AI glasses and the iPhone moment: what you can actually build for Meta Ray-Ban today

Oscar Falmer has spent nearly a decade in AR, and the sequence of jobs tells you the shape of the industry better than any market report. Apple, as an AR technology evangelist in developer relations. Then Snap, running AR developer relations for Europe out of the Paris studio. Since January, wearables developer advocate at Meta, working with the people building on the Ray-Ban glasses.

Before any of that, in 2017, he built TweetReality, the first AR client for Twitter, on the day ARKit made that possible for a self-taught iOS developer working alone.

So when I got him on Metavertising at the end of April, I mostly wanted to know how someone who watched every previous version of this fail feels about the version that is working.

A decade of AR, compressed

Mobile AR had its run from roughly 2017 to 2020. Pokemon Go did the marketing for the entire category. The problem, in Oscar’s telling, is the form factor: you are holding it, which caps the session at a few minutes.

Social AR took over from there, on Snap and Instagram, because it removed the download. You tap a lens, you send it to a friend, and the friend is the distribution. That worked for years and then flattened out. The capabilities stopped surprising anyone.

Meanwhile the serious hardware was struggling. HoloLens and Magic Leap both had trouble finding product-market fit, which is a polite way of describing what happened to them.

And underneath all of it, the least ambitious product in the category quietly started selling.

Why display-free glasses won

The four problems that have blocked AR glasses for twenty years are weight, battery life, heat management, and field of view. Take out the display and three of them get much easier, and the fourth stops being a question.

Oscar’s comparison is AirPods. You do not think about charging AirPods. You use them, you put them back in the case, and the case handles it. Ray-Ban Meta glasses land in the same behavioural slot: hours of battery, no heat, and light enough that most people trying them cannot tell the difference from their normal frames.

Then there is a fact about the market that the AR industry spent two decades not internalising. More than half the world already wears prescription glasses, by Oscar’s reckoning. Everyone else owns sunglasses. The device does not need to convince you to put something new on your face. It only needs to be the thing already there.

The rest is use case. Recording a moment with your hands free, so the people in the shot behave like people rather than subjects. Calls through open-ear speakers. And now an assistant that can see what you are looking at, with Meta’s Muse Spark model rolling out to the glasses.

The winning device is the one that removed the hardest problems rather than solving them.

The phone is the brain

Meta AI glasses work standalone. You can leave your phone at home.

But when the phone is in the loop over Bluetooth Low Energy, it does the heavy processing, which keeps the glasses light and their battery long. Oscar describes the phone as the brain of the glasses, and for developers this is the whole architecture. Your code runs on the phone’s chip, iOS or Android, and the glasses are input and output.

That sounds like a limitation until you notice it means a glasses app has a modern phone SoC behind it.

What the toolkit actually gives you

The SDK is called the Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit. Your inputs are the camera and the microphone array. Your output is the open-ear speakers. Everything in between happens in a companion iOS or Android app that you also control, so if a use case needs a visual, the phone screen is available as a second surface.

Oscar recommends watching what people are already posting rather than reading the docs cold. He shares publicly available prototypes on LinkedIn and X, and the proof-of-concept work coming out of the preview is the honest picture of what the platform can do.

Here is the part that reframes everything above it, and the reason I am glad we recorded when we did.

At the end of April the toolkit was at version 0.6. It had been in beta since December. You could prototype, and you could not publish. There was no way to put an app in front of a user who was not on your test list, and no date for when that would change.

That is the actual state of a platform in its iPhone moment. Millions of devices sold, an SDK you cannot ship on, and a room full of developers building anyway.

Update, July 2026. Since this conversation, Meta has moved. On 14 May the company opened the display on Ray-Ban Display glasses to third-party developers, adding display UI components to the Device Access Toolkit for both Swift and Kotlin, alongside a second path that lets you build standalone experiences in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Both routes support gesture input through the Neural Band. General publishing to all users still has no announced date.

Build for the glasses without a display first

This was Oscar’s clearest piece of advice, and it survives the update above.

Ray-Ban Display has only been available in the US, and the technology is new enough that scaling production globally takes time. The non-display glasses have sold in the millions, worldwide.

So if you want reach, build the version that needs no display. Design the experience around audio and camera, treat the display as an enhancement you add later, and you are addressing the entire installed base instead of a slice of one country.

Where the money is right now

I asked where a developer entering today actually gets paid. Oscar gave two answers and was clear about which one is real this year.

The future answer is app publishing and in-app purchases, once publishing opens.

The present answer is client work, and it is already happening in two places. B2B2C, where museums and venues commission tour guide experiences with an AI assistant giving real-time information as you walk. And enterprise, where the pitch writes itself: factory workers who need both hands, who cannot hold a paper manual, who sometimes work in environments where looking down is dangerous, and who can be talked through a task by someone remote seeing what they see.

Neither is glamorous. Both are invoicing.

The LED is a piece of engineering

I did not expect the privacy answer to be this specific.

Meta’s camera glasses have carried a recording indicator since Ray-Ban Stories. What has changed is the detail. The LED went from static to pulsating, so it reads as active in more lighting conditions. It was physically enlarged from one millimetre to two.

And there is a sensor sitting in front of it. Cover the LED with your hand, or put a sticker over it, and the glasses stop taking photos and warn the wearer. Tampering with it violates Meta’s terms of service.

The same logic extends to the SDK. Developer terms restrict what use cases you can build, and Meta acts against apps and accounts that ignore them. Worth comparing against Even Realities, the Chinese brand that answered the same question by removing the camera entirely. Two opposite engineering answers to one problem.

The tradeoff nobody puts on a spec sheet

Before joining Meta, Oscar built a public spreadsheet tracking the industry: glasses, operating systems, controllers, SDKs, and optics. He made it for himself and it turned out more people needed it than he expected.

What it makes visible is that the specs trade against each other. Large field of view costs you weight or battery, every time. Simple or absent displays buy back both. Nobody escapes it.

The optics section is the one worth reading twice. Field of view trades against lens thickness and weight, and separately against projector quality, which is its own hard problem sitting behind the waveguide. Oscar points to the Lumus waveguide in Meta Ray-Ban Display as an example of a genuinely good balance.

There is also a quirk in that data. Optics companies generally do not announce a component publicly until they have a distribution deal with a manufacturer. So the release dates in the spreadsheet often run a couple of years behind what those companies actually have working. Whatever ships in glasses in 2028 is sitting on a bench somewhere now.

On controllers, one detail stuck with me: Meta’s Neural Band, the sEMG wristband, is more battery efficient than running computer vision hand tracking continuously. Reading the electrical signal in your forearm costs less than watching your hands.

A detour: what Oscar looks for in China

He started learning Mandarin in middle school and has gone to China almost every year since 2011, COVID aside.

His reason is not really about glasses. It is that consumer adoption there runs ahead, and he has been using it as a preview for fifteen years. Fifteen years ago it was people sending voice messages in the street, which struck him as bizarre because no Western app had them, and which arrived here about three years later. Now it is foldable phones, which he sees elderly people using on the subway in Beijing while he sees almost nobody using them in London. Electric cars everywhere. The newest AI tools in the hands of every age group.

On glasses specifically, his read is that Chinese hardware is cutting edge because the companies sit next to the factory in Shenzhen, and that they tend to ship earlier with a thinner ecosystem around the device, often incompatible with the services Western users depend on. Sylvan Shen made a related argument from a different angle when she mapped the Chinese smart glasses market on the show.

He goes anyway. Every year, one trip, to see which weird thing people are doing that nobody here is doing yet.

Q&A

What is the Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit? An SDK that lets developers extend an existing iOS or Android app to Meta AI glasses. It provides access to the glasses camera, microphone array and open-ear speakers, with processing handled on the phone. It entered developer preview in December 2025.

Can you publish apps for Meta AI glasses? Not to the general public yet. During the developer preview you can prototype and share with test users through release channels. Meta has not announced a date for general publishing availability.

Can developers build for the Ray-Ban Display screen? Yes, as of 14 May 2026. There are two paths: display UI components in the Device Access Toolkit using Swift or Kotlin, or standalone web apps built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Both support gesture input via the Neural Band.

Should developers build for display or non-display glasses first? Non-display first. Ray-Ban Display has been US-only and is harder to manufacture at scale, while the non-display glasses have sold millions globally. Building audio and camera experiences first reaches the larger installed base.

How do developers make money building for AI glasses today? Mainly client work. Commissioned B2B2C experiences for museums and venues, and enterprise deployments for hands-busy roles such as factory and field work. App publishing and in-app purchases come later.

How does the privacy LED on Meta glasses work? The recording indicator pulses rather than staying static, was enlarged from one millimetre to two, and has a sensor in front of it. Covering or obscuring the LED blocks photo capture and warns the wearer, and tampering with it breaches Meta’s terms of service.

Why do AI glasses without a display sell better than AR glasses? Removing the display removes most of the weight, battery and heat constraints that have limited AR glasses, and eliminates the field-of-view tradeoff. The result is a device light enough and long-lasting enough for all-day wear, at a consumer price.

Who is Oscar Falmer? A wearables developer advocate at Meta with nearly ten years in XR, previously in developer relations at Apple and at Snap. He built TweetReality, the first AR Twitter client, in 2017, and maintains a public smart glasses industry spreadsheet.

Listen to the full episode

The full conversation with Oscar Falmer is on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Listen on Spotify

Listen on Apple Podcasts

• 00:00 Intro: who is Oscar Falmer
• 00:44 TweetReality, Apple, Snap, and the road to Meta
• 02:54 A decade of XR, from mobile AR to AI glasses
• 07:22 Why display-free glasses are winning
• 12:08 Use cases now, and what is coming
• 15:27 The phone as the brain of the glasses
• 17:43 What the Wearables Device Access Toolkit allows
• 20:02 Why to build for non-display glasses first
• 22:20 Where the money is today
• 24:35 Privacy by design and the LED
• 28:37 The industry spreadsheet and the optics tradeoff
• 33:56 What the West underestimates about China
• 37:33 Where to find Oscar

You can follow Oscar Falmer on LinkedIn and X, and his smart glasses spreadsheet is linked from oscarfalmer.com.

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