As Channel News reported ahead of Meta Connect 2025, the event was meant to showcase Meta’s new Ray-Ban smart glasses and the Oakley Meta Vanguard smart glasses for athletes.

Both products were pitched as milestones in bringing smart eyewear closer to the mainstream.

On stage, Meta hit two snags. A mass trigger of the Ray-Ban glasses’ Live AI overloaded Meta’s own servers. “We DDoS’d ourselves,” as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth put it.

Then a bug stopped a WhatsApp video-call notification from appearing. (Bosworth said rehearsals ran perfectly and the bug has since been fixed.)

The glitches attracted attention because reliability is becoming the deciding factor for consumer uptake.

The more ambitious the features – on-lens displays, wrist-band gesture control, voice AI – the more any small misfire risks denting consumer confidence.

The Oakley Meta Vanguard part of the showcase went smoothly.

Smart glasses may soon be crossing over to the mainstream, as smart watches already have

The sport-focused glasses record up to 3K video, claim around nine hours of battery life, and integrate with platforms like Strava and Garmin.

Unlike the Ray-Ban model with a display, Vanguard skips a built-in screen and leans into performance tracking and rugged design.

Smart glasses have remained a niche product since Google’s ill-fated Glass project in 2012, but there are signs the category is finally edging out of its experimental phase.

Snap drew buzz, if not huge sales, after launching Spectacles in 2016.

The camera-first glasses, aimed at those wanting to take photos and record short videos, helped define a clear use case but later led to sizable inventory write-downs, underlining the difficulty of sustaining demand beyond early adopters.

Google has re-entered the frame, partnering with Warby Parker on Android XR eyewear, with Google committing significant funding to the collaboration.

Reports point to a 2026–27 debut window, but timing is not locked in.

Apple is also widely reported to be exploring smart glasses, with rumoured timelines in the 2026-27 range.

The question now is whether Meta’s latest glasses can cross into the mainstream rather than settling as another much-hyped product only embraced by a handful of early-adopting technophiles.