is a senior reporter focusing on wearables, health tech, and more with 13 years of experience. Before coming to The Verge, she worked for Gizmodo and PC Magazine.
This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent every Friday from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest phones, smartwatches, apps, and other gizmos that swear they’re going to change your life. Optimizer arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes at 10AM ET. Opt in for Optimizer here.
About a month ago, I was walking in Williamsburg and a stylish Brooklyn hipster stopped me to ask about the Oakley Meta HSTN smart glasses I was testing. A few weeks later, I went to dinner with a friend that I hadn’t seen in years. It wasn’t until we were walking to the train that I noticed they were wearing a pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses. I went to a concert, turned my head, and saw someone in my section with the Ray-Bans’ recording light on. The next day, a quick search told me footage had been uploaded to TikTok.
It hit me. Regular people aren’t just curious about smart glasses. They’re actually buying and using them. I’m starting to spot them in the wild. And when Meta takes the stage next week at its annual Connect event, normal people are going to be wondering: what comes next?
That blew my mind.
What Meta did here was nail the execution on an old idea. Photo: Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
You could peg some of Meta’s success to timing. There’s a confluence of things happening right now: the AI craze, the search for AI hardware, and the TikTok era has normalized filming in public, to name a few. But what Meta genuinely innovated here was nailing the execution on a very old idea.
Where Google Glass stood out like a sore thumb — it had extreme Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z vibes — Meta teamed up with Ray-Ban to create stylish yet discreet glasses that don’t look like tech. It lowered the cost of entry from $1,500 to a much more affordable $300. The sound quality is good. The camera quality is shockingly good enough to post on Instagram, making this a useful tool for content creators. Adding AI seemed like a dubious move, but I’ve since heard from several low-vision and blind people who say the AI-infused glasses have helped them live more independent lives.
It’s why my inbox is flooded with pitches for Meta knockoffs. Hell, it’s probably why Google has suddenly thrown its hat back into the smart glasses ring after years of pretending the whole glasshole conversation never happened.
These glasses are popular enough to warrant an Oakley variant. Photo: Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
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