Hang up your handsets

Mark Zuckerberg is right, argues tech commentator, Matt Muir, smart glasses are coming for all of us

Meta’s website claims its smart glasses help users ‘Own the moment, hands-free’. Flickr: sndrv

The dream of ‘smart glasses’ died its first death on April 28th 2013, when the US technology evangelist, influencer and ‘personality’, Robert Scoble, shared a photograph he’d taken of himself, in the shower, all pink and sudsy. Scoble – who is famous for adopting all and every technological advance with wild fervour – had previously promised that he would never take off his glasses and the shower pic was offered as proof. Google Glass, who had released the product some months previously, never really recovered from the stench of uncool that Scoble bestowed upon them, and production of the product ceased three years later in January 2015.

But that was merely a single battle in a technological war – smart glasses retreated but they’ve never really gone away. Although, admittedly, they’ve never really quite taken off either. Since 2016, Snap (the parent company of the teen messaging app Snapchat) has sold several iterations of branded sunglasses that can also shoot photos and videos, which can be uploaded to social media; these tended to be limited edition drops and were never intended as mass-adoption devices. In short they were a bit of a PR stunt.

However, there is a new frontier, the big beasts of Silicon Valley are starting to bet big on ocular devices once more.