A few months ago, Meta held one of the most disastrous launch events in recent memory, at which it unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses. Despite the wave of technical issues that flat-out ruined many of the live demos on stage, Meta still won the day, because its new AR glasses were actually really cool. A more advanced follow-up to the surprisingly popular Ray-Ban Meta AI Glasses (), the new glasses have a monocular display (meaning there’s one screen in one of the lenses), a Neural Band wrist strap that lets you control what you see by performing air gestures, and, most importantly, a price: $799. While expensive, this kept Meta at the forefront of the burgeoning XR revolution by making it the first major tech player to have a retail-ready set of smart glasses that seem to bring us the future Google Glass promised us over 10 years ago.
Unfortunately for Meta, there are three major problems with the new Ray-Bans. First, and most obviously, they are made by Meta, a company that few people like or trust enough to wear its face computer and feed it deeply personal data. Second, it is a Meta-only platform, with app availability limited for the time being to the company’s own products — WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Third, the AI smarts of the glasses also come from Meta, and not from the true AI players right now, namely OpenAI and Google.