Meta (META) unveiled its newest AI-powered glasses, starting at $299. Yahoo Finance Technology Editor Dan Howley takes a closer look.
Meta is making another big push into AI wearables, unveiling a new line of smart glasses.
the lack of branding means that it's less expensive than the 299, so you're not paying for the Ray-Band brand or the the Oakley brand. Uh functionally they're they're exactly the same. They'll you'll still be able to, you know, say hey Meta, use Meta AI, things like that. Um you know, so overall, I think these are if you're in the market for smart glasses, these are a good value.
They have adjustable nose pads. So if you wear glasses, you know, like there's three different, you know, space. And then these are also adjustable, these little temple guard here.
So you have two cameras on either side here. Uh you have a microphone and you can do things like, you know, I can say, uh okay, what what am I looking at right now? right? And you know, if it's a piece of artwork, it'll tell you what that is. Uh hopefully you know what a cup is, you know, there's one on the table here. Uh but you can do things like uh if you have different ingredients, you could say what can I make with these? stuff like that. That's kind of a little ambitious. I don't know who
takes out just a armful of food and drops it on their counter and says, what do I do now? That just doesn't make sense. But like there are some things that it can help with, you know, uh if you're uh trying to record something that, you know, you want to do first person, that's where these kind of fit in.
What's the battery life on something like that?
These are I think the they said four hours or around there. That would I have to double check, so don't quote me on that even though we're live. But uh I would say that something like this is going to appeal to a very specific type of person. Right? I don't think
Who is that person?
I think it's more tech forward people. Uh people that uh maybe want to be like try to be uh influencers, things like that, content creators. Uh or people who just think that it's a cool gadget to have and need glasses. These can be prescription, right now they're not, so everything is incredibly blurry to me. Uh they can be regular sunglasses as well. So they they they work well in that respect. And I do think that having an AI agent, you know, well, not agent, sorry, they're not agentic, but having an AI assistant
uh on you at all times can be helpful if you're just, you know, asking I don't know what's eight, you know, eight times 8 obviously, you should know if you're driving a car or something like that. But you know, I I think it just makes it a little bit easier than asking, you know, Siri or something like that on the regular. It's worth noting that Meta dominates this space. They absolutely run away with market share when it comes to smart glasses. There is competition waiting in the wings. There's Google
uh which is going to launch its glasses with Gentle Monster. had no idea what Gentle Monster was until Google announced it and I had to look it up because I'm not cool. Uh and they're also going to be working with Warby Parker, which is huge as well. Samsung's going to be launching its own glasses and then oh yeah, Apple.