You Won’t Be Able to Escape Smart Glasses in 2026

There are many words that have been used to describe Mark Zuckerberg, but “cool” hasn’t often been among them. He has made a noticeable effort to shift this perception over the last few years, swapping his trademark hoodies for boxy Amiri tees, and adding Cuban link chains, a broccoli cut, and a rotation of IYKYK watches from the likes of F.P. Journe and De Bethune to the mix, but—lest you were fooled by these signifiers of coolness—it feels less like a genuine vibe shift and more like he finally hired a stylist. It’s easy to see why he’d want to rebrand. With the gloss long worn off Facebook, his flagship creation, and after spending $70 billion dollars on a VR Metaverse that didn’t catch on, he now has staked his company’s future on convincing you that Meta’s new Ray-Ban AI glasses are cool. And despite all indications to the contrary, he might succeed.

“If AI glasses are going to go mainstream, 2026 will be the year that we start to see that,” says Sinead Bovell, a futurist and the founder of tech education company, WAYE. Meta introduced its first line of Ray-Ban AI Glasses in 2021, and has sold more than 2 million pairs since launching the second generation in 2023. By the end of 2026, the company plans to sell 3 million more while ramping up production to 10 million pairs annually. As hard as it is to imagine 10 million people—the combined populations of NYC and Philly—buying Meta AI Glasses every year, it may well come to pass. “The iPhone came out in 2007 and by 2011 BlackBerry was still the number-one smartphone,” says Bovell. “The iPhone wasn’t seen as a phone, it was seen as a toy. The exact same things that were said about it in 2008 are being said now about [smart] glasses.” Likewise, no one knew they needed an Apple Watch when the product launched in 2015, but the company has reportedly sold hundreds of millions of them since then.

A decade ago, most people’s idea of internet-enabled glasses began and ended with Google Glass, the tech giant’s 2012 foray into the genre, and one of the biggest tech flops of all time. Equipped with a camera, a heads-up display, and gesture controls, it promised to move much of your smartphone’s functionality to a headset that looked like something worn by an engineer on Deep Space Nine. The technology behind Google Glass was impressive, but its dorky looks coupled with the ick factor of middle-aged men walking around wearing cameras on their faces—these early adopters were quickly dubbed “Glassholes”—helped seal its fate.

Meta’s line of AI Glasses picks up where Google Glass left off, with the same basic idea and many of the same capabilities, including an HD camera, plus a Siri-like voice assistant. The biggest difference, obviously, is that instead of a geeky cyborgian headset, Meta’s glasses are disguised as a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers. As the signature eyewear of Miles Davis, Bob Dylan, and the chillest member of the emoji family, the Wayfarer solves the biggest problem of wearable tech by looking like a pair of archetypal cool guy shades (or prescription frames) rather than what it actually is. A series of slick ads starring Doja Cat, Teyana Taylor, and Chris Hemsworth—whose fees are part of the estimated $73 billion Meta spent on smart glasses in 2025—are helping to drive this point home. Still, like Zuckerberg 2.0, the vibes are slightly off. Wayfarers might be iconic, but it’s hard to imagine Jack Nicholson rolling up to the Oscars wearing a pair of Meta AI Glasses.

“I think these glasses are fucking dumb,” says Albert Muzquiz, a menswear content creator better known as @edgyalbert. As someone who earns a living by making videos, Muzquiz appreciates the utility of smart glasses in his line of work, but doesn’t envision a future in which they’d be considered a tasteful accessory. “When am I supposed to wear my Meta glasses, when I’m going for a walk? Because, like, that’s the one time in my life where there aren’t screens sending me notifications. I don’t think it makes a lot of sense for most people.”