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That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox. Welcome to the Vercast, the flagship podcast of The Metiverse. Still, I'm David Malth. And today we're talking about smart glasses. Meta announced a boatload of new glasses last night.
There's new Ray Ben-Mettas, including an audio-only version, and some new VR glasses. And last week, Snap showed off its new specs. The Vercast JPeters and Vsong are here to talk about it. But first, here's what's happening on the verge today. I'm David Malth.
And this is 90 seconds on the verge for Thursday, September 24th, 2026. 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 claims that Williams had allegedly solicited donations of Nintendo eShop 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 Albanis said the agent infiltrated Australia's Medicare Statistics Portal and accessible public and non-public files.
In a statement to the Verge, opening AI 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 the Verge.com. That's 90 seconds on the Verge for Thursday, September 24th, 2026. Are you tired of hearing about business, tech and finance from the Rose? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with a Vox Media podcast network.
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Get started today. J and V, welcome to the Vergecast. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Alright, so we got to start with MediConnect.
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 Medi? So my question to you is, have you forgotten how you feel about Medi? No, I have not forgotten how I feel about Medi. It is.
That was a really big effort across, it was me, Mia, Hayden and Lauren, just kind of all, I called it the Meadow Voltron while we were writing it and just kind of all coming in with their various expertise about how people feel about Medi kind of ties into the various tentacles it has all, 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 in to 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 Muse 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.
So at least if you're chatting with 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 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 do do do do do do do.
Like you don't know. It's sometimes be like let me check on that for you and then just sign this way. 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 version that could very much change before it gets public but I was telling them like it 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 oh yeah so these little granola bite bars they're not part of the catalog and I was like what catalog. So let's let's break down exactly what new hardware they announced specifically with the Raven glasses. So you mentioned they have a new meta Raven 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 just there's a lot that's coming out and what I'm going to say is it's more. There's 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 Raven 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 that. 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 it lasts longer one hour longer than the gen 2 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 xenomodel and that's kind of like a geometric cat eye situation and then that's the gen 3s. And these are still Raybann meta correct they're not just the meta okay. Yeah these the some crazy naming conventions as well these are still the Raybann meta gen 3 and then we saw the Raybann meta audio glasses which are no camera that's the big thing no camera.
Well how are they pitching the no camera version I mean obviously there's a big backlash against smart glasses right now. It is probably trying to salvage the reputation a little bit it doesn't help as much when releasing camera versions and non 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 talked to I mean a thing to know about Connect is you're walking around Metas campus and like the vast majority of people are wearing meta glasses in some way so it's like this alternate reality universe or like everybody's chill with glasses. Yeah but for the audio focus 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 they're just they're like thinner temple bands that like sit on your ears and I think that the styles look nicer personally they just look that much less like computer glasses on your face.
Thank Mad Men 50's Club Master 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 what I mean it has a different type of glasses called new ones audio and they're just basically using AI to enhance the audio kind of give it a conversation boost it's similar to 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. Well 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 upfront so it's not necessarily like a extra fee or whatnot and then you just have it there it meant to be kind of an aid for people who need that. So 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 the 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?
But they were very adamant and insisting that this has been in the work since 2024 back when they launched the meta glasses there was a press event and Boz was there and he's just like yeah you know we know that people love using the audio we're exploring audio only so he's 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 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 immersive content. Right well better than metaverse but speaking of metaverse it seems that meta has not completely given up on the metaverse as they have announced a new pair of VR AR mixed reality glasses. Jake 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 a 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 so micro LED display it looks very nice though so you put them on and you see color pass through other things around you and of course there's some it's not the same as looking at the real world with your real eyeballs right 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 the on video is doing is pinch a pinch lots of hand tracking. So they're checking in for the vision pro. Yeah and so the combo of that you just you you interact with it a little bit differently than you want to be our 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 these more of like a quest three where it's sort of a lot of games or is 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 Saber made specifically for the glasses called Beat Saber Flux where instead of like waving your controllers with the imaginary ones 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 like these like poles and dots that would appear on the screen.
I thought it was 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 Endgame where I think they're on a spaceship it's been years since I've seen the movie and 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 many minutes? No 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 like it's kind of interesting but Greed's head came out of the frame. 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 like hunt and pick 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 what it's about to go. Interesting. It was surprisingly good. I have nails on and it worked with my nails which can't say the same for every keyboard.
I think if you're having trouble thinking about what this device is like it's like what if you had a vision pro? If you didn't weigh a kajillion pounds on your head and I actually forgot almost the most important part of the glasses is everything all the compute and battery and storage and stuff in the glasses is in a puck like with a vision pro. It even has a belt clip like 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 pros M5 chip is in the actual glasses. Is this the processing in the puck or is it in the glasses as well?
All the glasses probably won't heat up. I don't think so. I actually asked because when we were watching the movie the movie clip I heard a fan and I was trying to ask where's that fan coming from and the fan is coming from the puck itself and they caution like oh we haven't you know dial in all that fans 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 $3,200 or whatever Apple is charging for the vision for these days? You almost feel like maybe this is what Apple should have done first.
It's 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 it's just way less burdensome than the heavy bulky headset of it all. Instead of just pair of glasses you can take on and off. You 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 swooshing 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 ex-realist 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. Is there anything that they're calling it that meta is calling these glasses?
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Search for and follow The Long Game, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get into a competing product now. The snaps 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. Jake, 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-ray band display, which could show something in one lens and put two in front. And that opens up all sorts of opportunities on how you can overlay digital content on top of the world. They're totally standalone products. You don't have to connect them to your phone or anything.
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 it's so thick and so bulky because everything is on the glasses.
I only got to wear them for like five minutes, ten minutes at a time. So I don't know over the course of a full four hour charge where they start to really drag on your face. I shook my head a few times, kind of like 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 the thing that got 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 you'll see digital content overlaid in front of you. I played a game of dominoes connected with somebody else wearing a pair of the snap specs. We were both looking at the same digital dominoes board. I had my hand, they had their hand, and we were playing together.
But 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 kind of neutered the entire point of what is supposed to make this product interesting. Right. And that's an expensive product too at $2,200.
Yeah. 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 last ones have legs? I don't think these are going to catch on.
They're so expensive and they just 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.
Right. Because they 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 techy 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 Metas VR glasses, these are like real glasses. You can like see my eyes through it right very clearly, but I could watch a video and nobody would have any ideas watching a video.
So created this very strange and weird and icky social situation that I would rather not anybody worry about. And I would just like use my own eyes over 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, Neil I 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 classes? 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 being the wearables lady testing, all of them. There are times and 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 the ways we do things and how we interact with each other to the point where I'm just like, is that a way of asking for this?
Is this a problem that needs fixing? And lots of people I talk to saying 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 holding phones now, but? 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 in 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. We just 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 Raybanchion 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 podcasts 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 very hard to tell when somebody else is recording. Yeah. And it's just so much else.
It's like so icky about it that I think way outweighs the what makes them so good. So it's really tricky in that very interesting products, but I think it's always 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, Jay V, thank you for joining us. This has been the VergeCast.
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