Google is prepping for I/O. Gemini-powered smart glasses are coming. The buzz is building.
Meta didn’t wait. They just dropped a bombshell of their own. The Ray-Ban Display glasses—the ones that cost a fortune and were impossible to find six months ago? You can finally build apps for them.
September felt like a tease. Meta unveiled these single-display spectacles at Connect, handed them out like exclusive party favors, but gave developers nothing to do. It was a phone accessory with no software hook. Useless. Or at least, barely useful. A very expensive window into nothingness.
Now? The doors are open.
Apps can live as standalone experiences. Or tether to iOS and Android. The choice is yours.
Web apps get a pass too. Build them once, extend them via a phone browser, and watch them bloom on your head-mounted display. It’s lighter weight coding. A deeper iteration of that toolkit they released last year for the screen-less frames.
So what goes in the box?
Meta’s pitch is broad. Text. Images. On the fly. Think news tickers, sports stats, streaming overlays. Useful stuff. Except their demo reel shows simple games and checklists.
Pop-up tetris while walking down the street. Really?
It begs the question. Do we need distraction layered onto distraction? How distracting are these actually? Maybe annoying. Maybe novel. Probably both.
Google talks app strategy next week. They’re pushing hard for justification. Smart glasses with displays need a reason to exist. Meta just handed developers that reason, awkwardly, a year late.
The race is on. Again.
