Meghan Bobrowsky of The Wall Street Journal reports that Meta is expected to unveil a new version of tech-enabled glasses on Wednesday. Bobrowsky writes:
Mark Zuckerberg has touted virtual-reality headsets as the next big thing. It turns out people may want something simpler: sunglasses with a camera.
Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses are gaining traction among consumers, who say they like using them to take photos for their friends and family as well as to create content for social media. The excitement comes as interest in the metaverse, an online world accessed via virtual-reality headsets, remains muted.
Meta Platforms META is expected to preview its latest pair of tech-enabled glasses at its annual developer and hardware conference Wednesday. […]
The company hasn’t disclosed sales figures for the more recent iteration of the glasses, but Meta has shipped more than 700,000 pairs, according to data provider IDC. Shipments more than doubled from the first to second quarter this year.
Meta still shipped more mixed-reality Quest 3 headsets than Ray-Bans in the most recent quarter. But analysts such as Bernstein’s Mark Shmulik see that changing soon. He forecasts that the glasses will be a holiday hit. […]
In July, The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta was in talks to buy a 5% stake in EssilorLuxottica. The status of those talks couldn’t be learned. EssilorLuxottica last week said it had struck a new long-term agreement with Meta to work on developing smart glasses into the next decade.
“I think what you’re going to end up with is just a whole series of different potential glasses products at different price points with different levels of technology in them,” Zuckerberg said recently.
Read more here.
