I’m postponing my regular field-notes update until later in the week, so that I can quickly comment on this news.
19 hours ago, Meta published “We’re Partnering With EssilorLuxottica to Launch Meta Glasses“
This is a huge moment.
I want to set that against another piece of information: this morning I woke up to several more messages in my inbox on LinkedIn from educators who are searching for policy guidance, having found students trying to use AI glasses in untoward ways.
I have to be honest and say that right now, there is no document out there, no policy guidelines, no clear framework for dealing with these in educational (or other) environments.
Why do the new Meta Glasses matter?
This matters because Meta has dropped the high-end branding of Ray-Ban and Oakley. These will presumably still be part of their product offering, but Meta glasses seem to represent a move towards the mass market and normalization of AI glasses in different styles and price points.
They are still not cheap, at $299, but it seems there are moves to make these appeal to more people – prescription lens capability, twenty-six styles.
The use of branding with celebrities like Kylie Jenner, and the stylistic elements of personal choice and colourways suggest that Meta is trying to remove the ‘glasshole’ social friction of previous styles of smart glasses.
As I documented with Google Glass, they were highly visible, ‘weird’ looking and singled you out.
Meta seems to be trying to dissolve that barrier by making them more indistinguishable from other forms of eyewear.
The introduction of multiple styles also will make it more difficult to detect whether AI glasses are there or not. In other words, they have engineered away the ‘weirdness’ (or are trying to).
The real headline though, is the fact that the models will introduce Muse Spark as a baseline.
When I began using Meta Ray-Ban Gen2, it still ran on Llama, which is terrible, and I have catalogued all of the horrific issues I’ve had with it (like the Matcha incident) in other posts.
Since my glasses upgraded to Muse Spark (which is part of the post I’ve delayed this week to tackle the new release), there is a qualitative difference.
Muse Spark is smart – it’s capable, and it has dramatically improved my experience. This usability will likely lead to a greater uptake. In other words, it looks like mass AI-glasses are on the horizon, and more likely to break through now in comparison to the past.
Note that the copy in the advert says ‘effortlessly’ helping with daily life is part of the pitch. The sales technique here is that the AI glasses will remove friction or pain points in our existence – we will be able to orient ourselves more easily in unfamiliar places, we will be able to rely on an AI to select the best photo of ourselves, and we will be able to converse in multiple languages.
I’ve spoken about this before as not just a solution but also a problem – we may gain convenience, but we will become habituated to AI use as the default for problem solving.
The privacy dimension is mentioned, briefly:
[Press X to Doubt]
I doubt this, as my Ray-Ban Gen2s will accidentally take photos. Not to mention, the LED lights can be dealt with quite quickly and cheaply. Respecting the privacy of people around you – I think we’re going to need some more information.
Why now? Has a Wearable Cold War Begun?
We are now seeing a second front open up in the AI dominance and market capture war.
We have seen strategies to get users hooked (myself included) on AI models. We are seeing AI companies pursue different niches, specialisations, and market segments.
My last thought:
Wearable AI is not automatically bad, automatically wrong, or will make our lives worse by default.
That said, we need to be paying close attention, and shaping the conversation – or we will walk into ubiquitous wearable AI with no say on why we need it, or how we regulate it.
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