At Meta’s recent Connect developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled the highly anticipated Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. Developed in collaboration with eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica, these glasses resemble classic Ray-Ban Wayfarers but are equipped with advanced technology. Cameras and microphones capture photos, video, 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 promotes the device as a significant advancement beyond its earlier Ray-Ban Stories, which were essentially cameras for social media. The new glasses promise seamless interaction with Meta’s suite of apps, allowing users to send messages, answer calls, or scroll through Instagram with simple finger gestures. However, the launch event was plagued by technical issues, including dropped video calls and unresponsive AI assistants. Meta has since explained the technical glitches and assured that the final product will be free from similar bugs. Yet, rebuilding trust and excitement after such a rocky introduction poses a significant challenge, highlighting the company’s tumultuous history with AR technologies.
A Costly History of AR Investment
Over the past decade, Meta has positioned AR and virtual reality (VR) as central to its future, predicting their impact to be comparable to the mobile computing revolution. This vision was recently solidified through the company’s framing of its social software and hardware under the “metaverse,” a concept of seamlessly blending real and virtual worlds.
The release of these glasses follows more than a decade of investment in Meta’s Reality Labs division, dedicated to developing virtual and augmented reality products. Since acquiring Oculus in 2014, Meta has invested an estimated $80 billion into these technologies, including acquisitions like the neural computing company CTRL-Labs. Despite these investments, the results have been mixed, with only two million Ray-Ban Stories sold, tens of millions of Quest headsets distributed, and ongoing quarterly losses amounting to billions.
Where exactly this money has gone remains somewhat opaque, though prototypes offer some clues. In addition to 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 to develop glasses that combine AR overlays with advanced AI systems. For instance, Ego4D was pitched to researchers as a tool for teaching AI to “see” from a human perspective.
Meta has projected to spend up to $72 billion on AI infrastructure in 2025 alone, highlighting the scale of its commitment to these technologies.
The Ethical Concerns of AR Technology
While the glasses’ uses appear benign—offering hands-free calls, short videos, and real-time notifications—they also pose significant surveillance risks. These risks are not just hypothetical. Since the launch of Ray-Ban Stories in 2021, numerous reports have emerged of women being recorded without consent by influencers and “lifestyle coaches” in public places. This has led to the devices being nicknamed “creeper glasses” and “stalker glasses.”
Meta points to a blinking white light as an indicator when recording is active, but online forums are rife with instructions on how to disable it. In Australia, fragmented privacy laws exacerbate the problem, leaving victims with 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 disciplinary arm of the state, whether through military deployments or the integration of facial recognition-enabled AR into policing.
Critics warn that the danger is not just that users put Facebook (or Meta) on their own faces, but that everyone else must live with the consequences, often without consent.
The Fantasy of Enclosure
If the state uses AR to discipline, corporations like Meta deploy it to capture and enclose. Meta’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. With Meta’s aggressive pivot to AI and integration of new models into its advertising engine, a key question arises: 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 represent a step toward enclosing perception itself within the infrastructure of a private platform.
This is the fantasy of enclosure that characterizes the private internet, literalized through technologies like VR and AR—an internet no longer open and distributed, but owned and mediated by a handful of corporations. When the interface is your glasses, there is no “outside” to Meta’s platform.
As the debate around AR technology continues, experts like Ryan Stanton, Ben Egliston, Marcus Carter, and Joanne Gray from the University of Sydney emphasize the need for stringent ethical guidelines and robust privacy laws to govern the use of such transformative technologies.
