5 minBusiness
Meta's Smart Glasses Lead the Race for AI Hardware Beyond the Smartphone
Meta has built the most popular AI-enabled smart glasses on the market, selling 7 million pairs in 2025 through its Ray-Ban partnership, as rivals including OpenAI and Apple race to define the next major computing platform.
Meta has emerged as the unlikely front-runner in the race to build the hardware that could eventually replace the smartphone as the primary way people interact with artificial intelligence. The company's family of AI-enabled smart glasses, developed through a partnership with Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, has become the most popular product in a small but strategically vital market that Silicon Valley's largest firms are now racing to dominate.
EssilorLuxottica sold 7 million pairs of AI-enabled glasses in 2025, and Meta's sales of the devices tripled over the past year, according to figures the eyewear giant disclosed. That growth has given Meta a lead that its rivals have yet to match, even as the company's underlying AI models generally trail those of competitors such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
At a private demonstration at its Menlo Park, California, headquarters, Meta showed off a collection that spans from its flagship camera-equipped Ray-Ban Wayfarers, now with nine-hour battery life, to the Ray-Ban Display glasses that project a high-resolution digital image inside the right lens. Those display glasses, priced from $799, can be controlled with a «neural» wristband that lets users open apps by tapping a thumb and forefinger together or summon an AI assistant with a voice command.
The lineup also includes audio-only smart glasses that drop the camera entirely, starting at $349 in Ray-Ban Clubmaster and Burbank styles, and the third-generation flagship camera glasses at $449. Meta additionally announced a new pair of virtual reality glasses weighing about 100 grams, with capabilities for cinema display, gaming and spatial computing, set to ship in the spring at $1,299.
Alex Himel, Meta's vice president of wearables, credits the company's early bet on the category and its decision to prioritize fashion over technology. Customers use the smart features only about 10 percent of the time, he said, making it essential that people want to wear the glasses for their appearance and weight. EssilorLuxottica held Meta to a 50-gram limit for most models. «We're able to keep adding this stuff into something that you're already wearing for other reasons,» Himel said.
Among the newer capabilities is agentic AI powered by Meta's latest Muse Spark model, which allows the glasses to carry out multistep routines such as managing schedules and scanning emails. A hologram feature scans a user's face and records expressions to produce a three-dimensional animated likeness that can appear on a friend's screen during a WhatsApp call.
The demonstration was not flawless. The glasses did not always respond to thumb swipes and sometimes lagged after voice commands, and the AI occasionally struggled to identify objects cleanly, including an attempt to calculate the calories in a tray of food. Meta said there is a natural learning curve and that the technology generally works without issue for most people.
Privacy remains the more serious concern. Meta has already had to respond to users who disabled the LED light that signals to bystanders that the camera is recording. The company recently adopted a policy to deactivate recording if the LED has been tampered with, and it will delete the accounts of anyone who uses a modified device to post harassing content.
Those measures address only part of the challenge. The most compelling features of AI devices depend on the technology's ability to interpret the world around the wearer rather than relying on on-screen data alone, creating inherent tension with norms around privacy and personal space. Recently announced Apple Watch features such as Siri Recap, which listens to conversations and produces AI-generated summaries, have raised similar questions about consent, and OpenAI's forthcoming device, rumored to be a portable smart speaker, could face comparable eavesdropping concerns.
The stakes extend well beyond hardware sales. Control over the next computing platform would determine how billions of people access AI, regardless of whose models prove most capable. OpenAI, Apple, and numerous smaller startups are all developing new AI-friendly devices, betting that consumers will want alternatives to the phone. Meta's early lead in glasses, built on fashion credibility and an established retail partnership, offers the clearest evidence so far that the post-smartphone era may arrive first on people's faces.
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