Meta strikes long-term deal with Ray-Ban maker following rumors of possible Google partnership

Ben Schoon | Sep 17 2024 - 11:15 am PT

Smart glasses are still largely a dream as the hardware just doesn’t fit the vision yet, but there’s been significant progress. One shining example has been Meta’s Ray-Ban series of smart glasses, and that partnership has now been renewed for years to come.

The company behind Ray-Ban glasses is EssilorLuxottica, which has been putting out eyewear products for decades now. Meta first partnered with the company back in 2019 to develop the Ray-Ban Stories, a pair of glasses with an embedded camera that could be used with Instagram and Facebook Stories to capture point-of-view pictures and video.

In 2023, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses launched to wide acclaim for their image quality, built-in speakers, and now smart features including integration with Meta’s AI.

Now, Meta has signed a “long term agreement” with EssilorLuxottica to continue developing “multi-generational smart eyewear products” following in the footsteps of those first two Ray-Ban releases. There’s no explicit word on how long the deal will last, but it’s mentioned that it will work “into the next decade.”

EssilorLuxottica explains in a press release:

EssilorLuxottica announced today that it has extended its partnership with Meta Platforms by entering into a new long term agreement, under which the parties will collaborate into the next decade to develop multi-generational smart eyewear products. The two companies have been collaborating successfully since 2019, resulting in two generations of Ray-Ban branded smart glasses that broke the barriers to adoption and redefined the potential for wearables in consumers’ lives.

This news comes as somewhat of a blow to alleged plans that Google had. It was recently reported that Google was looking to partner with EssilorLuxottica over smart glasses that would integrate the company’s Gemini AI. It’s still unclear when or how Google plans to move forward with smart glasses plans, but the company is clearly working towards that goal as it showed off “Project Astra,” a multimodal AI assistant, at Google I/O on a pair of smart glasses.

Meanwhile, Google and Samsung’s work towards a new mixed-reality experience is reportedly going to culminate in a pair of smart glasses.