Smart glasses are having a moment this summer.

But this isn’t the first time. Back in 2016, while one of our team members was in New York, they tracked down a Snapbot, a bright yellow vending machine with a single blinking eye. And, after feeding it $129.99, it spit out a pair of glasses — the Snapchat Spectacles.

If you weren’t following tech news that year, or if perhaps I’m aging myself, Snapchat didn’t sell its first glasses online or even in stores. Hell, not even in a pop-up retail space. It dropped vending machines in random locations around the country and let online hype do the rest. 

And we bought in. We got two pairs, actually, and filmed some delightfully weird circular-format video, and mostly confirmed what everyone eventually figured out: they were fun, the aesthetic was a little corny, and nobody wanted to actually wear them around.

After a few months, it simply became a footnote in our relationship with experimental camera tech. When a new way to capture content shows up — GoPros, gimbals, drones, 360 cameras — we’re more than happy to try it all. A lot of it ends up in a drawer, but some of it changes how we shoot.

That brings us to right now, because for the first time in a decade of false starts, smart glasses aren’t a gimmick anymore. Meta has sold somewhere north of 10 million pairs of its Ray-Ban glasses (7 million in 2025 alone). We’ve got Kylie Jenner wearing a rhinestone-studded pair. iShowSpeed is jumping out of a plane wearing them. Smart glasses are here, and this time it’s not Google, not Snapchat — it’s Meta at the helm. 

So let’s talk about why this attempt is working, why every previous attempt face-planted hard enough to break those same glasses in half, why there’s real controversy brewing, and what any of it means for the work we all do.

Why did everyone before Meta fail?

The graveyard of smart glasses is instructive because almost every failure comes down to the same thing: they looked like tech or a toy.

Google Glass (2012) was the original sin. It was a titanium band with a prism floating over one eye — my personal favorite comparison is that it looks like a power scouter from Dragon Ball Z. It didn’t matter what it could do. Nobody wanted to be the person wearing it, and “Glasshole” entered the dictionary before the product even shipped.

Snapchat Spectacles (our beloved 2016 pair) had the opposite problem. They looked almost normal, a bit like something you could buy off a rack from a souvenir shop at any beach town, but with a big yellow camera ring on the corner that screamed: “I am recording you.” They went viral off marketing and novelty, then died. They sold 22,000 pairs in the first year. The pendulum would swing in multiple directions after that as, to this day, Snap is still releasing new iterations of the Spectacles. In 2018, they released Spectacles 2.0 (lighter frames, more colors). The very next year, they released Spectacles 3 (new design, HD cameras and some 3D tech). Yet another year later, they releasesed the Spectacles 4 in 2021 (another redesign, computer vision and new software). In 2024, the Snap went all in on Augmented Reality with the Spectacles 5, and is still at it, by the way — its new $2,195 AR “Specs” launched recently to a near-universal thud. They’ve picked a different offering, type of consumer and pricepoint than Meta.

Let’s look at GoPro, arguably the most successful “wear a camera” product ever, deliberately stayed in its lane. It was marketed as gear, as camera equipment. Something for ski runs and mountain bike trails, not brunch. That framing made it acceptable, but it also capped its potential.

Imagine you invited me to brunch and I had a helmet and an action camera or even an AR headset on (I’m not saying I won’t, by the way).

Anyways, the pattern across all of them was visible tech on your face reads as nerdy at best and creepy at worst and lack of mass market appeal. Nobody solved that until Meta partnered with the most powerful glasses company of all time, and some malicious users began to hide that they were recording.

Why Meta is winning now

Meta’s masterstroke was the 2021 partnership with EssilorLuxottica, the company behind Ray-Ban and Oakley. Instead of inventing a futuristic-looking device, they put cameras, speakers, and microphones inside a Wayfarer — one of the most familiar, most beloved frame shapes on Earth. The tech didn’t jump out. It disappeared into the fashion.

It’s been successful in three disctint ways:

• Fashion first, tech second. Mark Zuckerberg has said, essentially, that these have to be glasses people want to wear even if the tech didn’t exist. That means celebrity co-created models (rhinestone details and Kylie Jenner). Or making a more capable version of what you already were wearing in Meta’s Oakley line, which targets the GoPro, outdoor, athlete crowd. Multiple styles for multiple identities.
• Right fit, right time. The hardware is small, light, and fast enough. The photo and video output are high-quality, while the desire to create content is at an all-time high. The features list aligns to what people actually want in their daily lives — content capture, phone calls, music, voice commands and chat.
• AI is the reason to believe. This might be the biggest shift — the emphasis on Smart. The pitch is no longer “record everything you see.” That’s the creepy version. The pitch is “your AI assistant can see what you see.” Ask it about the painting in front of you. Get live translations. Have it walk you through a recipe. The camera becomes a feature of the assistant rather than the point, which gives everyone a semi-socially acceptable reason to have one on their face.

And there are genuinely great use cases emerging. The most compelling story in this whole space is accessibility: blind and low-vision users pairing the glasses with Be My Eyes to have a volunteer (or the AI) read menus, sort mail, and navigate the world hands-free. Display versions can put live captions over conversations for people who are hard of hearing. That’s real change in the lives of people coming in the form of a (relatively) easily accessible device. 

Okay, now the uncomfortable part

Here’s the flip side, and the part users and marketers need to be aware of. We now have a recording device that’s nearly indistinguishable from a regular pair of glasses, and social norms haven’t caught up.

The glasses do have a privacy LED that lights up while recording. In practice? Many people don’t know what that little light means. And tutorials for covering or disabling it are all over TikTok. Entire genres of shock content — like creators secretly filming strangers without consent and posting the interactions — have built million-follower accounts on exactly this loophole. Interviews have surfaced where people only discovered they’d been filmed when the video went viral.

The legal landscape is a patchwork. Recording in public is generally legal in the U.S., but roughly a dozen states require all parties to consent to a recorded conversation — which matters if your content involves audio of people who didn’t agree to be filmed. Other places are moving faster: the EU’s GDPR requires explicit consent, South Korea mandates a loud shutter sound on phone cameras, and U.S. jurisdictions are starting to ban the glasses in courthouses and behind the wheel. Employers out there are writing “no glasses in meetings or bathrooms” policies as we speak.

There’s also a data question hiding under all of this. A Swedish newspaper investigation found that footage from users’ interactions were being reviewed by human contractors overseas — including deeply private moments people assumed only a machine would ever see. And Meta has reportedly (and allegedly) developing a facial-recognition feature called NameTag that would let wearers identify strangers on the street, a project that’s drawn opposition from more than 70 civil liberties organizations. 

In short, the opposition is: these glasses are normalizing surveillance, and your data may not be as private as you think. 

What marketers need to know

So where does that leave those of us making content and potentially embracing these wholeheartedly?

• The POV format is real, and it’s only growing. First-person footage has an intimacy that b-roll can’t fake — it’s a huge part of why glasses content performs on social. For tourism, hospitality, and experience-driven brands, “see it through my eyes” is a genuinely useful creative tool. We’ve been experimenting with it since the Spectacles days, and this generation of hardware is the first that’s actually very production-friendly.
• Consent is now a production line item. If you’re shooting glasses content in public — or briefing creators and influencers who will — build consent into the workflow. Releases for identifiable people, awareness of two-party consent states, no covered LEDs, ever. Treat it like a “real” camera. Backlash against creators who film people unaware should tell you everything about where public sentiment sits.
• Vet your influencer partners’ capture practices. The creator who’s great at glasses content and the creator who built an audience on secretly filming strangers can look identical in a media kit. Ask how footage gets captured before your brand rides along in it.
• Watch the adoption curve, don’t chase it. Even the most enthusiastic reviewers describe today’s glasses as, day to day, “glorified headphones.” Battery life measured in minutes for heavy AI use, headaches after long wear, and no killer app yet. Realistic mainstream adoption is probably five to ten years out. This is a start-experimenting moment.
• And keep an eye on the ad layer. Every major platform shift eventually becomes an ad product. A device that sees what millions of people see, all day, is the most valuable targeting data ever assembled. When that inventory arrives, the brands who understand the format — and the trust issues around it — will be way ahead.

TLDR: We’ll still keep a pair in our camera bag. They don’t yet belong next to the Spectacles in the drawer. But this time, we’ll be a bit more careful before we hit that record button.