At Meta Connect, smart glasses were everywhere

In February 2025, EssilorLuxottica, the group that manufactures Meta's glasses, announced it had sold two million Ray-Ban Meta units since their launch in October 2023 and that it would expand production capacity to ten million units a year before the end of 2026. That horizon is now on the table, and the latest edition of Meta Connect fits with it.

According to the report TechCrunch published on 25 September, smart glasses were everywhere at the event. The company behind Facebook and Instagram wants its users to stay connected to the digital world through a line of glasses that keeps growing, and this year Connect served as the showcase for that bet.

From quirky accessory to product line

The journey has been fast. The 2021 Ray-Ban Stories were little more than a camera with speakers. The next generation, already branded Ray-Ban Meta, added the Meta AI assistant in 2023 and turned the glasses into a device you talk to. In 2025 the sport-oriented Oakley Meta arrived, and at the previous edition of Connect the company unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display, with a small screen in the right lens and a wristband, the Meta Neural Band, that reads the electrical activity of the wrist muscles to control the interface. They went on sale in the United States for 799 dollars.

The commercial logic is easy to follow: several ranges and price points backed by brands from the EssilorLuxottica catalogue, with the idea that AI glasses stop being a niche product and become something you buy at the local optician.

The common thread across all those models is Meta AI. Without the assistant, the glasses would be a handy camera; with it, they become Meta's gateway to a kind of interaction that does not depend on the phone or on Apple's and Google's app stores, a goal Mark Zuckerberg has been pursuing for years.

Why it matters to people building with AI

Glasses change the conditions under which an assistant is used. There is no keyboard and, on most models, no screen either. Input is voice and whatever the camera captures; output is audio in the ear or a few lines of text. That demands short answers, low latency and an assistant that understands visual context without the user having to describe it.

For developers, the relevant news in 2025 was the Wearables Device Access Toolkit, with which Meta began opening access to its glasses' camera and audio to mobile apps. If that access widens, the glasses could act as a sensor for third-party assistants, including those built on the Claude API, always within whatever permissions Meta decides to grant. Today it is a space tightly controlled by the platform, but one worth following closely.

Who it is useful for and what holds it back

Brands and agencies have a concrete reason to pay attention: first-person content and voice and image search gain weight with every device sold. Product teams designing assistants have another: what works in a chat window does not carry over as is to a ten-second conversation while someone walks down the street.

The brake is still privacy. A camera always at hand on someone else's face raises concerns that the recording LED does not fully resolve, as two Harvard students showed in 2024 by combining Ray-Ban Meta glasses with facial recognition to identify strangers on the street. In Europe, GDPR and AI regulation also shape which features arrive and on what timeline.

At ElephantPink we read it as a hint about where the assistant will live in the coming years: less in a browser tab and more in objects we wear. For anyone designing agents, the practical takeaway is to start thinking about short, spoken answers that work without a screen, whatever logo the device carries.