Walking around Meta Connect 2026, everyone's sporting smart glasses in all sorts of shapes, colors, and sizes. It's a marked difference here, a tech bubble where “pervert glasses†are not a concern.
Outside Connect, the public backlash against wearable surveillance tech — a catchall term that encompasses not just smart glasses, but also smartwatches and AI pendants — is gaining steam. So it's incredibly curious timing that this year, the company is launching Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses: smart glasses infused with Meta AI, but with no camera for recording others.
To hear Meta tell it, that's a coincidence. Audio-only glasses have been years in the making.
“Three years ago, it wasn't clear if AI glasses were going to be a thing. Back then, every other company was backing out of the space,†says Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of wearables. “Then two years ago, we saw that audio was the top use case, the biggest potential for AI, and that it should work well in a pair of audio glasses.â€
Himel has a point. Open-ear audio is the least controversial part of the Ray-Bans — and the thing everyone can agree is convenient. Plus, the camera-less glasses are lighter. Himel says that by removing the cameras, Meta could “rearchitect†the glasses. “That allowed us to take a lot of electronics out of the front frame and have a lot more design flexibility.â€
The audio-only models start at 43 grams — heavier than normal wire-frame glasses, but noticeably lighter than the roughly 50g Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and the 69g Meta Ray-Ban Display. The arms are thinner. They come in two styles: the Mad Men-esque Clubmaster and the more Wayfarer-reminiscent Burbank. The hinges extend for wider faces; the temple arms and nose pads are adjustable. There are 23 color and lens combinations, and they can support the same wider prescription range as the Ray-Ban Meta Optics lineup. Even more so than the standard Meta Ray-Bans, these look and wear like normal glasses. And with a $349 starting price, they're cheaper too.
Free of a power-hungry camera, the battery lasts an estimated 12 hours on a single charge. The most technical things you can do with them are interact with Meta AI, take phone calls, and listen to podcasts or music. And that's it.
“They don't record,†Himel says. “The only thing they do, which is the same thing as an Alexa device in your house or some other devices, they're just listening for a specific wake word. They're not sending anything … If they hear [the wake word], then they start listening to what you're saying. When you're done talking, then it's processing, and that's visible to the AI. It gets processed, and that's kind of it.â€
Slipping them on, they're comfortable and, I think, quite fetching on me. Regardless of how one might feel about Meta, it's fair to guess most people would feel less like a creeper wearing these.
Meta Glasses and Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3
I feel differently slipping on the new Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3. Partly because the camera is back in play, partly because the pair Meta gives me is the new aviator style with transition lenses. I'm told I can pull it off, but I keep asking my colleague Jay Peters if I'm giving '80s serial killer vibes. The other new style is called Zena — not the warrior princess — and it's a bolder, geometric cat-eye frame.
The third-generation glasses feature fairly minor refinements. There's a sixth microphone, compared to the second generation's five, for clearer phone calls. Battery life has gotten a slight boost to nine hours, an hour longer than the second gen. The temple arms, like the audio-only glasses, are adjustable for a better fit. All sound will now be captured in Dolby Atmos for spatial audio. Sure! That's neat if I'm in my quiet hotel room, but it's harder to appreciate when reviewing footage amid the hustle and bustle of Meta Connect. The new model comes in 27 color and lens combinations, plus three seasonal options.
Along with the hardware changes, the Gen 3 glasses are also getting a price bump. They start at $449, up from $379 for the second-gen models last year.
Meta Glasses — the off-brand, more affordable entry-level glasses launched a few months ago — also have more options. There are two new styles, Capri and Nova. Capri is some kind of cat-eye shape, while Nova… honestly, the styles are all starting to blur together. They're round and remind me of several other Ray-Ban Meta glasses, but slightly different. There's a new ivory-colored Kylie Jenner pair that costs $399.
But maybe Kylie Jenner isn't the celebrity collab you've been dreaming about. That's fine. Because Blackpink's Lisa — a K-pop icon and The White Lotus actress — also has Meta Glasses. They have pink lenses and come with a blind-box-type charm styled after Lisa's pets. These also start at $399. (Non-celebrity versions of the Meta Glasses start at $249.)
Why the celebrity collabs? Options for more people, including women.
“With the Meta Glasses Starfire with Kylie, we saw a younger, more female audience start to buy the glasses,†says Himel. “Wayfarer is the most popular glasses type in the world, but it tends to be more male — though definitely not exclusively male. The second brand we did was Oakley … but Oakley [also] tends to be a more masculine brand. So I think with Kylie and Lisa, and with more styles, we're seeing them appeal to more women.â€
There are actually more limited-edition versions, styles, colors, and prescription permutations available across the entire existing Ray-Ban Meta lineup at a whole range of price points. I suspect I'd need to make a spreadsheet to list them all. While scuttling about Meta's campus this week, I'm brought to an entire area where they're all displayed. It looks like a high-end store for, regular, schmegular glasses. That, I suspect, is the whole point.
All around the campus, there are life-size cutouts of Meta's cuddly Muse mascot. That's because Muse, Meta's recently released personal AI agent, is coming to the seemingly 4,000 iterations of Meta smart glasses that now exist.
“Muse is gonna be everywhere,†confirms Himel. “Muse is gonna be on every device that we make.â€
The pitch for Muse in your glasses is that your AI assistant will better remember your context and do things on your behalf. During a demo, I ask a Muse agent to help me buy snacks that will give me the best protein bang for my calorie buck. It can do it, but fails at adding another snack to my cart. Obviously, this is an early-stage demo, and there are always kinks. I can see the shape of how this could be helpful. I can also see how it'd be a treasure trove of data for Meta.
Less contentious is a demo of a new FDA-cleared hearing assistance feature. I'm asked to wear earplugs to mimic mild hearing loss. Things sound a bit muddled. With the feature turned on, higher voices gain a tinny quality as the AI works to boost conversational tones in a semi-loud environment. After about five minutes, I've forgotten I have earplugs in. Adding this capability will cost an extra $149, but I'm told it's FSA/HSA eligible and designed to be a one-time fee versus an ongoing subscription.
Lastly, there are two minor privacy updates — though neither truly addresses the fears people have been debating this past summer. The first is bringing the same “private processing†pipeline used on WhatsApp to wearables. It's a server-based system in which a user's data is inaccessible to Meta or any other third parties when end-to-end encryption isn't possible or on-device processing isn't powerful enough.
“It's so that you know that your data is just yours and you're the only one who has access to it. Other companies have taken an approach to everything on-device. We do a lot on-device. But the problem with just doing things on-device is that the device is only so powerful and capable. And so if you want to run more capable models and get better functionality, we want to offer the same privacy protections, but with more capabilities. So that's what private processing is,†says Himel.
Meta will also roll out an update where users can opt out of their visual data being used for AI training. (Audio-only queries are still used for training.)
That's progress but doesn't really address people's primary concerns about the glasses being used to covertly record people in public. Himel also acknowledges that the private processing feature is mostly about protecting the data of the person wearing the glasses.
Meta's goal at Connect this year is to bombard everyone with options. By the end of the year, Meta expects to have over 100 versions of its glasses. The more versions of its glasses, the more people they'll reach. The more AI updates that trickle to each of these iterations, the faster Meta can stake its claim on the next era of mobile computing.
So goes the theory. But providing hardware options isn't Meta's problem. Inside the safe bubble of Meta's campus, everyone wears these glasses. The issue is outside Menlo Park, where a vocal contingent isn't asking for more. They're asking for less.
