Ray Ban Stories, Meta’s First Foray Into Digital Wearables, Fails to Catch On With Users

While Meta continues to construct for the subsequent phase of digital connection within the metaverse, and concentrate on latest AI-based bets for immediately, it’s also still establishing its full roadmap for AR, and wearables that may augment your worldview with digital elements.

Which it claims can also be an element of its broader metaverse vision. But really, the metaverse is VR, and AR is an entire different thing, regardless of how Meta tries to conflate the 2, within the hopes of claiming overall tech sector leadership.

Meta’s big hope in AR is its AR glasses, that are currently scheduled for launch in 2027. But with the intention to acclimatize the marketplace for that next stage, it’s already released its first glasses model, in Ray Ban Stories, that are Meta’s try and create a trendy digital device, which also provides some connective functionality.

But to date, they haven’t been a success.

Based on a brand new report from The Verge, over 90% of Ray Ban Stories users have stopped using the device since buying the glasses.

As per The Verge:

“Internal company documents reveal that around 27,000 of the 300,000 units reportedly sold between September 2021 and February 2023 are still being commonly used every month. Last April, Meta was reported to have sold just 120,000 pairs of the Ray-Ban Stories – lower than half its 300,000 goal at the moment.”

So of the 300,000 pairs sold, only a fraction are still seeing regular use, with the limited feature set, which allows you to take pictures, take heed to music, answer phone calls, etc., seemingly not catching on with a large audience.

Which is just not surprising. Back in 2016, Snapchat released the primary iteration of its Spectacles camera-equipped sunglasses, that are functionally very much like Meta’s Ray Ban Stories device.

And nobody cared.

Well, that’s not entirely correct. Snap did see a rush of early sales hype, which led to it moving over 150k units. Nevertheless it also overestimated demand, leaving it with “a whole bunch of 1000’s” of unsold Spectacles sitting in warehouses a 12 months after launch.

That initial miscalculation ended up costing Snap over $40 million in losses, which suggests that around 300k Spectacles were never sold in that initial production run.

Yet Snap is still selling them, and it’s still sticking with the concept, which seemingly points to a future iteration of the glasses that can be fully AR-equipped, although Snap has reportedly been forced to rethink some its AR plans because of rising costs, and lower ad intake.

Meta has also scaled back its AR timeline, each through cost-cutting and production missteps, with its acquisition of microLED maker Plessey failing to deliver the advance that it hoped for its AR device.

Yet each Snap and Meta do have functional versions of their AR glasses in testing, that are already within the hands of external users for initial experiments.

They’re not polished yet, they usually’re not ready for the subsequent level of full industrial availability. But each firms are working on the subsequent stage, which is able to put digital overlays onto your real-world view.

As such, it’s hard to know what to remove from the initial response to Ray Ban Stories.

I mean, it’s an interesting project, however it also seems unlikely that Meta would expect huge sales from this primary iteration of the device, which, on balance, is just not a serious functional leap over others available in the market.

Technically, they’re loads more advanced, but when it comes to what you possibly can actually do with them, they’re not way beyond what Spectacles has long provided. So I don’t know that Meta was really attempting to push these as a serious offering, or whether this was at all times going to be just the primary minor step in an extended AR development pipeline.

It looks as if Meta really needed to construct a production pipeline, and establish partnerships for the longer term, and Ray Ban Stories is just the early precursor to what comes next.

Indeed, The Verge also notes that, despite the losses, Meta’s still planning to release a second-gen version of Ray Ban Stories next 12 months, because it continues to maneuver towards the AR future.  

So while its initial foray into digitally-equipped glasses hasn’t caught on, possibly Meta sees this as a needed stepping stone for that next stage.