Apple is Reportedly Developing Smart Glasses to Rival Ray-Ban Meta Glasses

TL;DR: Apple has the technology to make this happen, but Meta now has a multi-year head start; this may not help Meta at all if they fumble up user data privacy, and the path they recently started walking along is somewhat unsettling in this regard.

Meta has to be really careful here. The Ray-Ban smart glasses turned out to be sort of a surprise hit, selling more than 2M despite being limited to voice only, and are apparently the best selling product in Ray-Ban/Luxottica stores. Apple has some advantages as they can push the integration with iPhones and already have ultra-low power silicon and watchOS from the Apple watch to base this on, but they are no doubt playing catch-up.

Meta has a multi-year head start. This doesn't amount to a lot with VR headsets, because those turned out to be a niche product even among gamers. visionOS and AndroidXR could still easily outgrow Horizon OS by leveraging their existing billions strong user bases. Meta's current lead could count a lot more for an actual mass market product, and smart glasses now see adaption by regular customers instead of only the nerds. So Meta is well positioned in smart glasses, which is even more astonishing considering their horrible reputation regarding user data privacy, and smart glasses being very intrusive devices.

But this is also where Meta could easily run everything into the ground: they recently announced the Live AI feature that will basically always listen instead of waiting for the user to first activate it with the "Hello Meta" phrase. Initially it will be opt in, but it may become obligatory. This would also require the cameras to always be on, and they consider no longer having the white LED on the glasses indicating the recording to others. And one of the new features is automatic facial recognition, giving the wearer extra information about anybody acquaintances they meet. That may be only the name they forgot, but could be a lot more, incl. real world location tracking.

Basically Meta are turning Ray-Ban Meta glasses users into walking surveillance cameras. This may be straight up illegal in certain regions. For example facial recognition in public is prohibited in the EU, you aren't even allowed to record people in public spaces if individuals can be identified this way, and there are very strict limits for what surveillance cameras are allowed to see even on private property.

But "inspired" by political changes, Meta has moved towards the dark side in recent months, cancelling 3rd party fact checking, removing moderation, forcing more political content into feeds for the sake of higher engagement, and took away power from Facebook's ethics and supervision teams that were put in place after previous data breach and abuse scandals exactly to prevent more user privacy neglect.

Other than the forced Facebook account requirement for Quest 2, which pissed off Oculus users and was later reverted, so far most of this has barely impacted XR. And Meta was very careful with introducing camera access on Quest or gathering even anonymized usage data to avoid any privacy concerns. But now that they finally have an XR product the mainstream seems to accept, they are throwing caution to the wind and again follow an "anything goes" policy.

And this could backfire horribly. If they gamble away the little bit of earned trust, and people realize that anyone wearing Meta Ray-Ban glasses can automatically identify them, by either uploading their image to Meta servers for analysis, or reporting the result of onboard recognition, without even a visual hint that the cameras are currently active, Meta smart glasses users will be branded the new glassholes in no time and be kicked out of public places.

And Apple with a hard earned reputation of defending user privacy even against government players will be more than happy to pick up the pieces. They have (correctly) convinced a lot of people that free products from Google and Meta mean you/your data is the product. So far this was "only" about you online behavior. Smart glasses extend that to the real world, and if people get the impression that Meta is continuing with its sheer endless data hoarding, tracking and profiling in areas where simply logging out won't help, it won't matter that they had a multi-year advantage and popular products long before Apple. The one thing you mustn't mess up in smart glasses is privacy, technology and convenience benefits are often secondary, as Google already learned with Google Glass.