The Vergecast - Meta and Snap battle for your face

Episode Date: September 24, 2026

Meta and Snap both want to get on your face. The Verge's Victoria Song and Jay Peters tried out all the new hardware: Specs, audio-only Ray Bans, and Meta VR. Today, they join guest host David Imel to talk about how these new smart glasses feel, both physically and emotionally. Further reading: Meta’s next VR device isn’t a headset — it’s glasses Meta ditches the camera on its newest smart glasses I wore Snap’s $2,200 smart glasses Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Abdul El-Sayed joins raging moderates. The Michigan Senate race is one of the most closely watched contests in the country, and El-Sayat is at the center of some of the Democratic Party's biggest fights. We talk about Trump's trade war with Canada, campaigning with Kamala Harris, Israel and Gaza, of course, got a little spicy, and his race against Mike Rogers more generally. El-Sayat answers some of the toughest questions facing his campaign and the Democratic Party. Listen or watch the full conversation now where you get your podcast.

Welcome to the Verlocut. Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Metaverse. Still, I'm David Emel, and today we're talking about smart glasses. Meta announced a boatload of new glasses last night. There's new Rayban metas, including an audio-only version, and some new VR glasses. And last week, Snap showed off its new specs. The Verges Jay Peters and V-Song are here to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on The Verge today.

I'm David Emel, and this is 90 Seconds on the Verge for Thursday, September. September 24, 26. Google has formally announced Project Suncatcher, a new venture to test how well satellites with AI processors perform in space. The satellites equipped with Google's tensor processing units and will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on October 1st, harnessing the power of the sun in low Earth orbit. The goal of the mission is to test how well its TPUs handle the physical stress of spaceflight, as well as the radiation and the thermal extremes of space.

Next, Nintendo has won its $4.5 million lawsuit against James' Williams, a Reddit moderator accused of distributing pirated Switch Games. In a judgment issued on Wednesday, a Washington federal court ordered Williams to shut down the online stores allegedly housing libraries of games. In the complaint, Nintendo claimed that Williams had allegedly solicited donations of Nintendo e-shop gift cards alongside physical copies of Switch games to be copied and distributed on online pirate stores. Nintendo asked the court for a default judgment of $4.5 million after Williams didn't respond

to the lawsuit. And finally, OpenAI artificial intelligence agents have hacked an Australian government website and attempted to breach numerous other government and university websites. Speaking on the sidelines at the UN General Assembly in New York, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanyes said the agent infiltrated Australia's Medicare Statistics portal and accessed both public and non-public files. In a statement to The Verge, OpenAI spokesperson Oscar Haynes said the models were attempting to look up answers during an internal evaluation and in the process

took actions that OpenAI did not intend. You can read more at Theverge.com. That's 90 Seconds on the Verge for Thursday, September 24th, 2026. So like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. It's the phenomenon rattling millennials.

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So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists. That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats. This week on America actually, Gen Z research. Rachel Jamfaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. It's not rocket science. And I keep saying, like,

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That's square.com slash go slash verge. Run your business smarter with Square. Get started today. J&V, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. All right. So we got to start with Medicare.

connect. We taped this after a press preview where you guys got to go hands on with the new products, but before the actual public event that happened last night, question for V. The Verge ran a piece a few days ago called Can You Forget How You Feel About Meta? So my question to you is, have you forgotten how you feel about meta? No, I have not forgotten how I feel about meta. It is, That was a really big effort across, it was me, Mia, Hayden, and Lauren, just kind of all, I called it the Meta Voltron while we were writing it and just kind of all coming in with their various expertise about how people feel about meta kind of ties into the various tentacles that has all of, it has in all of these businesses. And obviously I was addressing the glasses portion of it and their XR efforts. And so that was like really kind of on display while we were walking through the meta headquarters. And it was kind of impossible to forget how I feel about testing these devices and then how other people feel about these devices now that they're increasingly in the wild.

And that was very much at the forefront of my mind. So no, I was not able to forget how I and other people feel about meta in general. I think there's a clear reason why they probably decided to release some smart glasses without cameras, even though they're still kind of barreling ahead with the cameras. But we're going to get to that. Jay, I want to talk to you first. The Muse Agent is coming to these glasses, all these new glasses they're releasing. Can you tell me more about what that means exactly? That means you can take the Muse Agent, which is primarily run through an app on your phone.

and you can be looking at something and ask your muse agent about it. And so how that's different from like talking to just the hey meta more generally is, in theory, your agent is really dialed into kind of your specific needs. If you've used it a while, maybe it understands your personal context a little bit better. And so in theory, this agent is that much more helpful about telling you about what you're looking at. We were given a theoretical example of like, we were speaking with Henry, which was a Mews AI agent for a 38-year-old marketing professional who wanted to be, who was really focusing on his fitness. And they had a bunch of food right in front of us. And so we could ask like, what is this food in front of us?

Yeah, it was a food demo. And like, which one is best for my macros? Can you add this to my cart? and you're just chatting with the agent on your glasses. It was a little slow in my experience. Like you'd wait many seconds before it would respond to you, which kind of took it, it didn't feel as conversational as maybe just chatting through an app.

But you can see how as Meta wants to make its glasses very smart and make them your constant AI companion for everything that you do. This is how Muse ties in with that. It feels that that would require quite a bit of confidence in the fact that this AI agent is just doing things for you automatically, right? Because at least if you're chatting with you on your phone, you kind of see the tasks that it's taking. Did that seem weird to you at all?

Did you feel like you wouldn't really trust it to do the right things? Well, in one of my demos, it was looking at a box of protein bars, and it said, this has 15 grams of protein, and the box definitely said it had 20 grams of protein. So, you know, you have to like... That's not great. Kind of the constant, how much do you trust your AI to be telling you the correct information? That's still right now is a concern with using this agent. And it's not out yet, I don't think.

It might be something that's coming later this year, but still, we'd have to try it ourselves with our own agent. I tried the same demo as Jay did, but like with a different pair of glasses. They just had like these stations set up. And I kind of had a similar experience where I was also just like, you can't see. that it's thinking. So I was like, there's no like, do-to-do, do-do. Like, you don't know.

Sometimes you'd be like, let me check on that for you. And then it's just silence while you just wait. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, is it listening? Did it forget? Is it just thinking? You know, this is early kind of demo versions.

It could very much change before it gets public. But I was telling them like, you should make some, like, a way for me to know if it's actually doing something or if it's just like lost connection or whatnot. And I tried putting something into my cart and it was like, yeah. So these little granola bite bars, they're not part of the catalog. And I was like, what catalog? So let's break down exactly what new hardware they announced, specifically with the Rayben glasses.

So you mentioned they have a new MetaRabin Gen 3. I'm assuming with cameras. And then there's an audio-only version. Can you guys describe the difference between the two? Maybe V take the camera version. Okay, so there's a lot that's coming out. And what I'm going to say is it's more. There's just more happening.

And a lot of that is to give new styles for everyone. Because the camera glasses, like we've got these meta-rayband Gen 3s on my face. And do I look like Jeffrey Dahmer? Because they're aviators. There's aviator versions now. Hello, I'm wearing them. Are they faster, or is it just different styles? What's different with the Gen 3?

Different styles. There are adjustable temple tips, so that's something that they took from the optics glasses, which were meant to be more ergonomic and more prescription-friendly. And so you have these temple tips here, which can be adjusted. They recommend you go to an optician to do that. There is six mics in these instead of five. So call quality should be better. And they last longer, one hour longer than the Gen 2s.

So not a huge crazy hardware update on this front. There's these aviator glasses and this. It's not the warrior princess, but they have a Xena model. And that's kind of like a geometric cat eye situation. And then that's the Gen 3s. And these are still Rabin meta, correct? They're not just the meta glasses. Okay.

Yeah, these, we'll get into some crazy naming conventions as well. These are still the Rayban Meta Gen 3. And then we saw the Rayban meta audio glasses, which are no camera. That's the big thing. No camera. How are they pitching the no camera version? I mean, obviously there is a big backlash against smart glasses right now. Meta is probably trying to salvage their reputation a little bit.

It doesn't help as much when they're releasing camera versions and not. on-camera versions, especially if they look similar because people cannot really tell the difference. Jay, how are they like, how are they pitching that to people? Do they include any of that skepticism in there? Not directly in the folks that we talk to. I mean, a thing to know about Connect is you're walking around Metis campus and like the vast majority of people are wearing meta glasses in some way. So it's like this alternate reality universe where like everybody's chill with glass. Yeah.

But for the audio-focused versions, the big thing is that they're lighter, and because there is no camera and in theory, like less technology in the temples, that means they can offer slightly different styles. Like one that had,

they're just, they're like thinner temple bands that, like, sit on your ears. And I think that the styles look nicer, personally. Okay. They just look that much less like computer glasses on your face.

I think, Mad Men, 50s, Clubmaster style glasses, kind of like the horn-rimmed. Here, for folks on audio, it's the style where, like, there's like a little metal wire in the middle, and you can see some plastic on top, but on the bottom, it's more of kind of a,

you can see the metal of the lens. And this is not what the glasses are, but it is a close approximation of one of the styles. Okay. I heard something about a hearing enhancement feature, but that costs extra. Can you talk about that? It's FDA cleared.

It is, so, you know, SLOLoxatica has a different type of glasses called nuance audio. And they're just basically using AI to enhance the audio, kind of give it a conversation. It's similar to conversation boost. It's similar to over-the-counter hearing aids that we've seen in the past. FDA has given clearance because it's meant to be kind of an aid type feature. It does cost about $150 extra. Wow. The way that they told me it's going to work is that it's like it's a one-time fee that you pay up front.

Got it. So it's not necessarily like an extra fee or whatnot. And then you just have it there. It's meant to be kind of an aid for people who need that. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the more hearing aids, the better, I would suppose, out in the wild. There's apparently also Dolby Atmos audio capture, spatial audio. Is that only on the audio-only glasses or is that on both of them?

I think that's going to be on any of them. So a lot of this stuff is they're not gatekeeping things to the audio glasses only. I think the only thing about the audio glasses to keep in mind is that it's meant to one, it feels like the timing is very pointed because hot surveillance summer, right? Yep. But they were very adamant in insisting that this has been in the work since 20, 24. Back when they launched the metaglasses, there was a press event and Boz was there and he's just like, you know, we know that people love using the audio. We're exploring audio only. So he was kind of teasing

it a couple of months ago before things really blew up with the backlash. So it just happens to be that they're launching it at this time where people are like, ah, we hate these cameras. And so now we have a camera-free version that's only going to be audio. Very convenient timing for them. Yeah. And the Dolby Atmos thing, I think that ties into another product that we saw today. But in general, the audio you capture when you're recording is spatial now for immersive. That's the word like immersive content.

Right. Well, better than Metaverse. But speaking of Betterverse, it seems that meta has not completely given up on the Metaverse, as they have announced a new pair of VR-A-R mixed reality glasses. Jay, can you take me through this? They're 1299 launching in the spring of next year. It seems like an early announcement. What exactly are these things?

They are the meta VR glasses. And honestly, the best way I think about them is if Meta took a Quest headset and smashed it down into a glasses form factor. It's, you wear them much more like glasses than like strapping all. whole headset over your face. And they have what meta calls a, I think it was a 5K infinite display, was the term that we heard. It's a micro LED display. It looks very nice, though. So like you put them on and you see color pass-through of the things around you. And of course, there's some, it's not the same as looking at the real world with your real eyeballs. But like, it was pretty

passable. And then like content will appear. in front of you. The big thing with the glasses is that instead of controllers as the primary input method, it uses eye tracking to look at what you're looking at on screen. And then as V on video is doing is pinchy pinch, punch. Lots of hand tracking. Okay. So they're taking inspo for the Vision Pro. Yeah. And so the combo of that, you just, you interact with it a little bit differently than you want with the VR headset, but you still get to do a lot of VR type things. How exactly were these positioned. Were these similar to like the Quest Pro, where it was productivity focus and work focus? Or are these more of like a quest three where it's sort of a lot of games? Or was a little

bit of both? It's kind of all the above. They showed us three kind of main demos. One was playing a new version of Beat Sabre made specifically for the glasses called Beat Saber Flux, where instead of like waving your controllers with the imaginary wands, you use your hands, which had these like, like, energy balls attached them and a lightning bolt line that went between them. And you would manipulate that in response to these like poles and dots that would appear on the screen. I thought it's pretty fun. That feels a lot like supernatural VR kind of situation. Yeah. Like it was very similar. It was pretty cool. Another demo we did was just very the classic pitch with immersive glasses of you can watch a movie with a giant virtual display. And

for me, it was pretty good. Actually, we watched a little bit of Avengers Endgame and a bit of the twist meta is pitching is that around the display for certain films, they're going to add like a computerized set that matches very similar to what you're seeing on screen. So like the scene I saw was a scene for Avengers End Game where I think they're on a spaceship.

It's been years since I've seen the movie. I apologize. But around us on the display was like, more of this. If you imagine this set completely extended beyond the screen, that's what it would be. Is that like on the fly generative AI or how are they doing this? The way we were told is that they're working with Disney and industrial light and magic to work to make these. And they'll be like handcrafted to be timed with each film. So like as we're watching this five minute clip or whatever, the scene changed a couple times in time with whatever was happening with the movie.

So it's kind of interesting, but... Guru's head came out of the frame. Uh-huh. That was a big 3D moment that we saw as well. The other demo where I was looking at an Instagram page and they suggested putting in a comment and instead of having to hunt and peck type on a virtual keyboard in front of you,

you put your hands flat on the table and a keyboard appeared with a trackpad, very similar to like a Mac keyboard and a Mac trackpad. And you just typed. And for the most part, it worked really well. It's obviously not as fast as typing on a physical keyboard, but way better than any sort of like immersive keyboard experience I've used before. And the trackpad was maybe even more impressive.

I just like use my finger on the table like an imaginary trackpad and the mouse followed exactly where I expected it to go. Oh, interesting. That's quite cool. It was surprisingly good. I have nails on and it worked with my nails, which can't say the same for every keyboard. But I think if you're having trouble thinking about what this device is like,

it's like, what if you had a Vision Pro? But it didn't weigh a gazillion pounds on your head. And I actually forgot almost the most important part of the glasses is all the compute and battery and storage and stuff in the glasses is in a puck, like with the Vision Pro. It even has a belt clip with the meta logo on it. So they know that this is something you're going to like put on your pocket or Put in a desk. So the Vision Pro's M5 chip is in the actual glasses.

Is this the processing in the puck or is it in the glasses as well? Okay. So the glasses probably won't heat up. I don't think so. Yeah. I actually asked because when we were watching the movie, the movie clip, I heard a fan and I was trying to ask, where is that fan coming from? And the fan was coming from the puck itself.

And they cautioned like, oh, we haven't, you know, dialed in all the fan stuff or whatever. But as far as I know, there was not a fan inside the actual glasses itself. So would you say that this product sits a little bit in between like the Quest 3 and the Vision Pro? Because there definitely is a market opportunity for something that's more expensive than Quest 3, but not $3, $3,200 or whatever Apple is charging for the Vision Pro these days. You almost feel like maybe this is what Apple should have done first is something like this. And, you know, I don't know if the technology was there in 2024 for Apple to do something like this. But it's just a form factor that I think makes a lot more sense and is just way less burdensome than the heavy, bulky headset of it all

instead of just pair of glasses you can take on and off. I know Jay and I were talking about it earlier. It's kind of interesting to see this kind of third band of like smart eyewear device that's coming out. That's not a headset. It's not what they're calling AI glasses right now. It's smoohing them together in the middle for both, but it's not quite AR glasses as we were sold them in the past.

It's just, I think you're really seeing the technical limitations here because, you know, X-Reels famously not having the display glasses situation. It's like birdbath optics. So, you know, you kind of have this weird third middle child. Nobody knows what to call it. Yeah. Is there anything that they're calling it that Meda is calling these glasses? VR glasses.

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Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. All right, let's get into a competing product now. The Snap Specs are finally out. They got announced months ago. They're now $2,195 more expensive than any of the products that Meta just announced last night. They have augmented reality displays in both lenses.

They're huge. They bend your ears. Jay, you finally got some time with these glasses. can you tell us about them? They are much different than the meta VR glasses I just talked about, and that these are more like regular glasses that you wear,

but they have a little bit of digital content constantly in front of your eyes. So a parallel is taking the meta rayband display, which could show something in one lens and put two in front. And that, you know, opens up all sorts of opportunities on how you can overlay digital content on top of the world.

they're totally standalone products. Like you don't have to connect them to your phone or anything. Like they exist as computers entirely on your face. There's no charging puck. There's no compute puck. It's just all there. That's part of why they're so thick and so bulky

because everything is on the glasses. I only got to wear them for like five minutes, 10 minutes at a time. So I don't know like over the course of a full four hour charge would they start to really like drag on your face, feel bad. I shook my head a few times, kind of like, like kind of big shakes to see if they would slip.

They didn't slip on my head. I don't think I'd go on a run with them, but, you know. But the thing that caught me up about them is that the field of view, which I believe is like 51 degrees, it's not big enough for the stuff that you're looking at. So like you'll see digital content overlaid in front of you. Like I played a game of Domino's connected with somebody else wearing a pair of the snap specs. and we were both looking at the same digital domino's board. I had like my hand, they had their hand, and we were playing together.

But like I would constantly not be able to see the board on the table when I looked at my hand of stuff or when I looked at the other person. And so the digital illusion, I kept losing it. And I thought that like kind of neutered the entire point of what is supposed to make this product interesting. Right. And that's an expensive product too at 22.

$200. Do you think that those have any legs? Are they going to catch on? I mean, the avatars don't have legs, but do the glasses have legs? I don't think these are going to catch on. They're so expensive, and they just, they don't have a super clear, like, what do you need them for outside of, like, this? I mean, as a piece of technology, they're very interesting.

They're very cool, but, like, I'm not going to wear these anywhere in my regular day-to-day life that I can think of. and they violate the fundamental principle of wearable technology which is they have to be comfortable and you have to want to wear them like to put them on your face i'll give them like a six on comfort based on my very limited testing and like a three on why would i want to wear them for anything when my phone or my computer can do anything techie much better than i think what is possible with these glasses. And these glasses also set up a very weird interaction of like I could set up a

YouTube video playing in the corner of my vision. But unlike something like the Vision Pro or met as VR glasses, these are like real glasses. You can like see my eyes through right very clearly. But I could watch a video and nobody would have any idea of watching a video. So it created this very strange and weird and icky social situation that I would rather not anybody worry about. And I would just like to use my own eyes or regular glasses to look at people. This plays a bit into my last question here, which is there's all these new glasses coming out. This is the most backlash we've seen on wearable technology in a really long time.

It feels a little out of touch for these companies to keep racing forward, keeping releasing glasses like this. You know, Neely often says that he'd be the most powerful politician in the world if he just knew everyone's name and face, but that would break down our social standards significantly. Do you think that these companies, in general, are going to have any luck with these glasses? Because I don't think really anyone is asking for more cameras on their face. The long story short is that I've always been a skeptic of smart glasses, despite, you know, being the wearables lady, testing, all of them. There are times in use cases, specific enterprise or work-based use cases, and I think this is true for all AI wearables, where it makes a whole lot of sense.

But when you have a company with certain incentives for engagement where they want you to be using it all the time so they can hoover up all of your data, it starts to make a lot less sense and feels a lot more invasive in like the ways we do things and how we interact with each other to the point where I'm just like, is anybody asking for this? Is this a problem that needs fixing? And lots of people who I talk to say no. But the tech companies are very much like, this will replace your phone. And will it, will it? Do we just think that everyone's looking for the next computing paradigm, you know, because Apple thinks that's folding phones now. Well, Apple also has kind of weighted a very singular toe into the AI wearable space. You know, they announced audio intelligence and we will be covering.

audio intelligence and more depth as time goes by because it's kind of a complicated thing to really nail this new world of AI wearables where not only are you a steward of your own privacy, you start to have to think about how are you going to be a steward of everyone else's privacy around you. And so I have a lot of thoughts. I'm trying to put them together in a way that is, smart, which is harder than it looks, because it's such a brave new world out there. But we will be talking about this a lot more. Jay, do you have any final thoughts on these? What do you think about smart glasses?

When I reviewed the meta Rayband Gen 2 last year, it was very obvious that they're super useful for like taking photos of my toddler, like, right away without having to take out my camera or listening to a podcast while walking around. Like that stuff is like super great. Utility is so obvious. But all the privacy concerns about having a camera on your face that is, it's very hard to tell when somebody else is recording. And it's, there's just so much else that's like so icky about it that I think way outweighs the,

what makes them so good. So it's really tricky in that they're interesting products, but I think it's all, it's going to be almost impossible. for these companies to overcome these privacy hurdles, unless they make some kind of drastic change that I don't even know what that might be. Yeah. Well, JV, thank you for joining us. This has been the Vergecast.

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