The boss of the social media giant Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, unveiled connected glasses without a camera on Wednesday, designed as a gateway to his artificial intelligence (AI) Muse, against the backdrop of a revolt against his other models likely to film passers-by without their knowledge. “Without cameras, it opens up a lot of new design possibilities,” he explained at the annual Meta Connect conference at its Californian headquarters in Menlo Park, praising “lighter and thinner” audio glasses with “the longest battery life” in the range, without mentioning criticism aimed at the camera.
Muse, the multitasking AI assistant, will arrive on glasses “in the coming weeks,” he announced. Launched at the beginning of September and capable of booking a trip or making purchases on behalf of its users, Muse is “the centerpiece” of the strategy of the American group which owns Facebook and Instagram, declared its boss, for whom glasses are “the only format that allows your Muse to see what you see, to hear what you hear”.
Big investments to make profitable
The tens of billions invested by Meta in AI have so far borne little fruit, its models having disappointed compared to those of OpenAI, Anthropic or Google. But Muse became the most downloaded free application on the Apple App Store in the United States in September, ahead of ChatGPT, delighting investors: the title gained more than 11% on Monday.
Called Ray-Ban Meta Audio, the camera-free glasses will be available from October 13 in the United States, priced at $350. Meta holds nearly 84% of the connected glasses market, where 8.7 million pairs were sold worldwide in 2025 according to Omdia, compared to more than a billion smartphones. But its camera models are criticized, particularly in Europe: French justice is investigating videos of women filmed without their knowledge in the street, and Oslo has banned them from its schools.
Meta, however, continues to sell glasses equipped with a camera, including a new generation of Ray-Ban Meta presented on Wednesday. Asked by AFP about the criticism, Meta’s vice president for AI products, Vishal Shah, assured that the indicator light signaling recording on these models had only been made “more explicit” over time. “This is not a change in our position,” he said.
Twilight of the Metaverse
Mark Zuckerberg recognized that the group had “reoriented” its efforts towards “personal superintelligence”, to the detriment of the metaverse, its previous big bet. The group intends to profit from Muse by charging, ultimately, “a small commission on transactions” carried out by the agent, explained Mark Zuckerberg. These different bets are supposed to offer growth drivers to the company, beyond advertising, almost all of its revenues, which finance up to $145 billion in investments this year, especially in AI.
Although its core business, social networks, remains very profitable, the group is nevertheless surrounded by legal proceedings. At the end of August, he concluded agreements worth more than 18 billion $ with almost all American states which restrict the use of Facebook and Instagram by adolescents, but thousands of complaints remain pending.
Opposite, competitors are active: Snap launched glasses in August costing more than $2,000 that superimpose digital images on the real world, Google and Samsung are due to follow this fall, and OpenAI is planning a screenless speaker centered on ChatGPT for 2027.
A sort of “Tamagotchi” for its AI Muse
Mark Zuckerberg has finally unveiled “Muse Charm”, a small device to hang on a key ring, to talk to his agent without using his phone, which he plans to market in December. “If you don’t wear glasses, this will be by far the quickest way to talk to your Muse,” he assured.
Meta also announced the arrival of Meta Ray-Ban Display, its glasses with a screen integrated into the glass, in the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy and France, where they will be sold from 900 euros.
It also unveiled future virtual reality glasses weighing around a hundred grams, less than a fifth of the weight of its Quest 3 headset, expected in spring 2027 for $1,300. Mark Zuckerberg, however, announced that the group would now “build fewer virtual reality devices”.
