Meta Unveils $349 Camera-Free Glasses, Its First Hardware Product Whose Headline Feature Is Not Looking at Anyone
Engineers spent two years removing a component, and the marketing team spent six months figuring out how to say so.
MENLO PARK, Calif. — Meta on Wednesday introduced Ray-Ban Meta Audio, a $349 pair of smart glasses that plays music, takes calls and answers questions, and which the company presented on stage as its most ambitious privacy feature to date: the absence of a camera.
"For years, customers told us they loved our glasses but that everyone around them wanted to throw them into the sea," said a Meta product lead, standing in front of a slide that read, in 180-point type, NO CAMERA. "We listened. Then we removed the part that was listening. Well, the part that was looking. The listening part is still there. It is a pair of audio glasses."
The camera-free model is $100 cheaper than the camera-equipped Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, making it, according to the company, the first product in consumer electronics history to charge less for doing less on purpose.
A Meta hardware engineer, who asked not to be named, said the removal took 22 months. "You would think taking a thing out would be faster than putting it in," the engineer said. "But every internal review asked what we were going to do with the space, and 'nothing' was not an accepted answer until July."
Early reaction was positive. In a survey by the research group Lensline, 71 percent of people who have been photographed by a stranger's glasses said they would feel more comfortable around the new model, and 64 percent said they would still move to a different table just in case.
The company also showed its $1,299 VR Glasses, which weigh 100 grams and are connected by a cord to a computing puck the wearer keeps in a pocket, which Meta described as "untethered from the headset form factor."
At press time, a Meta spokesperson had confirmed the camera-free glasses do not record the people around the wearer, and declined to say whether they could hear them.