Mark Zuckerberg’s headwear venture between Meta and Ray-Ban may finally be starting to work out. The Meta CEO held the company’s first all-hands meeting with most of its employees on an online call, and answered a few of their questions about Meta’s direction in the era of Trump, though HR warned that they would “skip questions that [they] expect might be unproductive if they leak.” For the first time, comments were disabled, and the most upvoted employee questions were no longer openly ranked.
Meta shades the competition
Zuckerberg apparently began the meeting by reiterating his points on AI and smart glasses that he’d made on the previous day’s sales call. During this foray, he made a rare sales confirmation for Meta‘s hardware ventures – the social media company’s AI-powered Ray-Ban smart glasses sold over one million devices last year.
There are still many unknowns in the AI and smart glasses market. “A lot of the big hit products in their third generation reached 5 to 10 million units,” he said. “So I think one of the questions for us is, are we going to go from 1 million this year to 2 million? [Or] from 1 million to 5 million?”
Zuck noted how the Ray-Ban smart glasses are different from regular VR devices or even Google Glasses since these are smart glasses that maintain the style and fashionability of everyday sunglasses. He adds, “We basically invented the category and our competitors haven’t really shown up yet and they will… but we just have this wide open field right now to run and basically introduce as many people as possible to Meta AI glasses.”
Meta is reportedly working on a project codenamed Hypernova, supposedly a premium-priced pair of smart glasses with a heads-up display. The glasses won’t be Ray-Bans or made by its parent company EssilorLuxottica, though the company will make Meta’s upcoming Oakley smart glasses for athletes.
