New Delhi: Meta appears ready to try something it hasn’t really done before with its smart glasses line: take the camera out.
According to a report from The Information, the company is developing a new pair internally called Luna that skips the camera entirely and leans instead on voice. The device could be announced during Meta Connect on September 23 and 24 before shipping begins in October, and it’s expected to come in two frame styles, Clubmaster and Burbank.
The trade-off is straightforward. Luna would remove the outward-facing camera found on Meta’s current Ray-Ban, Oakley and house-brand glasses, but it would keep six microphones and open-ear speakers pointed toward the wearer. A physical button on the side gives quick access to Meta AI, and losing the camera is reportedly letting Meta build slimmer temples something closer to a normal pair of glasses than a gadget.
That’s not a small design choice. It’s a response to a backlash that’s been building for months. Meta’s camera-equipped glasses have picked up the nickname “pervert glasses” in some corners of the internet, and it’s stuck. All of Meta’s current smart glasses use a white LED that flashes when someone takes a photo and pulses during recording, meant as a visible cue that a camera is active. In practice, plenty of people never notice it, and a market has sprung up for physically modifying the glasses to remove that LED altogether.
The fallout has been fairly concrete. Gyms including Planet Fitness ban the glasses outright, bars and pubs across the US, UK and Canada have barred them, and cruise lines like Royal Caribbean, Carnival and MSC restrict or ban their use in casinos, bathrooms and other sensitive spaces. Courts in England, Wales and parts of the US require people to surrender the glasses before entering. Meta has recently tried to patch with the underlying problem with a recent software upgrade which disabled the cameras if the capture LED is removed or damaged, by closing a loophole that let the people to keep recording while hiding the indicator but that hasn’t been enough to change the perception.
Camera-free doesn’t mean privacy-free, though. Six always-on microphones raise their own set of questions, even if they’re less visceral than a hidden camera. And Meta has isn’t backing away from cameras entirely the company is also likely to show off Project Phoenix, a more advanced mixed-reality glasses line, at the same Connect event, so this reads less like a retreat from cameras and more like Meta testing whether a lower-key, audio-first product can win back some trust.
Whether that works probably depends on how people actually feel about being recorded versus just being listened to and that’s a distinction the public hasn’t fully sorted out yet.
