History of Smart Glasses: Google Glass Flopped. Meta Sold 7 Million

This September, Meta unveiled Ray-Ban smart glasses with no camera. For almost sixty years engineers chased a screen in front of your eye, so why did people buy seven million camera glasses with no screen at all? The history of smart glasses, from the first pair of glasses in medieval Italy to Google Glass, Snap Spectacles and Ray-Ban Meta. This video starts with a 1306 sermon about the man who made the first glasses, follows Ivan Sutherland's 1968 head-mounted display and Thad Starner's wearable computer to Google Glass, and ends with the question that sank Glass and never went away. Chapters 0:00 No camera 0:30 Glass on the nose 1:13 A screen before the eye 2:20 Google Glass 3:19 Everyone tries 4:04 Seven million 4:56 The old problem 5:56 Help the world see us Sources Meta, "Introducing Ray-Ban Meta Audio Glasses" (23 Sep 2026): https://about.fb.com/news/2026/09/int... UploadVR on the camera-free pair (27 Sep 2026): https://www.uploadvr.com/ray-ban-meta... Reviews of the audio-only pair: Engadget, TechCrunch, Tom's Guide (Sep 2026) Andrew Bosworth to Bloomberg ("a little bit fortunate"), as reported by Silicon Republic (Sep 2026) Giordano da Pisa, sermon at Santa Maria Novella, Florence, 23 Feb 1306 (E. Panella, archivio.smn.it); Treccani, "Gli occhiali" Tommaso da Modena, Hugh of Saint-Cher, San Nicolò, Treviso (1352) Sutherland (1968), "A head-mounted three dimensional display", Fall Joint Computer Conference: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/147658... Computer History Museum, catalog no. 102680042 (the "Sword of Damocles") Thad Starner, Georgia Tech: https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/home/thad/; MIT Technology Review (4 Jun 2013) Google I/O 2012 skydiving demo: TechCrunch, Engadget (27 Jun 2012) The 5 Point Cafe ban: NBC News, The Register (9 Mar 2013) Google Glass Explorers "Do's and Don'ts" (18 Feb 2014): NBC News, CNN End of the Explorer program: TIME (15 Jan 2015); Glass Enterprise end of sales: https://support.google.com/glass-ente... Snap Inc. Form 10-Q, Q3 2017 (SEC); Engadget (23 Oct 2017) Meta, Ray-Ban Stories (9 Sep 2021); The Wall Street Journal via UploadVR (Aug 2023) Meta, Ray-Ban Meta (27 Sep 2023) and its AI update (Apr 2024) EssilorLuxottica FY2025 results (11 Feb 2026); CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/11/ray-b... Reality Labs losses: Meta FY2025 results (28 Jan 2026); CNBC (29 Apr 2026) Counterpoint Research, AI glasses shipments, H1 2026 (21 Sep 2026) I-XRAY (AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio): The Boston Globe, The Register (4 Oct 2024) 404 Media, the $60 light mod (23 Oct 2025): https://www.404media.co/how-to-disabl... Meta, "Meta's AI Glasses: Your Questions Answered" (7 Jul 2026): https://about.fb.com/news/2026/07/met... Google, Android XR at I/O 2026 (19 May 2026): https://blog.google/products-and-plat... Photos (Wikimedia Commons and Flickr; cropped and toned; links to each file in the pinned comment) Hugh of Saint-Cher fresco, Treviso, 1352: Tommaso da Modena, Public domain Santa Maria Novella, Florence: Jebulon, CC0 Ivan Sutherland: Dick Lyon, CC BY-SA 3.0 PDP-1 running Spacewar!: Joi Ito, CC BY 2.0 NASA Ames computer room, 1960s: NASA, Public domain The Sword of Damocles, R. Westall: photo Cotinis, CC0 MIT Great Dome: R Boed, CC BY 2.0 Thad Starner: University of Salford Press Office, CC BY 2.0 Twiddler keyboard: Glogger, CC BY 3.0 Google Glass: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0; Ted Eytan, CC BY-SA 2.0; Loïc Le Meur, CC BY 2.0 Moscone Center, San Francisco: Guilhem Vellut, CC BY 2.0 The 5 Point Cafe, Seattle: Justin Baeder, CC BY 2.0; Joe Mabel, CC BY-SA 3.0 Snap Spectacles: Eigentlichich; vending machine, Berlin: Daylen and C.Suthorn; both CC BY-SA 4.0 Ray-Ban Stories: cavebear42, CC BY-SA 4.0 Ray-Ban Meta: CCadio, CC BY 4.0; Phillip Pessar, CC BY 4.0 Licenses: CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/... · CC0 https://creativecommons.org/publicdom... #SmartGlasses #GoogleGlass #RayBanMeta