Meta’s head, Mark Zuckerberg, provided his new vision of the technology future in the company’s latest earnings call. Specifically, the head of the world’s largest social network believes that smart glasses are the way things are trending. Conveniently for Meta, the company happens to have a large, commercially viable division making smart glasses.
This isn’t the first time Zuckerberg has made similar pronouncements, of course. Back when the company rebranded from Facebook to Meta, the looming future was closely tied to augmented and virtual reality headsets, with the metaverse a seeming (in Zuck’s mind, at least) inevitability.
Zuckerberg looks ahead
Meta’s honcho explained during the call, “Billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction. And I think that we’re at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones. It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”
He was talking to investors, of course, so the optimism and tone are to be expected. One doesn’t just tell shareholders that the future is uncertain and we’re all just guessing. That’s how you make your stock price drop into the toilet.
It is a fact that basically every tech company has launched or is working on a set of smart glasses. Samsung, Apple, Google, a range of Chinese companies, and even Finland are working on smart optics of one sort or another. This all lends support to Zuckerberg’s beliefs, but only as long as you don’t check the roster of companies that leapt onto the metaverse bandwagon before it ran out of gas.
There might be more longevity with this product line, which is currently acting as a vehicle to get people to wear AI assistants on their person. Either that or, like virtual reality, the number of interested customers will hit a brick wall and the ‘smart glasses’ push will be quietly memory-holed. Just like all mentions of the metaverse have disappeared from view.
