David Brown

No, not that one.

We're still a month away from the groundbreaking news that Facebook will rebrand to Meta, embed everything on a virtual reality space known as the Metaverse.

This announcement is more modest.

Facebook has teamed up with Ray-Ban manufacturer Essilor Luxottica to enter the smart glasses category.

Here's CEO Mark Zuckerberg teeing it up.

Ray-Ban Stories One look at the form factor of these glasses and the inspiration seems obvious.

Wired magazine outright calls them copycats of Snap's spectacles.

Even the name, Ray-Ban Stories, seems to be a thumb in Snap's eye, since Stories is the name of the feature Facebook copied from Snap in the first place.

Just like Snap's Spectacles and Epiphany Eyewear before them, Facebook's glasses are simple-looking frames with an embedded camera and a small LED recording light.

Just like Snap's, Facebook's version sells at a relatively low price point, starting at $300.

And just like Spectacles, these glasses produce video that integrates easily with your social media feeds, in this case on Facebook and Instagram.

Rayman stories do come in a few more styles and colors than spectacles, and they have a speaker that lets you activate them by voice.

But otherwise, they seem to be executing one of Facebook's tried-and-true plays.

Rip off its competitor as brazenly as possible and move on.

Except, to everyone's surprise, these smart glasses are destined to become something much more than a mere copycat, because one important addition is coming.

Generative AI.

And that will change everything.

They will become Meta's buzziest hardware product and open the door to a host of new concerns, like who is actually receiving the images you're capturing with your face and what happens to that data afterwards.

And what it means when one of the world's most powerful data brokers is also the company making the very glasses on your nose

Meta is about to break away from the pack in the wearables race.