The AI glasses race is heating up

0:00You all recently announced that you're pausing the international rollout. What was the reason for that? Demand has exceeded expectations. For a brand new product, brand new category, it was really hard for us to predict. We're selling them as fast as we make them right now. Revenge of the glass holes? At CES 2026, smart glasses are everywhere, trying to do everything. And today we have the perfect guest to talk about it. Meta's VP of wearables, Alex Himmel, the company with the hottest glasses on their hands out of just about anybody in the tech landscape. This week, Meta announced Neural Band powered handwriting on any surface.

0:34And they even paused their international rollout since they can't keep up with demand for their new display glasses. This week, we get into it all. Let's do it. I just declined a spam phone call that was coming in about a second ago while we were talking. You did? Came in the glasses, used my EMG band to swipe. Did you notice him doing that, Alex? Nope. Because I'm present with you guys. And you're connected. And I'm connected.

1:00Alex we are back at CES I guess you're here a lot more often than I am these days I haven't been in several years now a lot more robots, a lot more AI no more booth babes but a lot kind of feels the same in like a comforting way I like being back in tech media world rubbing shoulders with a lot of old friends from The Verge and otherwise and uh taking in the smells taking in the many interesting smells uh throughout las vegas yeah we got to do a little show floor walk yesterday and uh the smell was it was just insane for me i don't know i just can't get over it yeah i mean you combine tech bros with nathan's hot dogs and very old bathrooms and uh it's not not the most pleasant place to be yeah we need tech for that, I think.

1:52Yeah. I loved seeing that thing that you did a video for with the verge, the VR treadmill thing. And it looked exactly the same. Yeah. That was a highlight. Some things never changed like VR treadmills. Yeah. Other things do like automated AI lawnmowers. Oh man. Uh, how are you, uh, liking, yeah, Vegas overall. I mean, it's been, you're, you're leaving today. so I'm here all week because I hate myself um but you're you're in and out and which I think is the way to do it I think I think coming to Vegas and staying for as long as I am is is not uh advisable yeah uh not great for my sinuses fortunately I came armed with uh a bandolier of simply saline nasal spray so I'm doing just fine yeah and um I always forget I I mean, I always feel like Vegas is just massive, big Americana, giant Mondo burgers that weigh five pounds.

2:50But you wouldn't expect the food to be as good as it is here. We had a great dinner. I'm always impressed, yeah. A great dinner last night at the Wynn with Producer Dave, which was nice to meet Producer Dave in person. And, yeah, the food in Vegas is good. Well, what's your favorite part about being here? Playing poker. How do you remember anything you hear from anyone when everybody is drinking for a week straight? Well, this is so we were talking with a founder of an AI wearable the other day, and I need something that I can just quickly talk into because I'm the guy who like immediately after an interaction at a happy hour goes over to his phone and like starts typing what I need to remember.

3:28So I have a scratch pad, a running CS scratch pad of juicy tips, remember to connect so and so. Literally just wrote one just now. So yeah, it's only decipherable by me. It's your unique shorthand. And maybe AGI will be able to decipher it one day, but I can guarantee you that no AI would look at my scratch pad from Vegas and know what to do with it. Yeah, as we talk about with Alex or just having a look around, it for better or worse seems very clear that the future is very much on the record. Yeah. Everybody is wearing an AI pin. Like I saw a guy wearing a Plod little AI note-taking pin. I don't know how to know if it's on or not.

4:16There's glasses. There's phones, obviously. I guess we just have to be careful with all the locker room talk that usually pervades CES. Do we think Plod uses Cloud? I sure hope so. That's the ultimate crossover event of the millennium, I think. Yeah. Well, we are here in person. I want to shout out Farsight, who gave us this room that we are recording in right now. Shout out to them. It's fun to do these live shows. We want to do more of them this year. I think we had a good experience last year with Google and Harvey from Winston from Harvey. So yeah, this is fun. And we've got Alex Himel on, as we said in the intro, who runs wearables for Meta.

4:59and, you know, there are so many knockoffs of what they're trying to do here. I mean, literally we saw like four in one little corner of the showroom floor yesterday and he's a good guest, I think, to actually talk about, you know, what's going on in this space because it is seemingly getting hot, I guess. I was thinking how funny it is that it's finally happening. I mean, this has been one of those things that has been kind of happening for 10 years now. I mean, back when I was at The Verge, I mean, I remember trying out the original Google Glass. And the use cases from that product are like very literally the same use cases that are in AI glasses today.

5:43It can just do it a little bit better with a higher fidelity screen, better design, better battery life, obviously. But yeah, I mean, tried Google Glass, worked on Spectacles at Snap. those have been evolving and pivoting and changing for 10 years. It's definitely, it has to be a bit of an ego bruise, I would say for both Google and Snap, like as very, very early investors in this technology to see Meta come in and kind of swoop in and make the thing happen. But I mean, as we talk about on the pod, I mean, really, in my view, the master stroke in a lot of ways was bringing in Ray-Ban and now Oakley.

6:21And as Alex tells us, they actually brought interesting constraints into the equation that a tech company wouldn't necessarily think about to ensure that their brand is represented well. And, you know, conversely, that people would actually want to wear the things. And now they can't make enough of them. Yeah. Well, on your Google and Snap point, the timing is interesting for this conversation because both of them are coming back with glasses this year. So Snap will have the consumer Spectacles relaunched this year. They're very optimistic about it. I was catching up with some of them the other day.

6:59That's coming. Google is going to relaunch Glass, and I think call it Glass. I mean, they should. They should. Yeah, I think they think that enough time has passed. Retake Glasshole. Time has healed all wounds. But at the same time, the bar for calling it that and doing it again is so high. Because if you fail again, it's like, do you wait 20 years now to try again? But yeah, I mean, Meta's in the lead right now. It's a fast growing, but still relatively small category. It's like low, I think, single digit millions units a year now. But that's, I mean, it's a lot more than it was. And everyone is seeing that early growth and going, oh, we're going to like get back into this.

7:35I did not think that AI was going to be the thing that made Glass's work. I guess it's just one of those things where like you add up all the use cases and at some point it becomes interesting. You know, I think what is crazy, though, is that between Meta, Google and Snap, they all actually have different like input modalities. You know, like Meta is focusing on the neural band and the handwriting. Snap, I think, is focused on more like using your hands to pluck things out of the air, more similar to to Apple Vision Pro. I'm not sure if we know what modality Google is going to. I imagine it will be hand tracking and voice.

8:16I mean, that's the thing that it has that no one else has is the band and you got to try it for the first time yesterday The haptics the whole experience. It's very unique. Yeah Yeah, I mean to be totally honest going beyond how impressive it is It definitely wasn't perfect which of course like it's not perfect. It also wasn't trained for you So you were using Mina's and you have to like program it to you have to do like an initial onboarding Oh interesting. Oh, so at that point like what level of accuracy? So when I did it and they onboarded me properly, it was insanely accurate. Yeah. Yeah. I don't feel a lot of conviction that that is necessarily the thing.

9:01But I could be wrong. It's going to be mind control. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, are you going to do anything else in Vegas before you leave? You've got a flight in a few hours. Are you going to try to hit some slots? I played the Genghis Khan slots last night, lost$3 over the course of three minutes, and then I retired. I'm not much of a gambler, for better or for worse. Probably for better. I mean, it's funny. I expected it to be more of like a Candy Crush type experience where they get you some early wins so that you're hooked, and then they ramp down the odds as you get more hooked. But I don't think they're doing any of that stuff.

9:46You know what I'm saying? Like I was like, oh, I figured that the predatoriness of it would be as bad as all of the other predatory products that we use these days, but it's still beautifully stuck in the past of just like hit the button, that's it. Yeah, I mean the predatory aspect is you can smoke indoors and get free drinks. And get fucking massages. And massages. That was the funniest thing. So we're watching Alex play poker with all the high rollers last night. And dudes are in the corner getting body massages, getting ready to, I don't know, get back on the table. No, you do that while you play.

10:24Well, some of them were doing it while playing. And that's peak civilization right there. Vegas is just consumerism and capitalism to the extreme. I love it. Mm-hmm. That's what makes it, I think, even more mystifying that it isn't really leveraging a lot of the stuff that we now know is the best at hooking people. It's still old-fashioned in that way. Yeah. Well, the only thing besides poker is all the 90s rappers who are performing this week. That's what I'm looking forward to. So I'll be seeing Public Enemy tonight at the Yahoo party. and Snoop Dogg was at your former employer's party the other day and Gwen Stefani last night at Lenovo, right?

11:10It's nothing better. Speaking of my former employer, there's a story that I probably shouldn't say, but I will because it was so funny. We were here for the Snapchat sales offsite years ago. Oh, yeah. And this was back when geofilters were super popping. Do you remember this? Yeah. And so the bar restaurant nightclub that we rented out, at least part of it, for the big snap party, they had a geofilter, you know, and I think they had bought it. And there was an employee who couldn't get on stage with some of the other employees that were already on stage trying to use their privilege as, you know, renting out the club to go party next to the DJ.

11:53and they were so mad that they went back to their room and pulled the geofilter and got in very, very big trouble over that. I mean, just what a way to go, right? Man, and that's an early taste of the power of augmented reality and someone like Himmel who will be able to theoretically – I mean, I'm sure Meta has much better guardrails in place to keep someone from doing something like that. But it's a lot of power to hand to a company when it's not even just a phone filter, but it's on your face, right? Yeah. I mean, it's like reality trolling, you know? I mean, we also had a geofilter, speaking of Facebook, we had a geofilter back in the old days over Facebook headquarters.

12:43I remember that. That was so good. And it was the ghost pointing and laughing at you. That's right. And I'm sure that pissed off a lot of folks. because Facebookers are not, they're known for a lot of things, probably not their sense of humor. And so I think that probably pissed off a lot of people. Well, we shouldn't shit on Facebook too much when their guest is coming. But you're right. I would say they're not known for their humor. They're known for ruthless execution at scale. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's what they're doing here at CES. Everybody has their strengths. Yeah. It is fascinating to watch though.

13:19I feel like Facebook has been trying to crack new consumer products and apps for such a long time. And they've just got to be over the moon that they seem to have a hit on their hands. Yeah, they can't make enough. They haven't historically been known for creating net new things. You know, it's usually been through acquisitions or I don't want to say copying, but ruthless execution. Yes. They're damn good at it. Yes. Well, with that, we'll bring him on here and get going. Sounds good. Let's do it. Alex, how was your tour of the show floor yesterday? It's pretty great. It took a while. It's a very massive show floor, walking around.

13:58I want to check out not just the stuff that we work on, but everything else that's happening in the industry. It was cool. There was a lot of interesting stuff. Nothing unexpected. It was kind of the trends that I thought I'd see. Saw wearables, AI, robotics, a number of other things. The John Deere booth, maybe, was something I hadn't expected. That was especially cool. It was fun. It was fun to check out. You were saying before we were starting rolling that you gave your data for a hat, that it was worth it. It's a good hat. I really like hats. I did not wear a hat today because my wife encouraged me to dress better for CES.

14:28But yes, if you give your credentials to the John Deere booth, you get the green hat, which I am very excited to start wearing. Alice likes hats. Yeah, I do. How nauseating did you find the show floor on a scale of one to like, I need to take a step outside? The smell's really bad, actually. Yeah. It's just hard to get around. So you have to use the app. It doesn't really load well. And there's no printed material that I could find. And so I kept walking in circles because I couldn't really figure out where I was going. Maybe that's why I took 30 minutes. A good use case for AR, one would say.

14:57A phenomenal use case for AR. But the data has to be loaded to know where you're going. The CES app and the glasses next year. I mean, that's a good idea. I mean, I feel like the closest thing it reminds me of is like a video game with like a really bad mini map that confuses you more than it actually helps and you end up going the wrong direction. You can't find anything. But I guess that's all of Vegas, right? It's kind of deliberate. They want you to see everything and buy your way out as you walk anywhere you go. So I guess it's probably deliberate. You were enjoying all the taglines. You were, yeah.

15:32Yeah. Unless it's a tagline guy. And there were some great ones. Yeah, I spend a lot of my time writing taglines. I think, you know, the GOAT, TDK, in everything. Better. Oh, I like that. The Bosch one was good. I also like Paxini, empowering sensation. And, of course, we have Bosch. What is the product? It is a humanoid robot that, I guess, empowers sensation. You take that whatever way you want to take that. And it was right next to the Body Friend booth as well, which you can also imagine. imagine what that is. See how the holidays just passed us. The gift opportunities just missed. And of course, Bosch.

16:17That was the best one. The more you Bosch, the more you feel like a Bosch. These are gold. This is good. Do you guys have a tagline? You mean meta or wearables? Just for the... So we probably need to do a better job of populating this, but we've always talked about present yet connected when we do wearables so you're not kind of down in a screen, but you're able to be present with the people around you but still connected. I just declined a spam phone call that was coming in about a second ago while we were talking. You did? Yeah. Wow. Did you notice that? Came in the glasses, used my EMG band to swipe.

16:50Did you notice I'm doing that, Ellis? Nope. Wow. Because I'm present with you guys. And you're connected. Yeah, I'm connected. You could always just go with Sustainable Infrastructure for Intelligent Society. It is already taken, but I think you guys have more lawyers than they do. If you wanted to snag that. Or you could go with AI Solution Universe. Okay. Which of these is? Metaverse. AI Solution Metaverse. Oh, wait. Here's actually the best one. All dreams in one dream with an E at the end of the second dream. Do you guys have a tagline for the pod? The tech industry is inside conversation.

17:25Okay. Which, I don't know. Do we like that? It could be better, I think. That's awesome. It could speak to, I mean, we could always roll with supporting today's normal, taking the lead for tomorrow's normal. which was plastered on the side of like a, a cyber truck. Wow. Yeah. It's impossible to know what anyone's doing here. It's by tagline. Yeah. Yeah. You guys don't have a booth, right? You're not like, you're off the, we don't have a booth. Yeah. No. We have 14 companies trying to copy you on the show floor. Yeah. As, as they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. And we have definitely seen a lot of glasses that look and feel similar to the ones that we have on the market.

18:07I don't think they don't look as good. They don't perform as well. But there's a lot of products. We did a couple glasses demos. You want to talk about that? Yeah, they will do their best to hide the differences. Because I feel like at the Consumer Electronics Show, it's always, I would think, been more about hardware than software. And you walk by all these booths and the glasses ostensibly look similar. but then you know you look at all their all their like brochures and everything and you don't see any of the user interface and you're like that seems like a red flag because it sucks that they're not showing any of the user interface and you know you guys like uh and others are working on things like live translation and and this and that we we went to one booth that was like live translation like oh give this a go and it was like little green laser writing okay which Matrix style.

18:59Like up here somewhere. Like I thought I was going crazy. I'm like, oh, I see. Okay. They're not there yet. I think for me what it showed is it's very hard to do general purpose computing in this form factor. And everyone's doing like super niche things. There's a handful of companies, but you all and a couple others that can actually do general purpose because it's so expensive and it's so difficult to pack everything into the glasses. Right? Yeah. I mean, it's not just people do green. You do a monochrome because you could do a smaller projector if you just do one color instead of RGB. And green is the most efficient color.

19:33So it's the easiest to make the brightest without using a lot of power. But when we designed the MetaRabon displays that I'm wearing, our idea was you need to be able to see a message. So if a message comes in, and when you get a message, a lot of times it's a photo or a video. and seeing that in kind of a monochrome green up to the side felt like it would be a very dissatisfying way to see a message come in. So that drove a lot of the specs for a lot of the requirements for what we did. Speaking of that, has Zuck WhatsAppped you since this conversation started? Not yet. You just said you declined a spam call earlier.

20:08Have you gotten any other good notifications? In the last five minutes? No, it's been quiet. That's good. Well, I mean, there is a world in the future where you are both live streaming to your boss while they are messaging you about what you're saying and editing your teleprompter live, striking out words that they don't like and whatnot. Don't give Zuck ideas. I mean, I'm taking mental notes. I mean, not just the taglines, but also the product ideas. But I think one of the observations we had is that, you know, inspired by COVID, we spent a lot of time in Zoom calls. And when you're on a Zoom call, typically you also have a message thread with the people in the meeting while it's happening to kind of augment the experience so you can have kind of back channels or side channels.

20:57And one of the ideas with these glasses was, hey, if I'm talking to you guys physically, it's an easy way to pass notes while in the meeting. And so that, you know, we announced handwriting yesterday. So that's a way to efficiently, discreetly, quietly respond to a message or write a message while you're present with other people. I got to try handwriting with you back at Connect and it was a very cool demo. Yeah. I'm going to stick with T9 over here. Do you guys remember that? Of course. T9 feels so damn magical. Bring it back. We actually prototyped it. We were, I mean, we have tried every concept and going from an idea to does it really work for a lot of people and is it efficient?

21:41Is it usable? There's a lot that seems like a good idea and fails along the way or feels like a bad idea and ends up being awesome. T9 was one of the ideas. I mean, you can imagine with a, because basically you need a three by three grid, right, to be able to do T9. At EMG, so we had, we're using the neural band to try to do that, you know, different targets. and we got pretty far with it. It just didn't feel as promising or as fast. You couldn't hit the words per minute. Like we're doing 30 words per minute with handwriting. That's what Mark did on stage when he was saying something, messaging another in real time at Connect.

22:16So 30 words per minute is pretty good. And I think we couldn't get that with T9. What were you with T9? How fast were you? I'm not sure. But I was texting my first girlfriend very fast on T9, rest assured. I mean, I believe it. You got to try the glasses for the first time yesterday. I did, yeah. I mean, speaking of the user interface, I mean, it really was shocking to go from using this to the green laser on the floor. I mean, how many years ahead do you guys feel like you are from some of the others that you might see out there? I mean, it's hard to say. It's hard to measure. And we're not trying to spend too much time.

22:54We're not trying to obsess over what other people are doing because we've got a roadmap that we're really excited about. So we're mostly focused on just trying to bring everything that we've been working on to market. But I think it's pretty well known that a lot of companies tried glasses, and it didn't work out as well as they had hoped. Us included. I think our first-generation Ray-Ban stories did not go as well as we had hoped it would. And a lot of companies kind of retreated and divested from the space. We doubled down at the same time. And so when we had all these – we launched five devices in the last half.

23:27We launched the Oakley Meta Houston's, the Oakley Meta Vanguard's, the Meta Ray-Ban displays, the Meta Neural Band, and the new Ray-Ban Meta glasses. And a lot of people were like, wow, you guys, like, only a year after the Ray-Ban Betas, you had these display glasses. Like, man, we've been working on those since COVID. Like, that was a multi-year project that we greenlit a long time. It took a long time to build a display that was what we thought at a level to productize, to build the interface, to make the neural band ready to ship and be usable just out of the box for people. So there's a lot more of that coming.

24:00Those are investments we put in a long time ago. You've seen the Orion prototype, which is the North Star of where we're trying to get to. We're still working on a productizing version of that, a number of things in between. We believe people want different brands and styles that suit them. You'll see a lot of that coming. We've got a pretty big roadmap that's on the way. And speaking of the brands, I think working with Ray-Ban and Oakley were very smart decisions. Were you guys surprised by how well that strategy worked? Because I think, you know, like I was at Snapchat for several years, and I think every tech company would like to think that they could do it better, that they have taste.

24:38We had some glasses designers there that came from some big glasses companies. and you still end up with something that still kind of feels wacky and draws too much attention to itself. Those original Spectacles-like launch, though, that was a great launch. I mean, the vending machine and all that. It was, and we can talk about that more if you want, but it's like, yeah, maybe we should just let Ray-Ban do it. It's like they do know what they're doing here, and Oakley as well. But, I mean, were you guys surprised by how much the designs resonated, or did it feel like, yep, this is what we thought would happen?

25:13I mean, the Ray-Ban Wayfair is like the most iconic, best-selling style of glasses, brand and style of glasses in the world. And so we're pretty confident that that would give us our best chance of success. And Essilor Exotica, who's the partner that we've gone deep with, they're great. I'd say that there's maybe two aspects to it. Well, first, the Orion prototype that you saw and everything we're doing there, that's very much a tech first, use case first. We had an idea of what we wanted them to be able to do, and we were putting tech in them to enable that. In contrast, the Ray-Ban Metaglasses, we put a real limit on the industrial design.

25:50It couldn't be more than 50 grams. It had to be a shape and style that was truly authentic to the Wayfair. A lot of constraints on it. And one of the benefits of working with our partners at SL Exotica, who we talk to daily and are awesome, is they just say no to things that I think we'd compromise on if it was just us doing it. where, you know, go in, it's like, ah, it's just a millimeter. It's just a gram, like still looks similar to me. And they're just, nope, that's not going to work. I mean, that's awesome. I mean, you need someone to say no when it comes to the aesthetic or how something might appear in culture.