Meta is making a calculated play to dominate the nascent smart glasses market, officially partnering with sports eyewear giant Oakley for a new line of AI-powered wearables set to be unveiled this Friday. The move extends Meta’s reach beyond the fashion-conscious audience of its Ray-Ban collaboration, targeting the high-performance athletics sector and positioning the company against a new class of competitors like GoPro.
This expansion was confirmed by the launch of an official “Oakley Meta” Instagram profile, which teased the partnership with a simple but ambitious message: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. @oakley & @meta, together, amplifying human potential as never done before.”
For consumers, this means the AI features Meta has been steadily refining—from live visual assistance to real-time language translation—will now be housed in Oakley’s durable, sport-centric frames.
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The new glasses are expected to be more than a simple rebranding. The camera will be possibly shifted to a central position on the frame, a more practical placement for capturing first-person video during activities like cycling or running. With an anticipated price point between $240 and $300, Meta is aiming to make its wearable AI technology an accessible tool for a whole new demographic.
Beyond Fashion: Meta’s Grand Wearables Strategy
The Oakley partnership is a single, albeit significant, piece of Meta’s much larger, multi-tiered strategy for wearable technology. The company’s long-term vision extends far beyond the capabilities of its current glasses. While this week’s launch will leverage existing technology, earlier reports from Bloomberg detailed a far more ambitious roadmap, including a high-end model codenamed ‘Hypernova’ with an integrated display and a next-generation Oakley version, ‘Supernova 2’, slated for 2027.
This long-term ambition is fueled by CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s stated goal of eventually selling hundreds of millions of AI glasses, framing them as the next major computing platform. To support this vision, the company is planning to expand its physical retail presence to give consumers a hands-on experience with its hardware, a strategy aimed at driving both sales and public acceptance.
A Crowded Field of Vision
Meta’s push comes as the smart glasses market is rapidly heating up. Recent market analysis from Counterpoint Research shows the sector grew an explosive 210% year-over-year in 2024, driven largely by the first-generation Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The same report forecasts a “war of hundreds of smart glasses” in 2025, with new entrants like Xiaomi and Samsung expected to join the fray.
The competition is already formidable. Apple is known to be developing custom chips for its own smart glasses project, while Baidu has launched utility-focused AI glasses in China. Other companies are differentiating themselves by tackling privacy concerns head-on.
Solos last December launched AI smart glasses with a modular design allowing the camera to be removed. This approach, explained Solos Co-founder Kenneth Fan, was designed specifically for “allowing consumers to have control of their experience with AI and smart technology, particularly with privacy options in mind,” highlighting a key market vulnerability for camera-centric devices.
The Unblinking Eye: Navigating the Privacy Minefield
As capabilities grow, so do the ethical and privacy challenges. The core tension of smart glasses—balancing utility with the potential for surveillance—remains the industry’s greatest hurdle. These concerns were reignited by a Winbuzzer report detailing Meta’s internal exploration of integrating facial recognition into future devices. While Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth has said the company would only supply such technology if the public is comfortable with it, privacy advocates remain wary.
Normalizing facial recognition in wearables could lead to pervasive surveillance and significant legal challenges. The risks are not abstract; digital rights advisors have pointed to the specific dangers such technology could pose to women’s safety.
Amanda Manyame, a digital rights advisor for Equality Now, stressed the need for proactive regulation, stating, “Policymakers need to see the harm that could be caused by AI because they don’t fully understand why you need safety at the design level.”
Smarter, Faster, Longer: The On-Device AI Push
To deliver a seamless experience while mitigating some privacy risks, the industry is increasingly focused on advancing on-device AI. Also known as Edge AI, this approach allows models to run locally, enabling glasses to function without a network connection and preventing raw personal data from ever leaving the device. The software powering the Oakley glasses will be built on this evolving foundation.
A promising technical solution, outlined in a Forbes article, involves a new architecture for on-device AI that separates the lightweight “encoder” on the glasses from the power-intensive “decoder” on a paired smartphone. According to Forbes Councils Member Wei Duan, this hybrid model represents a “promising future direction” for wearables because it efficiently balances performance, privacy, and power consumption.
Ultimately, the success of the Meta-Oakley venture and the broader smart glasses category will depend on this delicate balance. The industry must prove it can deliver powerful, intuitive AI assistance without turning its users—and everyone around them—into unwilling subjects of a vast, interconnected surveillance network.
