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Meta has reportedly invested $3.5 billion in EssilorLuxottica, the eyewear firm that owns Ray-Ban and Oakley. The two corporations have been in partnership since 2020, collaborating on glasses that includes synthetic intelligence expertise.
Mark Zuckerberg’s firm now holds an virtually 3% stake within the producer, nameless sources instructed Bloomberg, and is contemplating rising it to five% with extra investments.
“This represents another step in Meta’s commitment to the smart-glasses category,” analysts from analysis agency Bernstein stated in a notice, seen by the publication.
Meta’s historical past with sensible glasses
Meta’s partnership with EssilorLuxottica started in 2019. The following 12 months, it launched Project Aria, a analysis initiative into non-commercial, AI-powered sensible glasses, introducing its first prototype, Aria Gen 1.
In 2021, Meta, then nonetheless Facebook, launched Ray-Ban Stories, its first client sensible glasses, which allowed customers to take heed to music, make calls, and seize photographs and brief movies; nonetheless, they lacked any augmented actuality capabilities.
In 2023, the corporate launched the second-generation Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, that includes a higher-resolution 12MP digicam, two further microphones, improved audio system, and deeper integration with Meta AI, the corporate’s in-house conversational AI assistant. Subsequent updates to Meta AI enabled real-time translation and multimodal interactions.
In 2024, Meta unveiled Project Aria Gen 2, designed particularly for educational and industrial researchers working in robotics, AR, contextual AI, and machine notion. Just final month, Meta and EssilorLuxottica launched a pair of Oakley sensible glasses designed for athletes, providing real-time sport-specific insights resembling wind pace for golfers and wave peak for surfers.
In January 2025, Bloomberg reported that Meta was getting ready its first pair of AR glasses, Artemis, for launch in 2027.
Meta’s racing towards Apple and Google
Meta will not be the one tech large coming into the AI eyewear market.
Apple plans to launch its personal sensible glasses by the tip of 2026, providing smartphone-like performance at eye degree and positioning them as direct rivals to the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses. It can also be reportedly growing chips for a separate pair of AR glasses that may overlay digital content material onto the true world, offering an immersive expertise.
Google can also be on the path, having lately partnered with Kering Eyewear, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster to develop AI-powered glasses that includes Android XR. It is trying to distance itself from Google Glass, the corporate’s ill-fated early try at client AR eyewear. The product was discontinued in 2015 as a result of widespread privateness considerations and a destructive public reception, leading to bans in varied settings.
Meta’s shifting focus from social media to AI
While Meta began as Facebook and retains an virtually too robust grip on the social media panorama, the corporate has been shifting its focus to AI since roughly 2013. It additionally cemented its dedication to digital actuality with its 2021 rebrand and continues to spend money on the house, pushed by Zuckerberg’s perception that headsets and the metaverse are the subsequent frontier in client expertise.
However, Meta has not seen a lot success with AI within the post-ChatGPT period, struggling to maintain tempo with OpenAI and Google. Its newest Llama fashions have underperformed, its AI chatbots have earned a seedy fame, and prime engineers have…
