Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg delivers a speech, as a giant image of Ray-Ban smart glasses appears on screen, in Menlo Park, California, on 27 September 2023. Exclusive: Documents show officers from Maine to California worry Meta's camera-equipped glasses will be used either to secretly record them or aid acts of terrorism In January, the New York Police Department's counterterrorism unit sent out a memo warning police officers about a new potential "security and counterintelligence" threat: Ray-Ban Meta glasses. The memo directed officers to "conduct thorough inspections of all eyewear permitted within inmate cells" and cautioned that people who have been arrested could use these glasses, equipped with small cameras and microphones, to record inside police facilities. The memo cited two examples of such videos posted on social media.

The most mind-blowing IFA 2026 devices you need to see From AI gadgets to futuristic home tech, here are the coolest innovations we found across IFA 2026.

Mashable Voices Mashable Selects Look Up Mashable's Best: E-readers, robovacs, laptops, earbuds, smart home and more Say More Safety Net Creator Hub Versus Gift Ideas For Everyone On Your List Switch Off Trending Now In My Bag All Series Agents have been spotted wearing Meta glasses during raids. Now ICE is telling every employee to take them off. Olivia Tauber is the deputy editor of digital culture, covering creators, media, movies, beauty, and more. Based in New York, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Cut, Teen Vogue, Complex, and Interview Magazine. She holds a Master's degree in Journalism from NYU and a Bachelor's from the University of Michigan.

Since WIRED reported on Meta's NameTag face recognition system, company executives have made confusing and conflicting remarks about its very existence. Does a software feature exist if its code has been deployed to the devices of millions of people but they can't use it yet? Not if you work at Meta . The company's executives have spent the last few weeks making this semantic argument about NameTag, the in-development face-recognition system that Meta built for its smart glasses . The inevitable result is confusion, but that's easy enough to clear up.

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.