Jeremy Freed, of GQ, in an article with the provocative headline “You Won’t Be Able to Escape Smart Glasses in 2026”:
“If AI glasses are going to go mainstream, 2026 will be the year that we start to see that,” says Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE. Meta introduced its first line of Ray-Ban AI Glasses in 2021, and has sold more than 2 million pairs since launching the second generation in 2023. By the end of 2026, the company plans to sell 3 million more while ramping up production to 10 million pairs annually. As hard as it is to imagine 10 million people — the combined populations of NYC and Philly — buying Meta AI Glasses every year, it may well come to pass. “The iPhone came out in 2007 and by 2011 BlackBerry was still the number-one smartphone,” says Bovell. “The iPhone wasn’t seen as a phone, it was seen as a toy. The exact same things that were said about it in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses.” Likewise, no one knew they needed an Apple Watch when the product launched in 2015, but the company has reportedly sold hundreds of millions of them since then.
This article was published a day after people from, presumably, Meta or EssilorLuxottica told Bloomberg they were going to double production to 20 million units by the end of this year in response to overwhelming demand. So from two million since 2023, three million this year alone, to twenty million next year — that is quite the forecasted sales curve. It is almost enough to make you think Meta has a hardware hit on its hands.
Bovell is from Canada, where the BlackBerry was indeed still the top smartphone brand through 2010, but that was not a worldwide trend. By 2011, Android phones were outselling BlackBerries in the United States; worldwide, RIM was never the best-selling smartphone vendor.
As for Bovell’s claim that the “exact same things that were said about it [the iPhone] in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses”, the problem is that there is a far better comparison given we have already had an example of smart glasses in Google Glass, and the same things were being said about those a decade ago. In 2012, CBC News quoted a researcher saying Glass is “the mainstreaming of this kind of device”. In 2013, Jessica Guynn, of the Los Angeles Times, wrote that they “may still be on the fringes of mainstream consciousness. But they are not going to stay there very long”. The following year, Paul Saffo lamented for CNN that while “[i]nfo-glasses today are like PCs in 1984 – they look cool but perform a few functions that aren’t all that useful, such as taking pictures or surfing the Web while sitting in a bar with friends” — yes, “they look cool” is presented as a factual statement — in the very near future from 2014 “we are certain to be astonished by the capabilities of the device sitting on the bridge of our nose”.
Well, it has been nearly twelve years since Saffo wrote that, and the killer capabilities of smart glasses remain based entirely around the camera. And you know what? It is a pretty good feature — but it alone is not as compelling today as was a smartphone in 2008. I do not think the question is are smart glasses today akin to smartphones in 2008?; the question is more like what is different about today’s smart glasses compared to Google Glass?. To his credit, Freed attempts to answer this in noting that Meta’s Wayfarer shape instead of a sci-fi is an obvious upgrade, but I think he underplays the advancements in image, language, and speech detection since Google Glass by calling it “a Siri-like voice assistant”. GQ is not a technology publication, true, but that is among the biggest changes for a device so dependent on real-time interaction with the surrounding environment, like for translation features.
But there are problems with today’s smart glasses that remain unchanged from those that affected Google Glass. Most obviously, they are still a privacy nightmare for yourself and for others. Meta says the externally-visible recording LED must not be obstructed to record video, but people are modifying the glasses to remove that restriction. They must effectively be treated like spy glasses because they could be recording anywhere — in a public area running facial recognition software, to the apparent privacy of a massage room.
Meta is far from the only company producing glasses like these. Snap has its Spectacles and Xiaomi’s A.I. Glasses are available in China. All of these companies are responsible for developing a selfish future that prioritizes selling buyers on the advantages of an unobtrusive camera while barely acknowledging the societal impact of the same. Google is taking another kick at the can, and rumours consistently indicate Apple and Samsung are each working on their own, too. They may all say the right things about privacy, but the fundamental fact is that a barely-visible camera is a tool for abuse as much as it is entertainment.
Freed:
Whether the possibilities presented by smart glasses sound fun and appealing or like the tipping point into a dystopian nightmare is a matter of perspective. There are the obvious doubts about what happens if someone hacks your glasses and what companies like Meta are planning to do with your data (spoiler alert: it’s being used to train AI), but these aren’t so different from existing concerns around other internet-enabled devices. “Every piece of technology ever created has been used for good and bad things,” says Edward R. McNicholas, a Partner at Ropes & Gray in Washington DC who leads the firm’s global data, privacy and cybersecurity practice. “Just think of the Internet itself — it helps bad actors, but it brings the globe together, creates enormous economic opportunity, and inspires millions.” What will ultimately decide the fate of smart glasses, he says, is regulatory friction — and cultural embrace. “That is, what’s the rizz? Do the 20-somethings deem it based or cringe?”
McNicholas was admitted to the Maryland bar in 1996. His career as a lawyer is at least Millennial-aged and, as a Millennial myself, I feel pretty confident in saying he cannot use “rizz”, “based”, or “cringe” like this. It is not, in fact, lit.
I find it difficult to believe it is a coincidence there are two stories promoting Meta’s A.I. glasses appearing in the news the same week Meta laid off ten percent of its Reality Labs employees, and reallocating funds to the team developing those glasses. I am sure these things have their defenders, and may be more popular than Meta expected given the company’s long run of hardware flops. The relative success of the glasses means Meta can jettison its original messy concept of the metaverse and redefine it to suit its needs today.
But this does not feel like the nascent days of the iPhone, nor like we will not “be able to escape smart glasses” this year. I knew lots of people with smartphones in the mid-to-late-2000s, including some with original iPhones despite them not being available in Canada. Anecdotally, I do not personally know anyone who owns or is even thinking about buying smart glasses. Mind you, I know plenty of people with an Apple Watch today who did not consider it compelling even years after it launched. Maybe it is like the early days of smartwatch ownership, after all, and I simply do not notice because Meta’s glasses just look like Ray-Bans. That is, I guess, the whole point.
Despite the concept of smart glasses being the product of so much hype and excitement, it never seems to have materialized in something you can buy. Maybe that will change; maybe that has changed without me noticing it. But one of the other biggest shifts of the past ten years is how much people say they want more distance from technology. One of the predictions for 2026 in a list from the New York Times is the rise of the “dumb phone” as a status symbol. Some people who have tried smartwatches have found them more demanding over time than helpful; I stopped wearing one after four years because I need less technology in my life, not more. There is a vast gulf between what people say they want and their actual behaviour, of course, but I cannot shake the feeling this technology is still too much of an imposition. We will not need to “escape smart glasses” if people still choose not to buy them.
