The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have grown on me. I liked them a fair bit when I first reviewed them, but the addition of the Meta AI – which has now rolled out beyond the US officially – has made them easily the best AI wearable out there, and one of the best smart glasses you can buy. And it turns out I’m not alone when it comes to being impressed by them.
That’s per EssilorLuxottica's CFO Stefano Grassi who in the company’s Q3 2024 earnings call revealed that the smart specs are the best-selling glasses at 60% of the Ray-Ban stores in the EMEA region (via UploadVR). EssilorLuxottica is Ray-Ban’s parent company, and EMEA stands for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
It’s no wonder then that Grassi called the smart glasses “a success,” and that Meta and EssilorLuxottica have extended their partnership to continue working together on smart specs.
Now, there are a few factors to consider here. Firstly, because we don’t know their total share of sales, the Ray-ban Meta Smart Glasses will still likely be a minor player compared to the company's traditional sunglasses. The Meta-powered specs might be the best-selling model in some Ray-ban stores, but the vast majority of sales will still likely come from the many different shades of standard sunglasses.
Also, Ray-Ban glasses aren’t inexpensive. If you’re already the sort of person who can confidently stroll into a store ready to drop over $100, even $200, on a pair of shades, paying that bit extra for a $299 / £299 / AU$449 pair with speakers and cameras added-on is borderline an impulse buy. Being popular among Ray-Ban purchasers doesn’t make them widely popular.
Despite this, even if you have cash to splash that additional cost isn’t nothing, and it’s interesting – and perhaps a tad worrying – to hear that these wearable recording devices are clearly not as off-putting as the tech was even a decade ago.
Are we ready for a smart glasses revolution?
When Google Glass launched it was billed as a technological revolution. In reality, they didn’t quite stick the landing.
Price was a factor but I remember a lot of talk about how creepy the specs were if you thought too hard about them. Not just for wearers, who had to adjust to a camera that was (even if it’s not always active) seeing where they were looking at all times, but also for members of the public.
There were several published stories about owners of the camera- and microphone-equipped Google Glass being assaulted because the tech agitated others so significantly. The seemingly less niche Ray-Ban smart glasses don’t seem to have caused a similar or proportional surge in crime.
There are going to be a few reasons for this. The more discrete design of the Ray-Bans plays a part I’m sure, as will the fact that (for better or worse) we’re simply more comfortable with people carrying and using cameras around them every waking moment – you can’t wander around a busy part of a major city for more than 30 minutes and not feature in a dozen or so live streams, vlogs, or viral TikTok dance videos in the making.
For whatever reason, it does seem that smart glasses aren’t just experiencing a technological revolution right now, but a public perception one, too. We probably should be at least a little concerned about big tech companies having access to more or our personal data than ever thanks to smart glasses, and how they might use it (such as training their AI). But from a purely technological perspective, this renewed interest in smart glasses from consumers could spur companies to come up with exciting and competing designs in the coming years.
We’ll have to wait and see what exactly comes from the burgeoning smart glasses space, but news like today’s is starting to convince me that it might actually be a matter of when, not if, we’ll one day all be wearing a pair – as awesome and slightly frightening as that all sounds.
