And we’ll likely find out a lot more at Google I/O next week.
Smart glasses are hot right now, and Google is poised to turn that temperature up even further. In a very brief teaser on Friday, Google’s President of the Android Ecosystem, Sameer Samat, gave the tiniest of glimmers for what the company may have in store on the smart glasses front. At the end of Google’s I/O edition of its Android Show series, Samat can be seen very coyly taking out a pair of glasses and sliding them onto his face while proclaiming that Google will have “a few more really cool Android demos” in store for viewers who tune into I/O next week.
If we’re to read between the very obvious, billboard-sized lines, that means Google is going to show off some smart glasses—and soon. For me, personally, that’s very exciting, but I can think of one company that might not receive Google’s teaser so well. I’ll give you a hint: they own a little social media platform called Facebook. As nascent as smart glasses may be as a device category, they already have a clear poster child, and it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. As an owner of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, I can say for sure that, despite not having many competitors, the smart eyewear has earned the frontrunner title.
Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses are stylish, they take surprisingly nice pictures, and they have a voice assistant that is more adept than most (ahem, Siri). They also deliver shockingly good audio for phone calls and music playback, which makes them a perfect gadget for when you want to listen to something but you don’t want to wall yourself off with ANC earbuds or over-ear headphones. In my opinion, they’re the one device that you don’t think you need, but as soon as you try a pair, you’ll likely want them.
But as bullish as I am on Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses, I’m also fully aware that the field for smart glasses is entirely wide open. Meta, as I alluded to previously, has the benefit of being a big fish in a relatively small pond, but that arrangement is destined for a disruption, and that shakeup could come by the hands of several companies—Google included.
