Smart glasses far exceed expectations, is Meta now most likely to win the AI hardware competition?

AI Pin and Rabbit R1 have both sparked an AI hardware craze, but neither could escape the fate of "going public and crashing, debuting and peaking", while the seemingly less flashy Meta Glasses are considered to have the potential to win this AI hardware competition.

On September 21st, technology media The Verge's senior journalist Victoria Song stated in an article that in a year when AI wearable devices generally performed poorly, Ray-Ban's Meta smart glasses exceeded expectations.

In Song's view, the advantages of Meta smart glasses include a variety of styles and colors, fashionable and easy to integrate into daily life, after all, "ordinary people don't want to look like they just walked out of a sci-fi movie".

The price of Meta glasses is also relatively reasonable, priced at $299, which is much more affordable compared to $3500 for Vision Pro or $699 for Humane AI Pin.

Furthermore, Meta glasses are more practical in terms of functionality. AI is part of its features, capable of object recognition, landmark information, automatically generating Instagram post titles, translating menus, and it also has good audio and call quality, with video and photo quality sufficient for sharing on social media.

Song mentioned that although Meta's AI is sometimes not perfect, it works naturally on the device, and even if there are issues with AI functions, the device can still perform other tasks well, "which is good enough for now."

Song revealed that Meta's strategy is to help people adapt to facial computers through simple smart glasses, preparing for the maturity of future AI and AR technologies.

The smart glasses jointly launched by Meta and Ray-Ban were released in 2021, with Meta starting to test multimodal AI updates for Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses in December 2023, and officially bringing Meta AI with Vision to users in the US and Canada at the end of April this year.

According to third-party estimates, Meta has sold over 1 million glasses. Zuckerberg once revealed in a conference call earnings meeting that multiple styles have been sold out.

Zuckerberg has always been very optimistic about the future of smart glasses. In July this year, at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference, he predicted that almost everyone will wear AI smart glasses in the future:

I think, based on what we're seeing with the Ray-Ban Meta glasses now, a $300 AI smart glasses without a display will be a very popular product, eventually tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people will own it, and you will have super interactive AI that can talk to you.

Meta is not the only company developing smart glasses, Snap Inc. has developed AR-supporting Spectacles, and Google has been developing Google Glass since 2013 With the advancement of AI technology, the market's interest in the new generation of smart glasses is increasing.

Song pointed out that Meta has already succeeded in making people accept simple smart glasses, but to maintain its leading position in this AI hardware competition, the AI capabilities of Meta glasses must be excellent enough to make users willing to wear them all day long for the convenience they bring.

At the Meta Connect developer conference starting this Wednesday (September 25), a large number of demonstrations related to Meta AI are expected.

Meta is expected to unveil an updated version of the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses at the conference, which may include a new chatbot assistant experience. In addition, Meta's internally developed new mixed reality glasses Orion are also expected to shine at this conference