Mark Zuckerberg recently predicted that smartphones will no longer be the king of personal tech, sharing that devices like smart glasses will likely take over as the predominant wearable device of the everyday person.
The Meta CEO has been pushing the smart glasses agenda for years, touting that the AI-infused technology is able to take pictures and make calls hands-free, translate in real time, and provide instant information about a person’s immediate environment.
The new frontier
“I think the trend in computing is to become more ubiquitous, more natural, more social,” Mark said in an interview. “So you want to be able to interact with the people around you, and I think that’s probably going to be the next major platform after phones.”
He later added at Meta’s annual Connect event that smart glasses are the new frontier in tech thanks to their hands-free capabilities and AI updates. “I think that it’s pretty easy to wrap your head around [the idea that] there are already one to two billion people who wear glasses on a daily basis,” he said at the event.
“Just like everyone who upgraded to smartphones, I think everyone who has glasses is pretty quickly going to upgrade to smart glasses over the next decade. And then I think it’s going to start being really valuable, and a lot of other people who aren’t wearing glasses today are going to end up wearing them, too.”
© NurPhoto via Getty ImagesThe Facebook co-founder said that the smart glasses will allow the tech world to move forward after languishing with smartphones for decades.
“On the one hand, [the iPhone has] been great, because now pretty much everyone in the world has a phone, and that’s kind of what enables pretty amazing things,” he explained on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast.
“But on the other hand…they have used that platform to put in place a lot of rules that I think feel arbitrary and [I] feel like they haven’t really invented anything great in a while. It’s like Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, and now they’re just kind of sitting on it 20 years later.”
Tech race
© dpa/picture alliance via Getty IMark and his Meta team released a line of smart glasses with Ray-Ban in 2021 to moderate success, and plan to expand on this. The Ray-Ban glasses feature a five-megapixel camera, two speakers and three microphones, and are mere prototypes compared to what Meta has planned.
The company bought a minority stake worth $3.5 billion in the world’s largest eyewear manufacturer, EssilorLuxottica, proving their commitment to pushing the technology forward.
Supernova 2 is just one of their projects, which is designed for cyclists and athletes and is inspired by Oakley’s Sphaera eyewear.
© AFP via Getty ImagesThey are also working on Hypernova, which will integrate a small screen where users can see notifications and messages. Apple is reportedly working on its own AI-enhanced smart glasses, with Google and Samsung not far behind.
Despite initial success in the world of smart glasses, Mark reiterated the importance of maintaining perspective as the technology begins to take off.
“You’re never as good as they say when you’re up, and you’re never as bad as they say when you’re down,” he said in an interview.
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