Don’t think Meta made a camera-free version of its AI Ray-Bans just because of the unpleasant fact that people have been calling the camera versions “pervert glasses.” Mark Zuckerberg says they’ve long been in the works.
Meta just added an audio-only pair to its lineup of smart glasses. The new Meta Ray-Ban Audio glasses don’t have cameras, but you can use them to listen to music, make phone calls, or talk to your Muse AI agent. The new glasses are more lightweight, come in two styles, and start at $349.
Zuckerberg, in an interview with Joanna Stern, denied that the recent backlash had any effect on the decision to launch the design. Stern asked if the audio-only specs were a response to people who are “uncomfortable with a camera on people’s faces or having a camera on my face.”
“No. I mean, we have to work on these things. We start working on them like, I mean, you know how this works,” he laughed. “It takes a very long time in advance. So if people have a question about something and we start working on something that it’s going to take a couple of years to build the thing, the answer is no. I mean, we didn’t decide to design this in two months because some people had some questions a couple months ago. This has been a project that’s a long way in the works.”
It’s true that the backlash against the camera glasses has really ramped up in the last few months, especially since the Kylie Jenner version launched in June. And, of course, there’s no way they whipped up this product in several weeks’ time in response to it.
But there have always been concerns and pushback against the Meta glasses since they launched in 2021. It’s not a brand new thing that people are worried about being filmed without their permission or awareness of these glasses.
It’s not even a new concern that people might cover or disable the LED light — I taped over the light in my review of the glasses when they first launched; this has been a thing people have been doing since literally day one. (After Stern’s reporting about drilling out her light, Meta made it so that the glasses will essentially brick if you tamper with the light.)
Despite Zuckerberg’s reasonable statement that the controversy from this summer didn’t directly affect the product lineup, it’s hard to imagine that these years of ongoing concern had zero factor in the decision to make an audio-only version.
