Whereas Meta continues to construct for the subsequent section of digital connection within the metaverse, and concentrate on new AI-based bets for proper now, it’s additionally nonetheless establishing its full roadmap for AR, and wearables that can increase your worldview with digital components.
Which it claims can also be part of its broader metaverse imaginative and prescient. However actually, the metaverse is VR, and AR is a complete totally different factor, regardless of how Meta tries to conflate the 2, within the hopes of claiming general tech sector management.
Meta’s massive hope in AR is its AR glasses, that are at present scheduled for launch in 2027. However with the intention to acclimatize the marketplace for that subsequent stage, it’s already launched its first glasses mannequin, in Ray Ban Tales, that are Meta’s try and create a trendy digital machine, which additionally offers some connective performance.
However to date, they haven’t been a success.
In response to a brand new report from The Verge, over 90% of Ray Ban Tales customers have stopped utilizing the machine since shopping for the glasses.
As per The Verge:
“Inner firm paperwork reveal that round 27,000 of the 300,000 models reportedly bought between September 2021 and February 2023 are nonetheless being often used every month. Final April, Meta was reported to have bought simply 120,000 pairs of the Ray-Ban Tales – lower than half its 300,000 purpose at the moment.”
So of the 300,000 pairs bought, solely a fraction are nonetheless seeing common use, with the restricted characteristic set, which lets you take photos, hearken to music, reply cellphone calls, and many others., seemingly not catching on with a large viewers.
Which isn’t shocking. Again in 2016, Snapchat launched the primary iteration of its Spectacles camera-equipped sun shades, that are functionally similar to Meta’s Ray Ban Tales machine.
And nobody cared.
Properly, that’s not solely appropriate. Snap did see a rush of early gross sales hype, which led to it shifting over 150k models. But it surely additionally overestimated demand, leaving it with “hundreds of thousands” of unsold Spectacles sitting in warehouses a yr after launch.
That preliminary miscalculation ended up costing Snap over $40 million in losses, which means that round 300k Spectacles had been by no means bought in that preliminary manufacturing run.
But Snap is still selling them, and it’s nonetheless sticking with the idea, which seemingly factors to a future iteration of the glasses that will probably be totally AR-equipped, although Snap has reportedly been compelled to rethink some its AR plans as a consequence of rising prices, and decrease advert consumption.
Meta has additionally scaled again its AR timeline, each via cost-cutting and manufacturing missteps, with its acquisition of microLED maker Plessey failing to ship the advance that it hoped for its AR machine.
But each Snap and Meta do have practical variations of their AR glasses in testing, that are already within the fingers of exterior customers for preliminary experiments.
They’re not polished but, and so they’re not prepared for the subsequent degree of full business availability. However each corporations are engaged on the subsequent stage, which is able to put digital overlays onto your real-world view.
As such, it’s exhausting to know what to remove from the preliminary response to Ray Ban Tales.
I imply, it’s an fascinating mission, nevertheless it additionally appears unlikely that Meta would count on enormous gross sales from this primary iteration of the machine, which, on steadiness, is just not a serious practical leap over others out there.
Technically, they’re much more superior, however when it comes to what you may really do with them, they’re not approach past what Spectacles has lengthy offered. So I don’t know that Meta was actually attempting to push these as a serious providing, or whether or not this was at all times going to be simply the primary minor step in an extended AR growth pipeline.
It looks as if Meta actually wanted to construct a manufacturing pipeline, and set up partnerships for the long run, and Ray Ban Tales is simply the early precursor to what comes subsequent.
Certainly, The Verge additionally notes that, regardless of the losses, Meta’s nonetheless planning to launch a second-gen model of Ray Ban Tales subsequent yr, because it continues to maneuver in direction of the AR future.
So whereas its preliminary foray into digitally-equipped glasses hasn’t caught on, possibly Meta sees this as a crucial stepping stone for that subsequent stage.
