themselves do not support out of the box). More insidiously, the alleged New Orleans bomber reportedly wore Meta’s smart glasses to scout locations for his attack.

Despite all this, there has been relatively little backlash against the device yet. That could change once there are millions more in use. “There will be bad actors with that many pairs of glasses in market,” acknowledges Moor Insights & Strategy analyst Anshel Sag. He thinks Meta could do more educating people about the way these glasses function. “I’ve had some people assume it’s just always recording,” he says. “That’s not true.”

Next up: New devices, including one with a display

Meta has plans to launch “half a dozen” additional wearables in the future, the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth recently told staffers in a leaked memo. Part of that line-up will reportedly also be a first model with a visual component. With an integrated display in just one lens, it will be a far cry from the kind of augmented reality glasses Meta wants to sell in a few years. Users won’t be able to view 3D holograms or play immersive games with it, and the size of the virtual display will be comparably small.

Still, by positioning its first generation of AR glasses as supercharged smart glasses, Meta may have found a way to make people embrace lower-end specs. Keeping these kinds of devices simpler comes with lots of added benefits, says David Goldman, the VP of marketing of AR optics startup Lumus. “You’re going to have a much longer battery life” with a smaller display, he explains, adding that functionality like live translation of a person talking to you actually is less disruptive with a smaller display. “People will be pleasantly surprised by the added value,“ Goldman says.

At the same time, Meta will continue to make AI glasses without displays, with a recent Bloomberg report suggesting that the next wave of models will include at least one optimized for outdoor sports. Zuckerberg told investors recently that the company was aiming to sell up to ten million units of its next-generation AI glasses – a number that Sag believes is within reach.

“The Super Bowl ad will most likely be a planting the seed moment in a lot of people’s eyes who haven’t met someone wearing them yet,” he says. “Then, we might get a new model this year paired with an aggressive ad campaign to push sales into the 5-10 million territory.”