Welcome to Meta’s future, where everyone wears cameras

All around Meta's Menlo Park campus, cameras stared at me. I'm not talking about security cameras or my fellow reporters' DSLRs. I'm not even talking about smartphones. I mean Ray-Ban and Meta's smart glasses, which Meta hopes we'll all - one day, in some form - wear.

I visited Meta for this year's Connect conference, where just about every hardware product involved cameras. They're on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that got a software update, the new Quest 3S virtual reality headset, and Meta's prototype Orion AR glasses. Orion is what Meta calls a "time machine": a functioning example of what full-fledged AR could look like, years before it will be consumer-ready.

But on Meta's campus, at least, the Ray-Bans were already everywhere. It was a different kind of time machine: a glimpse into CEO Mark Zuckerberg's future world where glasses are the new phones.

I'm conflicted about it.

Meta really wants to put cameras on your face. The glasses, which follow 2021's Ray-Ban Stories, are apparently making inroads on that front, as Zuckerberg told The Verge sales are going "very well." They aren't full-fledged AR glasses since they have no screen to display information, though they're becoming more powerful with AI features. But they're perfect for what the whole Meta empire is built on: encouraging people to share their lives online. 

The glasses come in a variety of classic Ray-Ban styles, but for now, it's obvious users aren't just wearing glasses. As I wandered the campus, I spotted the telltale signs on person after person: two prominent circle cutouts at the edges of their glasses, one for a 12MP ultrawide camera and the other for an indicator light.

This light flashes when a user is taking photos and videos, and it's generally visible even in sunlight. In theory, that should have put my mind at ease: if the light wasn't on, I could trust nobody was capturing footage of me tucking into some lunch before my meetings.