Meta Is Charging a Subscription for Smart Glasses Features. Now you'll need to subscribe for "expanded access" to the most advanced features. So you paid a few hundred bucks for a neat little gadget and think you're good to go. But it turns out you'll need to subscribe to a monthly plan to unlock its advanced features. That where AI-powered consumer electronics are increasingly heading, and Meta is the latest to prove it with its smart glasses .

The new Meta-branded glasses have the same camera, microphones, and chatbot as the Ray-Bans. They come in three styles, one of which was codesigned with Kylie Jenner. Smart glasses are like public transportation, according to Peter Bristol, Meta's vice president of industrial design. "People will use it when it's good enough." To reach "good enough," Meta is making its smart glasses more accessible, more customizable, and comfier to wear.

Smart glasses are hitting the mainstream, so companies are now getting into the accessories game. A suite of bright clip-on frame covers for Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses are the first product from Lorika, an Italian startup that has described itself as "a team of entrepreneurs under 30." They're called Ontop because they go--you guessed it--on top of the glasses frames. The covers are polycarbonate plastic frames, with elastic polymers woven in for stability. One piece clips around the lens and covers the hinges that connect to the glasses' arms.

Snapchat's parent company has announced it is releasing new smart glasses, a decade after its original pair lost the company tens of millions of dollars . The new augmented reality (AR) glasses, called Specs, will allow users to see digital elements overlaid onto the world. They will cost £1,995 in the UK and $2,195 in the US when shipping begins this autumn. That makes them cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro mixed-reality headset and its $3,499 starting price, but far more than Meta's smart glasses, which start at $224. Evan Spiegel, co-founder and chief executive of Snap Inc, said the glasses marked the beginning of a new era in computing.

You Can Finally Buy Snap's New AR Specs--for $2,195 Snap CEO Evan Spiegel lays out the company's vision for its augmented-reality smart glasses, arriving later this year. Snap--maker of the popular social app Snapchat--has a new pair of augmented-reality smart glasses called Specs. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel revealed the new glasses at an event during the Augmented World Expo (AWE) tech conference in Long Beach, California. As Snap frames it, this isn't a prototype or developer device--it's the first actual consumer version of the Specs AR glasses, unlike the previous generation exclusively sold to developers and creators. Snap says it expects the devices to ship this fall in the US, UK, and France.

Rank One, whose board includes a former CIA deputy director and a former FBI science chief, supplied face recognition to Meta for internal development of its smart glasses app. Meta is testing face-recognition software built by a company that sells surveillance tools to police departments and the United States military, as it explores bringing the technology to its smart glasses, WIRED has learned. The arrangement is documented in a software license, obtained by WIRED, that was issued by Rank One Computing--a Denver-based company that derives roughly 80 percent of its revenue from government clients--and is tied to a test version of the Meta AI app that powers Meta's Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses . Rank One's face recognition has been bought by the US Marshals Service, which uses it to confirm prisoners' identities without fingerprinting them during transport, and by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service--the Navy's police force--which purchased the company's video tool, ROC Watch. Rank One developed long-range face recognition for US Special Operations Command under a government research contract, saying its software could identify a face from as far as a kilometer away.

The'disappearing into the bushes like Homer Simpson' strategy is a bold choice. Only a day after a dormant bit of code that seemed to be a facial recognition algorithm was discovered in a companion app for its smart glasses, Meta released an update which removed that code, Wired reported. The publication had first uncovered the suspicious code, internally dubbed Name Tag within Meta, while reviewing code for a Meta AI app which handles some core features of the glasses. In other words, the same app necessary for pairing Meta smart glasses to a user's phone over Bluetooth was also ready to start harvesting every face a user passed by while wearing them. It contained algorithms which would have converted photos of faces into biometric identifiers stored on-device and cross referenced with each new facial scan.

'The Information' says Meta will release up to four new smart glasses before the year ends. Meta is developing an AI pendant and will start testing it over the coming year, according to . In addition, the company is reportedly gearing up to release up to four more models of smart glasses before the year ends, as part of an aggressive plan to make up for the massive losses of its Reality Labs division, which houses its hardware business. While Meta has yet to confirm the report, it was pretty much a given that the company would start working on an AI pendant after it purchased Limitless in 2025 . Limitless was the maker of an AI device literally called Pendant, a clip-on Bluetooth microphone that listens and records everything you say or hear throughout the day so it can provide summaries, transcripts and a searchable database of conversations and things you record for yourself.

Best Power Banks Best Smart Rings Routers vs. Modems Choose the Right Laptop Smart Sprinklers Deals Delivered But This Is Why It's Heartbreaking Designed by Jony Ive and a host of ex-Cupertino colleagues, the Luce shows us what might have been had Apple made good on its $10 billion bet. You know things are bad when the Pope gets involved . No doubt reeling from a launch that somehow went down even worse than Ferrari itself anticipated, the Italian carmaker sought to get the endorsement of none other than His Holiness Pope Leo XIV for its first EV, the Luce. Guided by Ferrari chairman John Elkann and senior Ferrari executives, in a hillside town about 15 miles southeast of Rome, the pontiff sat in the driver's seat and listened patiently as test driver Raffaele De Simone explained the vehicle's controls and driving modes as if he really was speaking to a man clearly in the market for a 1,000-horsepower electric car capable of hitting 62 mph in 2.5 seconds. Meanwhile, as Pope Leo was no doubt pondering how the Luce could boast one of the largest batteries in any production EV yet still only manage a maximum 329 miles, or how an accelerometer on the rear axle somehow worked like a guitar pickup to create in-cabin sound like an "instrument," the market was speaking.

Gear Wearables Google's Android XR smart glasses hope to succeed where AI-first wearables have failed The audio-only frames pair with Android and iOS so a Gemini agent can run errands on your phone while you stay heads-up. More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. We may earn revenue from the products available on this page and participate in affiliate programs. Google put AI on people's faces more than a decade ago with its Google Glass wearable. It was designed to put a computer directly on your face, but the world (and to some extent, the hardware) wasn't quite ready for that yet.