If there’s one thing that’s become evident with Meta Connect this year, it’s that the social media giant has invested in its burgeoning line of smart glasses.
Indeed, glasses were everywhere at the annual event, where Meta showcases its latest hardware and AI products. Both the Meta staff and the flocks of influencers who frequent the event seemed to arrive with glasses glued to their faces. Most of the demos the company offered this week also involved glasses.
I quickly joined the bespectacled masses and found myself trying on pair after pair of Meta’s high-tech specs.
One of the most notable products I had the opportunity to demo was Meta’s new, as-yet-unreleased audio-only smart glasses. News of the glasses emerged shortly after the company resisted accusations that it was selling “evil glasses”, with critics alleging its camera-equipped specs could be used for nefarious surveillance purposes.
The new glasses have six microphones, but no camera, and they have no native way of recording your surroundings, which should go a long way to alleviating privacy concerns. They are significantly lighter than any other smart glasses I have worn and they were quite comfortable.
The Meta employee I spoke to highlighted the glasses’ entertainment and communication options: You can listen to music easily (they’re more comfortable than headphones) and take phone calls without picking up your phone.
The glasses will also integrate with Muse, Meta’s personal agent system, which can perform tasks on the user’s behalf. The new integration, which is not yet publicly available, allows users to talk to Muse and give it commands verbally. Meta also plans to personalize the agent, allowing users to choose from an assortment of cute digital avatars that can represent the agent when communicating with them.
I had the opportunity to try this, which was fun but also somewhat comical. You have to be very direct with the agent and you can’t talk to anyone else at the same time or it will get confusing. Problematically, I kept chatting intermittently with the Meta employee who gave me the glasses, and the agent kept thinking I was talking to him, so he would do the talking instead.
Yet, in the right context, it’s easy to see how incredibly useful this new integration could be. If you don’t mind being seen in public talking in your own sunglasses, you’ll be able to ask Muse to take care of various digital tasks for you, like sending emails or reciting to-do lists, and it will handle them while you run errands or drink a beer. You can also ask the glasses anything, and like a mobile version of ChatGPT, they’ll spit out an answer. (I asked the glasses a question about WWII and they gave me a succinct and historically accurate answer.)
Finally, I was also able to test a second audio-only pair: the new Meta glasses for the hearing impaired. Since hearing loss affects many families (an estimated 50 million Americans are estimated to have some level of hearing loss), this device, unlike many other modern tech gadgets, serves a clear and practical purpose.
I spoke briefly with a member of Meta’s research team who told me the glasses have been in development for about five years, and he pointed out a price difference that might make them attractive: While many hearing aids can cost up to $1,600, the glasses will sell for $150.
The experience of wearing these glasses was interesting. Meta had me put in earplugs before trying them on to simulate the hearing loss that the glasses are supposed to help users overcome. Once the glasses were put on, they seemed to amplify the voice of my interlocutor. Users can switch from focused amplification, which focuses on the person in front of them, to omnidirectional amplification, which picks up sound from everything around them, depending on how they want to perceive their surroundings.
Mark Zuckerberg has made it clear that he believes smart glasses are the future, and it’s clear his company is doing its best to realize that vision. But smart glasses remain a niche that has not yet really found its place. What was most evident about Connect is that Meta has – in an attempt to succeed where others have failed – cast a very wide net, trying to make its glasses stylish, functional and, above all, useful.
Is this the future? Not surprisingly, everyone at Connect seemed to think so. I guess we’ll have to see if the rest of the world follows suit.
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