Devices

Meta Bets the Platform on Smart Glasses as Connect 2026 Approaches

With Quest headset launches pushed to 2027, Meta's September event is shaping up as a coming-out party for AI eyewear, and the company's pipeline is wider than most observers expected.

Mainstay Communications Team · September 9, 2026 · 5 min read

In brief

Meta Connect 2026 arrives with no flagship headset on the agenda, cleared to spotlight a smart-glasses lineup that sold over 7 million units in 2025. Four new models are reportedly in the pipeline before year-end, alongside an enterprise subscription program and a consumer AI agent called Hatch. The event will show how far Meta's platform-level wearables bet has advanced since the Ray-Ban line first shipped.

The Event

Meta Connect runs September 23-24, 2026, at the company's Menlo Park campus, with a keynote on the 23rd and developer sessions the following day. A free livestream is available via meta.com/connect.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg telegraphed the theme weeks ago by posting a photo of what appeared to be a new glasses frame, the design obscured with blue pen marks. The company described the event as focused on "the latest in VR, wearables, metaverse, and AI." No Quest 4 is expected; Meta's next flagship headset isn't shipping until 2027, according to multiple reports. That absence clears the stage for eyewear.

The Commercial Runway

The glasses business has earned that spotlight. EssilorLuxottica, Meta's manufacturing partner on the Ray-Ban line, disclosed in its Q4 2025 financial results that the partnership sold over 7 million Ray-Ban and Oakley Meta glasses in 2025, more than triple the prior year's volume. The cumulative sales figure stood at roughly 2 million as of February 2025, which makes the 2025 acceleration steep.

Meta followed that momentum by launching the $799 Ray-Ban Display glasses on September 30, 2025. The device packs a full-color heads-up display into a 69-gram frame and ships with a Neural Band, an EMG wristband that reads hand gestures. The Display product gave Meta its first entry in the wearable display category without the bulk of a traditional headset.

Meta launched two additional prescription-optimized Gen 2 frames in April 2026: the Blayzer Optics (RW7001) and Scriber Optics (RW7002), priced at $499 each and available at optical retailers in the US and select international markets.

What the Pipeline Reportedly Holds

Reporting by The Information earlier this year painted a wider picture. According to that reporting, Meta plans as many as four new smart glasses models before year-end, with internal codenames including "Modelo," "Luna," "RBM2 Refresh," and "Mojito VIP." The company is also testing models it calls "Artemis" and "SSG," the latter standing for supersensing glasses, for future release.

Two of those near-term models, codenamed "Aperol" and "Bellini" per the Financial Times, represent the next generation of the core Ray-Ban Meta line. Aperol is reportedly a sunglasses design with a thicker frame and larger battery. Bellini targets prescription wearers, a demographic the current lineup serves only partially. Both are said to carry a "super sensing" AI mode that extends continuous Live AI operation from the current roughly 30 minutes to several hours of background awareness.

That extended runtime is central to what Meta is building toward. The idea is that the glasses' AI can observe context throughout the day and surface reminders unprompted: a forgotten item at home, an errand you mentioned earlier. The Financial Times reported that Meta is also exploring a facial recognition capability that could identify acquaintances by name. That feature remains exploratory, and the company is reportedly weighing whether the privacy indicator LED could be disabled during extended AI sessions, a consideration that has drawn scrutiny from privacy advocates.

The Business Angle

Meta is pairing the product push with a commercial program. According to The Information, the company is developing a subscription offering called "Wearables for Work," targeting enterprise customers. The reported goal is to sign at least 10 companies and deploy devices to organizations requiring at least 100 units each. Use cases in the program would include hands-free information retrieval, meeting documentation, and live guidance for field workers.

The consumer side is getting its own infrastructure. Meta is preparing to launch a consumer AI agent called "Hatch," reported by The Information to be designed for integration with Instagram, WhatsApp, and third-party services including DoorDash and Microsoft Outlook. Hatch would run on the new glasses as the primary AI layer.

Meta's internal sales target for the second half of 2026, per The Information, is 10 million wearables. That's an aggressive number, but it's not a stretch given the 2025 trajectory, and the company is reportedly working to expand availability to additional countries to reach it.

Orion Waits

Meta's true AR project, the Orion prototype, isn't part of this year's consumer story. Orion features silicon-carbide waveguides with a 70 degrees diagonal field of view, on-device spatial computing, and EMG gesture input (a genuinely different product category from the Ray-Ban line). Meta revealed it as a prototype at Connect 2024 at a manufacturing cost in the high thousands per unit.

A consumer version, reportedly codenamed Artemis, is now expected in 2027 at the earliest, according to Tom's Guide. Meta may offer Orion access to select developers in the meantime, per UploadVR's reporting. Orion is the long-term thesis; the glasses shipping this fall are the revenue engine funding it.

The Industry Read

The pattern forming around Meta's wearables push mirrors how smartphones initially displaced dedicated devices: incremental capability gains carried on familiar hardware, with AI doing the work previously done by a separate screen. The glasses look like sunglasses. The subscription model for enterprise looks like every other SaaS rollout. The Hatch agent runs on services people already use.

What's different is the scale of the simultaneous bets. Four new form factors in a single year, a business program, a consumer agent, and a $799 display device already on shelves is a coordinated platform push, not a product experiment. Connect 2026 will show how far the assembly is along.

Sources

Companies mentioned

Mainstay Digital · Spatial and 3D visualization for industrial companies

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