Meta and the Battle for Smart Glasses | Prize on the Eyes | 1

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0:21It's 2025 in Nairobi, Kenya. A data labeler clocks in for his shift and lets out a heavy sigh. He does not want to be here this morning. He walks into a large room lined with rows of workers tapping away at computer terminals. He logs in, opens a program, and starts to watch a woman get undressed. She seems totally unaware that anyone might be viewing her. But this data worker can see everything, because the video is being streamed live from a pair of metaglasses sitting on her nightstand a continent away. The Kenyan man works for a data labeling company called Sama, a corporation that supplies the human labor behind the so-called autonomous machine learning at the heart of AI.

1:15Every day in 10-hour shifts, his job is to review unfiltered video content and label what he sees by drawing bounding boxes around the images on the screen. He draws one box around a cluster of pixels and labels it a lamp. He draws another box and labels that a bookcase. He's training the AI to recognize everyday items so the algorithm can get better at doing it in the future. The labeling work is low-paid and repetitive, but that isn't the worst part. Because this man doesn't just see lamps in bookcases. He often finds himself reviewing sensitive or graphic video content, like the woman undressing.

2:01He sees strangers' credit card numbers. He sees people having sex. He even sees crimes being committed, all of it captured in first-person video, streamed by the people who have no idea they're broadcasting their lives to the cloud, much less that it's being reviewed by a human. And more and more of this footage now seems to be coming from one device, Meta's Ray-Ban glasses. You might know them as Meta smart glasses or Meta AI glasses. They have thick black frames equipped with a tiny built-in camera and a voice-enabled AI assistant that can describe what you're seeing, play your favorite music, and more.

2:44This wearable technology is designed to be seamless, painless, and normal. Meta designed its Ray-Bans to blend into the background and become part of your daily life. And in that way, it's succeeded where almost every other smart glasses product has failed. Meta's Ray-Bans are the first tech-enabled eyewear to truly break through in the consumer market. But in going mainstream, Meta has also created something troubling, a tool that may be enabling mass surveillance, built by one of the world's most notorious data brokers. So, what happens next?

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4:31From Audible Originals, I'm David Brown, and this is Business Wars.

4:59Smart glasses with superhuman abilities have been part of the public's imagination for generations. Think of those X-ray specs a kid in the 1950s could order from the back pages of a comic book. And they've been an obsession of the big tech companies since at least the early 2010s. But getting smart glasses right? That's proven surprisingly hard. The most notorious example was Google Glass, a product that was massively overhyped before going very wrong. Glass crashed and burned so spectacularly that some believe it set the entire category back by a half a decade. After that flame-out, tech giants like Google, Apple, and Meta seemed to pivot.

5:43They focused their hardware efforts on high-priced, high-tech virtual reality headsets designed for gaming, entertainment, and, of course, the metaverse. But now, the metaverse has collapsed, and smart glasses have made a comeback. Not by doing more, but by doing less. The proof is in the numbers. Sales of Meta Ray-Bans have more than tripled in a single year. In 2025 alone, Meta sold 8 million pairs. People seem to actually want these devices. And in cracking that code, Meta has finally solved a puzzle that eluded its fiercest competitors and its own research division for more than a decade. Now that smart glasses are everywhere, the competition isn't far behind.

6:31And neither are the questions, urgent, uncomfortable ones, about the mandatory sharing of user data to the cloud, the exploitation of human workers in the global South, and government overreach, including reports about ICE agents using the glasses illegally. So if smart glasses are really here to stay, the question becomes, is that a good thing? This is Episode 1, Prize on the Eyes.

7:07It's 2011 and an overcast day on the Stanford campus in Palo Alto, California. Students John Rodriguez and Eric Miller stand on an elevated walkway and nod to their cameraman to start recording. They're making a pitch video, hoping to get their startup, Vergence Labs, into a prestigious Stanford incubator called StartX. Acceptance into this accelerator can unlock everything for young founders. Mentorship, buzz, and funding for whatever they can dream up. Miller speaks to the camera first. He's got sandy hair, a round boyish face, and black framed glasses. In his hands, he's holding a bulky black visor with a face shield and several wires sticking out.

7:51It looks like a cross between a welder's mask and Darth Vader's helmet. This is a prototype of a wearable computer that we built that has immersive hemispherical optics, and it's a running Android. And when you look through it, it does facial recognition. Miller passes the helmet to Rodriguez, who has a long face, unruly black hair, and a wide grin when he gets excited. Right, so the prototype software that I've written is, first of all, really awesome. So to redefine the future of face-to-face interaction, The software that I've written talks to, in real time, talks to a cloud service to identify the person that I'm interacting with based on my Facebook friends.

8:34You heard that right. Miller and Rodriguez are pitching facial recognition goggles in 2011, long before anyone had heard of Meta Ray-Bans or Google Glass. Their software leverages Facebook's existing facial recognition tech, which has been around since 2010, helping users quickly tag their friends in photos. But their visor promises to bring this facial recognition into real-world interactions, delivering a live augmented reality experience. It sounds and looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. But on the bright side, it's unlikely that you'd miss someone coming at you with a giant visor on their face.

9:16So at least it won't be happening in secret. But Miller and Rodriguez aren't done. Next, they talk about the second prototype they're developing, A product that isn't immediately visible. That is, until Miller removes the simple black-framed glasses he's been wearing and holds them up to the camera, showing off the hidden tech inside. And these glasses have a video recording device in them and a little video processing board with an SD card and a USB slot plug-in and recharge your computer. And so these glasses can be used to capture your experience and capture your first-person point of view perspective.

9:55and then share it socially online. Miller and Rodriguez called this product their social video glasses. The idea behind these glasses is simple. They record whatever you're seeing, either for posterity or to live stream on your social feed without you ever needing to pick up your smartphone or a GoPro. The inventors envisioned these low-key glasses folding seamlessly into everyday life. They may not realize it yet, But Miller and Rodriguez's two distinct prototypes, the helmet and the glasses, foreshadow the two diverging paths that will define tech-enabled wearables for the next decade. One gives you high-tech, high-output features.

10:39It's essentially a computer system strapped to your head. The other? Simpler, less ambitious tech that doesn't look like tech at all. One's high-profile. One's low-profile. One's maximalist. The other is minimalist. Question is, which one will be the more lucrative path forward? Rodriguez and Miller's pitch works. Virgin's Labs gets selected for the Stanford Incubator, class of 2012. Unfortunately, acceptance does not lead to easy funding for their prototypes. Miller, the CEO, finds it hard to raise money for wearables because in late 2011, most VCs are focused on mobile apps like Uber, WhatsApp, or Instagram.

11:25No one really wants to bet on a high-tech Hellman. So instead, Miller and Rodriguez focus on their more modest prototype, the glasses. Without investor backing, Virgin's Labs turns to crowdfunding. They post their smart glasses, which they call Epiphany Eyewear, to the Indiegogo platform. And to their delight, it works. Epiphany Eyewear manages to raise$70 ,000 to develop the glasses for commercial sale. People seem genuinely interested in the product, and it's easy to see why. The glasses, well, they look almost exactly like a pair of black Ray-Bans. The camera's so well hidden at the top right corner, you barely notice it's there, which makes a compelling use case for everyday people.

12:14The crowdfunding success finally earns Vergence Labs some attention from the VC crowd, including from Adam Draper, son of notable VC Tim Draper, and from Charlie Cheever, co-founder of the online platform Quora. When these guys make moves, Silicon Valley notices. Within a year, Vergence is taking pre-orders on their website. The site boasts a hype video on its homepage, featuring high-profile tech writers and Silicon Valley execs trying on the glasses and saying nice things. And at 29 seconds in, a familiar face pops up. It's a pale white man with curly light brown hair grinning at the camera as he holds the Epiphany glasses in his hands.

12:58The caption reads, Awesome! This is awesome! And it's attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. At this time, getting an endorsement from Zuck is like receiving a blessing from the Pope. 28-year-old Zuckerberg is the most powerful social media mogul in the world. Facebook is just eight years old, with annualized revenue of over a billion dollars, and a recent IPO that raised$16 billion. The Hollywood movie immortalizing Facebook's founding was recently nominated for eight Oscars. Zuckerberg is on top of the world. and moving fast, having just bought Instagram for$1 billion in what will become a signature move for him.

13:44When you see competition, buy it. Now, if you're wondering how Vergence Labs got their product into Zuck's hands, they had their methods. The early Vergence team includes a couple of former Facebook employees, including their investor, Charlie Cheever. Co-founder John Rodriguez briefly interned at Facebook before quitting to build Vergence full-time. And Eric Miller? Well, he used to stalk the Facebook parking lot hoping to catch Zuckerberg and pitch him on the way to his car. But despite all of these connections, Zuckerberg doesn't seem to give epiphany eyewear much thought, at least not beyond giving the glasses a hasty thumbs up in a photo.

14:26He's got bigger fish to fry, like investing in Facebook's algorithmic news feed and in social gaming like FarmVille, and collecting data from Facebook's more than one billion global users. So it's entirely possible he forgot all about these social video glasses that look like classic black-framed Ray-Bans. On the other hand, it's also entirely possible he filed them away in the back of his mind as an idea to come back to later.

15:04It's February 2012 in Mountain View, California, and Google co-founder Sergey Brin is agitated. He stalks through the hallways of Google X, the top-secret research and development lab affectionately known as the company's moonshot factory. Or at least, Google X used to be top-secret, until reporters from the New York Times blew its cover. A few months ago, the Times ran a feature on Google X after speaking with a dozen mostly unnamed employees about the type of moonshot projects they were working on. The list included far-out, purely theoretical concepts like space elevators that could send cargo to a space station without a rocket.

15:45But it also included projects a lot closer to fruition, like the fleet of driverless cars that will one day become Google's Waymo. You might think Bren would be pleased. The article paints Google as a relentlessly innovative and future-focused company. But for Bren, the piece also put an unspoken clock on Google X. Now that word is out, he feels pressure to produce something newsworthy and amazing. His co-founder, Larry Page, is laser-focused on driverless cars. But Bren, he's obsessed with a different project. A pair of tech-enabled smart glasses that will free us from the bending, craning posture of constantly looking down at our phones.

16:31These smart glasses would do much more than just record video. They would take pictures, use voice commands, search, and essentially bring the functionality of a smartphone up into the user's field of vision using what's known as a head-up display. Head-up displays were first developed in the 1940s to help fighter pilots see their control panels without having to look away from the sky. Now, Bren wants to bring this idea to anyone who's ever found themselves bent down over a screen instead of engaging with the world in front of them. Bren wants to move beyond just recording. His ideal glasses would transform every day into an augmented reality or AR experience.

17:14You could use the glasses to interrogate your surroundings in real time, Google them, process them, or just stream them to a friend, like Terminator vision from the movies, only less focused on apprehending John Connor. In a way, this is what the Virgin's Labs guys from Stanford originally envisioned, before their funding challenges made them scale things back. Remember that facial recognition helmet? That was augmented reality. If Vergence had been fully funded right away, they would have tried to add those elements to their smart glasses, but they had to put their AR dreams aside. Google, on the other hand, has had no such problems.

17:58It has moonshot money. Anything anyone wants to dream up, it can at least try to create. Delivering an AR future becomes Wren's passion project. Let Larry Page have his driverless cars. He wants these glasses. Bryn assembles a wearables super squad, hiring scientists who are expert in body-worn computers. Initially, the wearables team is given the luxury of working at the pace of discovery with no hard deadlines. But after the New York Times piece exposes Google X, that changes. Bryn desperately wants to produce something incredible. He wants to bring these AR glasses to market and stun the world, whether or not they're ready for their close-up.

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21:04It's June 2012 in San Francisco. The Moscone Center is packed. Google's I.O. Conference, the company's annual conference for developers, is in full swing. And backstage, Sergey Brin is pacing. In his black pants and black long-sleeved tee, he could pass for a stagehand, except for the pair of charcoal-colored asymmetric glasses balanced on his nose. As he walks back and forth, he waits for his cue, and then he hears it. Google's VP of engineering says the words, New Features. Bren bounds on stage and interrupts, even though this interruption is something they've rehearsed many times. We've got something pretty special for you.

21:46It's a little bit time-sensitive, so I apologize for interrupting. You've seen some really compelling demos here. They were slick. They were robust. This is going to be nothing like that. This can go wrong in about 500 different ways. So tell me now, who wants to see a demo of glass?

22:08But the uncertainty in Bryn's voice isn't entirely an act. As he speaks, he knows that a blimp full of skydivers is circling about a mile over their heads. He's keeping contact with them through his Google Glass headset, which communicates with their headsets. A live stream appears on the screen behind Brynn, the skydivers and their aircraft broadcasting live to the stage. And they keep broadcasting, even as they jump into the open air. The audience watches in amazement as the skydivers get closer and closer to the ground, broadcasting their POV through their glasses. The effect makes the viewers also feel like they're plunging toward the earth.

22:51When the divers land safely on the Moscone Center roof, their cameras keep going. The audience watches as the divers rappel down the side of the building, hop on some bikes and pedal triumphantly into the theater before embracing Brynn on stage. Google's strange asymmetric glasses captured every second of it. The demo is a success, and Brynn can finally breathe a sigh of relief. But that feeling doesn't last for long. Debuting Google Glass with a skydiving stunt was a masterclass in generating excitement. Because the Google I.O. conference isn't just for developers, it's also for the press. And sure enough, a wave of breathless coverage follows, recounting every heart-stopping moment of the demo.

23:43But on the heels of that coverage, Brin and his team face a real challenge. Glass isn't ready for consumer sale. Not even close. Remember, Brin fast-tracked Glass through the Google X lab. He was feeling pressure to bring something astonishing to market. Something that could perhaps make him the next Steve Jobs. But Glass still has a ton of kinks to work out on both the hardware and software side. And that's before you even get into the challenge of mass production. Google tries to manage expectations. It warns that Glass likely won't be in retail stores for at least another two years. But it also provides a tantalizing caveat.

24:27Coming much sooner. By the following spring, Google plans to release what it's calling the Explorer version of Glass. The price is a cool$1 ,500, and it's only available to industry insiders, VIPs, and members of the elite tech press. These so-called explorers can sample the goods ahead of everybody else, as long as they're willing to pay. There's a reason Bryn decides to roll the product out this way. He strongly believes in a core tenet of software development called the minimum viable product. That's the idea that getting product into your customers' hands early, even if it's imperfect, is the fastest way to improve it.

25:12Real users will show you which features they care about, which ones they struggle with, which ones they don't need at all. This prevents you from developing your product in a vacuum where you run the risk of putting your time, energy, and capital in all the wrong places. Of course, the minimum viable product strategy gets trickier when you're talking about software and hardware together. And glass is both. With software, it's easy to push out patches overnight and fix bugs along the way. With hardware, a bug in the form factor or the physical material is much harder to fix. Actually, you know what, I'll take this proposition a step further and say the minimum viable product idea doesn't have a winning track record when it comes to expensive hardware, much less hardware worn on the face.

26:02Pretty unforgiving place for mistakes. This much is certain, however. If your early users feel like beta testers paying premium prices for the privilege, well, resentment can kick in and spread fast. What works for apps can backfire pretty badly for physical products. Bren figures the Explorers program is a way for Google to have its cake and eat it too. If it only rolls out glass to select people, repairing any hardware issues should be more manageable. And since the Explorers know they're getting the earliest version, they won't be so upset if something goes wrong. These folks are the early adopters, the people who get excited about trying the latest gadget and testing its limits.

26:47Even the name explorer's gestures at diving into the unknown, like those skydivers getting ready to land on a roof. The Explorer's program also lets Google stay exclusive. Because so few will be available, demand will be sky high. Bryn's hope is that glass will become as coveted as the next iPhone, precisely because it will be so hard to get. And while Bryn is busy making glass the most talked-about gadget in Silicon Valley, a much smaller team is watching all of this very carefully and wondering if they might be sitting on something Bryn doesn't have.

27:33It's March 2014 in downtown Los Angeles, a dense, gritty section of the city. In the cramped, overcrowded offices of Virgin's Labs, the mood is tense. The air smells like cooking oil from the Indian restaurant on the building's first floor, and the constant wail of sirens from the police precinct across the street keeps interrupting their work. It's been around 18 months since their crowdfunding campaign put Virgin's Labs on the map, But the company can still only afford to employ about 10 people. CEO Eric Miller has been pushing everyone to the limit, trying to get their sole product, Epiphany eyewear, off the ground.