Meta debuts glasses under its own brand at lower $299 price

By Mark Gurman, Bloomberg

Meta Platforms Inc., which helped popularize smart glasses through partnerships with Ray-Ban and Oakley, is going down-market by launching lower-priced models under its own brand for the first time.

The social networking giant on Tuesday unveiled what it calls the Meta Adventurer and Fury glasses, each priced at $299. That’s $80 less than the second-generation Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer model announced last year. Meta is also introducing a $399 Starfire model in collaboration with Kylie Jenner, aiming to appeal to a younger, more fashion-focused demographic.

While Meta designed the glasses, its partner EssilorLuxottica SA, the parent company of Ray-Ban and Oakley, will produce them. EssilorLuxottica’s logo appears alongside Meta’s on the inside of the temple arms and on the packaging. The in-house designs come ahead of Apple Inc.’s planned smart-glasses debut next year. Similar to Meta, the iPhone maker designed the upcoming glasses itself.

In an interview, Meta and EssilorLuxottica executives said the new approach came in response to a desire for a “more accessible price point.”

“We were looking at brands together and trying to figure out what makes sense,” said Alex Himel, who runs Meta’s wearables unit. “We didn’t really find one, so then it was just, ‘All right, you’ve got Ray-Ban Meta here, Oakley Meta here and Meta at the bottom.’”

The Adventurer glasses look similar to Wayfarers, with a rectangular design and thin edges. They come in both regular and large sizes. The Fury look similar to the Adventurer but are thicker. The Kylie Jenner glasses, meanwhile, have a slim oval shape, matching an increasingly popular style among women. Meta is offering several colors, including tortoise, black and green, as well as transition, polarized and clear lenses. The new eyewear is also compatible with prescription lenses.

The hardware and software features are largely in line with Meta’s other screen-less smart glasses. One exception is a new option to adjust the width between nose pads to three different levels by manually opening and closing the pads on the glasses. Meta recently rolled out Muse Spark, its new artificial intelligence model, and the functionality is included out of the box with the new models.

Meta also hinted that it’s considering a version of its glasses without a camera, focusing on an audio-only experience for phone calls, media playback and interacting with its AI tools. The company wouldn’t comment on when the glasses would be released or how they’d be branded, but said there are consumers who mostly use the microphone- and audio-based features. A camera-free option could both lower the price point and enable new styles, it said, given the need to include fewer components.

“The larger the market gets, the more we can afford to have something different for more people,” Himel said. The company has explored facial-recognition tools for its glasses although the tool isn’t in active development as Meta works out the privacy and societal implications, according to Himel. Ideally, he said, Meta’s glasses could name people the user knows, and who would want to be identified to the wearer — such as family, friends and associates.

Himel also touched upon the widening smart-glasses landscape, calling Apple “formidable.”

“I think you need to take anything they do seriously,” he said, adding, “they’re good at hardware, they’re good at design.” But he criticized the iPhone maker for closing off the iOS operating system so that Meta’s smart glasses don’t have full connectivity to the iPhone in the same way that Apple glasses would. “There’s a number of places where we won’t necessarily be able to build the same quality consumer experience when paired with the phone, and so I think they’re taking advantage of that.”

Meta’s next step, the company said, is further expanding into more styles and brands with its partner and — eventually — diving into augmented reality glasses. It showed off an AR glasses prototype two years ago and could introduce a consumer-grade version as early as next year, Bloomberg News has reported.

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