Want weekly shortcuts like this?
Join the Shortcuts community.
Join
I have spent the last two weeks testing Meta's smart glasses. They feel like the absolute epitome of a double-edged sword. On one hand, you get a helpful AI assistant and a hands-free camera sitting right next to your ear. On the other hand, you are walking around with a camera strapped to your face all day. Let's look at the hardware, what works well, what misses the mark, and why these glasses are a fascinating glimpse into our mixed-reality future.
Meta has partnered with Ray-Ban for a while, but this specific pair is a new collaboration between Meta and Luxottica. The model is called the Fury, and it comes in a sleek green color.
The base glasses run $300. If you need prescription lenses like I do, the price jumps to $400. You also get a charging case in the box, but I opted for the standalone charging block for an extra $60. It makes resting and charging the glasses on a desk much more convenient.
The hardware is packed with tech but still looks remarkably like a normal pair of glasses. The left eye frame houses a 12-megapixel camera. The right eye frame has an LED light that flashes when you take a photo and pulses when you record video.
The right stem is your main control center. The outside is a touch surface. You can tap it to play or pause audio and swipe forward or backward to adjust the volume. On top of that same stem is a tactile action button. You can customize this, but by default, clicking it snaps a photo and holding it down starts a video recording. If you ever need to turn the tech off completely, there is a small hardware power switch hidden on the inside of the right stem.
Using these as an everyday camera is genuinely fun. Because the camera is always looking exactly where your eyes are looking, you never have to think about framing.
Photos look great at 12 megapixels. Video is captured at a 1440 by 1920 resolution, which is just slightly higher than standard 1080p.
The biggest limitation here is orientation. Every single photo and video you take is locked to a vertical format. There is absolutely no way to record horizontal video. If you want to grab standard landscape B-roll, these glasses will not help you. Video recordings also hard-cap at exactly five minutes. If you try to record longer than that, the glasses just stop themselves.
Because these have Meta AI built in, you can ask the glasses to analyze the world around you. You activate it by either saying "Hey Meta" or pressing the custom button on the back of the stem.
I stood in front of a bookstore display and asked the AI for recommendations. It successfully identified the books on the table and suggested I read Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. Later, I walked up to a cafe counter and asked what was on the espresso menu. The AI read the menu perfectly and read the prices back to me through the built-in speakers. It even managed to read and translate a French menu later in the day.
I also tried asking the AI to find a specific Issey Miyake design book on Amazon and save it as a reminder. It did successfully create a reminder card in the app, but it failed to actually fetch the Amazon link.
Everything related to the glasses lives inside the Meta AI app on your phone. This is where the ecosystem starts to feel clunky.
When you want to pull your photos and videos off the glasses, you have to open the app and tap Import. This forces your phone to disconnect from your current Wi-Fi network and join a temporary Wi-Fi network generated by the glasses themselves.
It takes time, it requires your phone to drop its current connection, and it is a cumbersome hoop to jump through just to save a video to your camera roll. Furthermore, none of your Meta reminders sync with your Apple Reminders app. The whole experience feels very siloed.
This is the elephant in the room. Having a camera on your face all the time creates some incredibly awkward situations.
I walked into a public restroom at a grocery store and instantly realized I had a camera pointed exactly where I was looking. Yes, you can flip the hardware switch to turn the glasses off, but to everyone else around you, it still looks like a camera lens.
Meta's track record with privacy doesn't help ease the tension. A cottage industry has popped up showing people how to tape over or disable the recording LED on the front of the glasses. In response, Meta is reportedly rolling out a software update that will completely brick the glasses if you tamper with that light. Add in the recent news that Instagram is opting users in to use their public photos for AI training, and it makes you think twice about feeding a live video feed to Meta's servers.
If you already wear prescription glasses every day, the Meta Fury glasses are a surprisingly capable upgrade. They let you stay present in the moment while still capturing memories, and the AI features are legitimately useful for quick translations and context.
But the social friction is real. Asking someone to wear a camera into every room they enter is a very tough sell. Until the tech industry figures out a way to build smart AR glasses without strapping a camera lens to your face, you have to decide if the convenience is worth the strange looks.