Mark Zuckerberg Says Smart Glasses Are the Future Now, Despite the Creeps

After a $77 billion disaster in his adventures creating the metaverse, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has laid out his new vision for the future: everyone wears AI smart glasses.

“Billions of people wear glasses or contacts for vision correction. And I think that we’re at a moment similar to when smartphones arrived, and it was clearly only a matter of time until all those flip phones became smartphones,” Zuckerberg said during Meta’s Q4 2025 earnings call on Wednesday. “It’s hard to imagine a world in several years where most glasses that people wear aren’t AI glasses.”

Meta’s smart glasses have been a ray of light that has come out of the Reality Labs division, which was created to focus on virtual reality worlds and which Zuckerberg ultimately renamed his entire company after. The newest glasses, the Meta Ray-Ban Displays, are so in-demand that the company had to pause international roll out so it can service U.S. customers.

TechCrunch reports that during the Q4 earnings call, Zuckerberg spoke effusively about the glasses, saying he believes they’re “some of the fastest growing consumer electronics in history.”

But Zuckerberg formally believed that people would be hanging out with their friends in avatar form in virtual rooms while donning large goggles in the real world.

Nevertheless, other tech giants have taken note of the success of Ray-Ban Meta glasses: both Google and Apple are expected to unveil smart glasses of their own in the near future. The latter has had its own problems with VR in the form of the Apple Vision Pro. OpenAI is also reportedly working on AI hardware — Sam Altman is hoping it will turn out better than the Humane AI Pin.

Glassholes

Meta Ray-Bans have one obvious privacy concern: people can record others clandestinely. Last week, Mashable published an article detailing some of the worst behavior that is currently proliferating on social media.

Although there is a red light that blinks when the glasses are recording, many who have fallen victim to them say they have no idea they were being filmed.

One woman named Oonagh from the U.K. tells the BBC she was filmed by a man without her knowledge and consent. The interaction of the man asking for her phone number was published to TikTok where it received at least one million views. Oonagh was sent the video and says she became panicked as she read the comments — many of which were abusive.

As many photographers are aware, filming another person in public without their consent is perfectly legal. It means people like Oonagh have no legal recourse. But it’s difficult to argue that this type of exploitative behavior against unsuspecting people for social media clout is ethically okay.

“I know it’s legal. I don’t care,” content creator Brad Podray tells Mashable. “That’s not the discussion. I think it’s weird and creepy, and it shows a very predatory mindset.”