Meta Looks Back to the Metaverse with Rose-Tinted Ray-Bans

Meta is returning to its roots somewhere in the metaverse.

Sources told the Financial Times that Meta is planning to expand its partnership with Ray-Ban to make glasses with a little display on the inside, so users can gaze out at the world with a digital overlay — Terminator style. It’s a sign that Meta, having set aside its big metaverse ambitions for a while to ride the generative AI wave, is turning back to futuristic hardware.

My Glasses, I Can’t See My Texts Without My Glasses

Meta’s collaboration with Ray-Ban’s parent company kicked off in October 2021, exactly as Meta was rebranding itself from Facebook and saying it was going to become a metaverse company, distancing itself from its core social media business. Meta released a second generation of its Ray-Ban smart glasses at the tail-end of last year, and they let wearers control their phone through audio commands (basically Siri but on your face) and record video using the cameras mounted in the frames.

These features don’t quite get us to what purists might consider a metaverse product, which typically involves some degree of virtual reality or a melding of the digital with the real world. Sources told the FT that Meta wants to take the glasses a step closer to something like the ones that famously framed Tom Cruise in Minority Report:

• The sources said Meta wants to add a screen on the inside of the glasses that would be able to flash things like text messages, and that the product might be ready to hit the shelves as early as the second half of next year.
• Reality Labs, the part of Meta that makes its hardware products, is still something of a cash-burner for the company, posting a $4.4 billion loss in the third quarter of this year. Reality Labs’ total losses since the company started accounting for them separately in 2020 stand at $54.9 billion.

Knock, Knock: While Meta reconnects with its metaverse heritage, Apple is reportedly looking to break ground on a whole new product category. The iPhone maker, which had its own foray into metaverse products with the Vision Pro VR headset this year, is looking into making a smart doorbell alongside a range of other smart-home products, according to a Bloomberg report.