There’s no doubt that today’s best smart glasses are better than ever, but they’re yet to catch on, something Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg is confident will happen in the future, even though his digital company Metaverse posted a hefty $6 billion loss in its most recent financial quarter.
Earnings conference call speech (via TechCrunch), Zuckerberg has gone on record to say that “it is difficult to imagine a world in a few years in which the majority of glasses people use are not artificial intelligence glasses”, comparing the wearable revolution he anticipates with the transition from classic folding phones to smartphones.
Zuckerberg noted that billions of people around the world wear vision-correcting glasses or contact lenses, which represents a large number of potential customers. It also said sales of Meta smart glasses (including the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2) tripled last year.
The interest of technology manufacturers is definitely great: Google and Samsung prepare data glasses together with Samsung confirm separately that its long-awaited AR glasses will arrive later this year.
Apple was rumored to be working on its own pair and developing a Snapchat developer earlier this week. Snap announced a new subsidiary called Specs to advance its future smart glasses products.
Meanwhile in the metaverse…
Zuckerberg expects the smart glasses category to do better than his previous efforts to reach the metaverse: As CNBC reports, Meta Reality Labs reported a loss of $6 billion for the final quarter of 2025, down from $4.43 billion in the previous quarter.
As you may remember, the Metaverse is the completely virtual world that Meta hoped we would all live in from now on, which is why the company changed its name from Facebook to Meta. Although many of us enjoy playing in virtual reality, users have not shown much interest in spending much of their time as digital avatars.
Meta isn’t completely giving up on the Metaverse, and it has been suggested that Horizon (the official name of the Meta Metaverse) could become more of a Roblox clone that focuses more on mobile devices.
We’ll have to wait and see what happens, but these financial losses continue to go in the wrong direction. The future of smart glasses looks a little brighter, especially with the continued development of artificial intelligence assistants powering them.
