Tuesday marked Meta $META's entry into smart glasses territory, with a starting price of $299 — undercutting the entry-level Ray-Ban Meta by $80 — as the company works to expand its foothold in the wearables market.
The new line, called Meta Glasses, was built in partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley, which will manufacture the devices. Three frame designs make up the lineup: a rectangular style called the Meta Adventurer offered in two sizes, a blockier square option called the Meta Fury, and an oval silhouette priced at $399 that Kylie Jenner co-designed. In total, 26 color and lens combinations are available at launch, and all styles are compatible with prescription lenses.
On the hardware side, the new glasses share the underlying platform of Meta's existing camera-equipped AI eyewear, with open-ear audio, a multi-microphone array, and the ability to shoot photos and video without using your hands. The standout physical addition across all models is a nose bridge that users can manually click between three width positions for a more customized fit. The Kylie Jenner model includes a decorative gem on the right lens and a metal nose bridge, and allows users to set an AI-generated version of Jenner's voice as the assistant's voice.
The devices launch with Muse Spark, Meta's updated AI model developed by Meta Superintelligence Labs, which the company said improves multimodal capabilities and contextual understanding. Meta's existing Ray-Ban and Oakley glasses are receiving the same AI update. Among the forthcoming software additions: a shooting mode that snaps a burst of frames and automatically picks the sharpest one, walking navigation that announces turn-by-turn directions aloud, and an expansion of live translation to cover 14 more languages — among them Mandarin, Hindi, Japanese, and Korean.
Pricing the glasses lower was an intentional move to widen the audience, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth explained. "You really want to be able to be in many places in the market, so reaching people isn't just about even design and style, it's also about the price point," he told CNN. The decision to put Meta's own name on the glasses came down to a gap in the brand portfolio, according to Alex Himel, head of Meta's wearables division. After surveying partner brands for a lower-cost option and coming up empty, the path forward became clear, he told Bloomberg: "We didn't really find one, so then it was just, 'All right, you've got Ray-Ban Meta here, Oakley Meta here and Meta at the bottom.'"
Privacy concerns remain a backdrop to Meta's glasses expansion. The ACLU and 75 other organizations have called on Meta to abandon plans for facial recognition in its smart glasses, arguing the technology poses unacceptable privacy risks. At the same press event, Bosworth addressed the misuse of the glasses' camera by people recording others without permission, describing the challenge as "a cat and mouse game."