- Mark Zuckerberg has spent many billions of dollars trying to build computers people will wear on their faces.
- It has yet to happen. But Zuckerberg says 2025 will be a pivotal year for that tech.
- His big hope: that AI-powered glasses — like the souped-up Ray-Bans Meta sells — become “the next computing platform.”
Tech giants have been trying to find a way to put a computer on your head — and then have people buy that computer — for years. So far, it hasn’t really caught on.
Now, Mark Zuckerberg says, we’re going to find out if people are really going to buy these things in meaningful numbers — or if the industry is going to have to wait even longer for the future to arrive.
“This will be a defining year that determines if we’re on a path towards many hundreds of millions, and eventually billions of AI glasses, and glasses being the next computing platform, like we’ve been talking about for some time — or if this is just going to be a longer grind,” the Meta CEO said during his company’s earnings call Wednesday.
Zuckerberg has seen some promising signs that he might have figured it out. Sales of Meta’s Ray-Ban augmented reality glasses, while modest compared to mainstream tech products, have been a pleasant surprise for the company — Zuckerberg called them a “real hit” on the company’s call.
And last fall, Meta showed off an impressive demo version of its Orion headset, a much more powerful computer that looks like oversized glasses; the company hopes to have one that’s ready for consumers to buy in the next few years.
On the other hand: Revenue for Meta’s Reality Labs unit, which sells the Ray Bans along with its more cumbersome Quest goggles, remained essentially flat over the last year. Sales of $1.08 billion in the fourth quarter of 2024 were up a mere 1.1% compared to the previous year.
So, it doesn’t look like there’s been a meaningful surge of people buying any of the devices Meta has been selling. In the meantime, Reality Labs — which also includes the company’s once-hyped metaverse projects — has lost more than $60 billion over five years.
What’s going to change about this year? Zuckerberg didn’t get into details, except that he thinks AI will make the glasses much more compelling for many more people.
And if it doesn’t happen this year, it’s going happen … eventually, he insists.
“There are a lot of people in the world who have glasses,” he said on Wednesday’s call. “It’s kind of hard for me to imagine that a decade or more from now, all the glasses aren’t going to basically be AI glasses, as well as a lot of people who don’t wear glasses today finding that to be a useful thing.”
