Remember when the company once called Facebook tried to convince the world to spend $US300 on a pair of camera-equipped Ray-Bans capable of snapping photos of people while they weren’t looking? Neither did we, really, but that hasn’t stopped Meta from moving forward with a pricey multi-year plan to roll out new generations of the device. The only problem: nobody seems to want them.
Meta documents cited in a recent Wall Street Journal story show that just 10% of customers who purchased Ray Ban Stories still actively use them. The company has reportedly sold 300,000 pairs of the shades as of this February but only recorded around 27,000 monthly active users. Around 13% of those customers reportedly returned their devices, too.
Per the Journal, the document highlights some of the most common reasons cited for poor user experience, which include battery life issues, connectivity problems, difficulty importing media, poor sound quality on podcasts, and buggy voice commands.
“We’ll also need to better understand why users stop using their glasses, how to ensure we are encouraging new feature adoption, and ultimately how to keep our users engaged and retained,” the document reads, according to The Journal.
In theory, the spy glasses are supposed to let users snap photos and video with an equipped 5-megapixel lens embedded in the frames and listen to audio or take calls via a tiny pair of speakers. Meta partnered with EssilorLuxottica to design the glasses to appear almost indistinguishable from Ray Bans one might see covered in sand at the beach or bobbing up and down festival crowds. To assuage privacy concerns, a faint white light appears on the top corner of the devices to indicate they are recording video. You could just cover that up with a piece of tape, but a Meta product manager once said that would violate the glasses’ terms of service. Meta did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment.
Meta Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth, who led Ray Ban Stories development, previously told The Verge the first model was intended to “lay the groundwork in the minds of consumers,” for future products in the same vein. The documents suggest Meta is moving forward with that plan in spite of the pathetic usage stats and intends to release a second version either in the fall or next spring. All of this in line with Meta’s grand vision of creating “the next era of human-computer interaction,” brimming with augmented reality-equipped glasses, wearables, and even sci-fi neural inputs.
For now though, Ray Ban Stories are just relatively expensive hunks of plastics capable of taking pretty crappy photos. And anyone hoping Metai may have figured out how to add AR to glasses without burning users’ eyeballs will be sorely disappointed. The next version, according to the documents cited by the Journal, won’t have notable AR features. Still, Meta’s CTO believes it’s just a matter of time before the devices catch on.
“I think in 10 years it’ll be like, ‘Of course. Why don’t your glasses take pictures? That’s just weird,’” Bosworth previously said on his podcast. “It really has that opportunity to turn the corner on that and move things forward.”
Meta is burning through money to make its vision a reality. Reality Labs, the division responsible for creating the devices and other metaverse adjacent products, has reported an operating loss of nearly $8 billion in the first half of 2023. The division has reportedly lost $21 billion since the beginning of 2022. In that time, the company has laid off around 21,000 people and ushered in a “year of efficiency.” That’s a whole lot of cash and livelihoods disrupted for 10% of customers using a device.
To Meta’s credit, the company used a similar tactic of selling its early Quest headsets at a substantial loss in order to grow interest in the market. In that case, the strategy worked. Meta emerged as the undisputed VR king. Interest in VR for gaming and fitness is higher than ever and studies repeatedly show Meta absolutely dominating overall market share. So, in the immortal words of Field of Dreams, “if you build it, [they] will come.”
With sunglasses, Mark Zuckerberg faces more challenges. Snap has its own AR-enabled chunky glasses, as do a handful of other competitors. Apple, which recently released its much anticipated ski-goggle-sized Apple Vision Pro mixed-reality goggles hasn’t publicly said it’s working on smaller glasses but has filed patents hinting at it. So, it appears the industry eventually will bring more of these devices to market whether users really want them or not.