The mainstreaming of AI glasses starts today
Meta's super great AI glasses got two Super Bowl commercials. Here's what happens next.
Meta is advertising its Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses today with two 30-second Super Bowl commercials in the first and third quarters. Meta spent more than $7 million per ad.
The first ad, which features Chris Hemsworth, Chris Pratt, and Kris Jenner, is already on YouTube. In the ad, Chris Pratt uses the Meta AI feature to identify Maurizio Cattelan's "Comedian" artwork in Kris Jenner's home.
(Meta is also selling a limited edition Super Bowl version of the glasses, a matte black Wayfarer design with either gold reflective lenses or lenses reflecting the colors of the Super Bowl finalists.)
The event represents to me the long-awaited mainstreaming of all-day, everyday AI access by what will eventually become a majority of the world's people.
It's also a big moment for Meta, which has ambitions for its facetop computer.
During the company's Q4 2024 earnings call, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicted that AI glasses can reach "hundreds of millions and eventually billions" of users. He said he finds it hard to imagine that within ten years, basically all eyeglasses and sunglasses will connect the wearer to AI.
I hope that dozens of companies offer hundreds of styles of glasses. But for now, Ray-Ban Meta glasses are the most consumer-friendly.
I wear my Ray-Ban Meta glasses every day, and I've been trying out its two most advanced (and, in fact, experimental) features: Live AI and Live Translation.
Live AI is turned on with a voice command and stays on, during which time video is streamed to Meta servers through the glasses. You can ask questions about what both you and the AI are seeing and hearing, and the AI tells you. This feature isn't as powerful as Google's demo of a similar feature in the lab, which Google calls Project Astra.
Live AI is less powerful, specific, and able with the information, but it does have the charming feature of existing, whereas Astra is totally unavailable to the public.
Live Translation is amazing. I'm in Sicily, and Italian is one of the currently supported languages (the other two are Spanish and French). I can turn on live translation, and whenever the glasses pick up the Italian language, the words are translated into English and spoken for me (and only me) to hear.
(All the photos in these two collages were taken by me in the last week via Ray-Ban Meta glasses in Sicily. I take so many pictures with these glasses, and it's so easy to take them, that the stream of photos becomes a lifelog.)
Beyond helping me understand my environment and Italian, Meta glasses read incoming messages to me while my phone stays in my pocket. I can ask all kinds of questions and get answers, hear turn-by-turn directions, listen to music and podcasts, take pictures and videos, and even live-stream to Instagram or Facebook, all hands-free, using glasses everyone around me thinks are just regular glasses.
And that's the magic: I hear without anything in my ears and use my phone without looking at or even touching my phone.
I bought transition lenses with my prescription, so they're regular glasses and sunglasses.
In short, Ray-Ban Meta glasses are amazing, thrilling and powerful to wear, and just about anyone who tries AI glasses like these will never want to go without them.
But the real takeaway here is not that Ray-Ban Meta glasses are great. What matters is that the human race is about to be augmented with all-the-time AI access on a massive scale, representing the biggest change to human culture since the smartphone.
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Love my Ray-Ban Metas. For cycling (hands free photo and videos) and listening to music and podcasts you cannot beat them. Pro tip: Turn off the always listening and turn on tap to activate and it saves lots of battery
The quality of the pictures are impressive. I don't have a Facebook account. Could I still use these glasses?