At Meta’s recent Connect developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the much-anticipated Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. Developed in collaboration with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, these glasses resemble classic Ray-Ban Wayfarers but are equipped with a compact computing stack. Cameras and microphones capture photos, videos, and audio, while an augmented reality (AR) display projects information directly into the wearer’s field of view. An accompanying neural-sensing wristband detects subtle electrical signals from the user’s muscles, translating finger twitches and hand gestures into commands.
Meta presents the device as a significant advancement beyond its earlier Ray-Ban Stories, which primarily served as a social media camera. The promise is seamless interaction with Meta’s suite of apps: users can flick their fingers in mid-air to send messages, answer calls, or scroll through Instagram. However, the launch did not go as planned. Zuckerberg’s demonstration was plagued by dropped video calls and unresponsive AI assistants. Meta has since explained the technical issues and assured that the final product will be free from such bugs. Despite these assurances, regaining trust and rebuilding excitement after the rocky launch remains a challenge, reflecting the company’s troubled history with AR technologies.
A Costly History
Over the past decade, Meta has positioned AR and virtual reality (VR) as central to its future, predicting these technologies will have an impact comparable to the mobile computing revolution. This vision was recently articulated through the company’s framing of its social software and hardware under the “metaverse” concept, envisioning a seamless blend of real and virtual worlds.
The glasses arrive after more than a decade of investment in Meta’s Reality Labs division, the research and development arm for virtual and augmented reality products. Since acquiring Oculus in 2014, Meta has invested an estimated $80 billion in virtual and augmented reality, including acquisitions like neural computing company CTRL-Labs. The results include two million Ray-Ban Stories sold, tens of millions of Quest headsets, and billions in ongoing quarterly losses.
“Meta has projected to spend up to $72 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone.”
Where this money has gone remains somewhat opaque, though prototypes offer hints. Alongside Oculus headsets and Ray-Ban collaborations, Meta has unveiled experimental AR technologies such as Orion, Ego4D, and Project Aria. While never commercially released, these prototypes reveal Meta’s ambition: glasses that combine AR overlays with advanced AI systems. Ego4D, for example, was pitched to researchers as a tool for teaching AI to “see” from a human perspective.
The Uses — and the Risks
On the surface, the glasses’ uses seem benign: hands-free calls, short videos, and real-time notifications. Yet glasses that discreetly record raise surveillance risks, not only for wearers but for those around them. These risks are not hypothetical. Since the Ray-Ban Stories launched in 2021, numerous reports have surfaced of women being recorded without consent by influencers and “lifestyle coaches” in places like Sydney’s King’s Cross, Bondi Beach, and even the University of Sydney campus.
“The gendered nature of these incidents has earned the devices nicknames like ‘creeper glasses’ and ‘stalker glasses’.”
Meta points to a blinking white light as an indicator when recording is active, but online forums are full of instructions on how to disable it. Australia’s fragmented privacy laws exacerbate the problem. With no overarching federal right to privacy, victims often have little recourse against covert recording.
Concerns extend beyond interpersonal harms. In the United States, an ICE agent was spotted using the glasses during an immigration raid, raising alarms about state surveillance. This is part of a broader trend where AR (and VR) technologies extend the reach of state surveillance, whether through military deployments or the integration of facial recognition-enabled AR into policing.
A Fantasy of Enclosure
If the state wields AR to discipline, corporations like Meta deploy it to capture and enclose. The company’s history — from Cambridge Analytica to teen-targeted advertising — raises serious doubts about whether it can be trusted with such an intimate, data-intensive device. Now, with Meta’s aggressive pivot to AI and its integration of new models into the advertising engine, a key question emerges: to what extent are the inputs captured through these glasses being repurposed to train and refine AI systems?
Almost a decade ago, filmmaker Keiichi Matsuda’s Hyper-Reality imagined a cityscape saturated with overlays of ads, gamified points, and algorithmic nudges. What once seemed dystopian now feels uncannily prescient. Meta’s smart glasses are not just another consumer gadget; they are a step toward enclosing perception itself within the infrastructure of a private platform.
“When the interface is your glasses, there is no ‘outside’ to Meta’s platform.”
This is the fantasy of enclosure that has come to characterize the private internet, and which is literalized through technologies like VR and AR — an internet no longer open and distributed, but owned and mediated by a handful of corporations, with every layer (hardware, operating system, apps, and data) folded into one ecosystem.
Ryan Stanton is a research associate at the University of Sydney. Ben Egliston is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow. Marcus Carter is Professor in Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Sydney and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Joanne Gray is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Cultures at the University of Sydney.
