Meta glasses, patents and advertising

01Seven million camera glasses

EssilorLuxottica sold more than 7 million Meta glasses in 2025, about three times the 2024 figure.1 In the third quarter of 2026 its wearables revenue grew 20% year on year, to €1,261m over nine months.2

The range now runs from Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 ($449) and the camera-less Ray-Ban Meta Audio ($349) to Meta Ray-Ban Display with the Meta Neural Band ($799, September 2025). Meta states that all camera models carry an LED that lights during capture.34

02What the frame holds

A camera and a microphone array sit at eye and ear level, with open-ear speakers in the temples, a touchpad and capture button on the right temple, a processor and batteries inside the temples. The first generation, from 17 October 2023, had a 12 MP camera.5

The glasses in the video are a procedural Blender model of a Wayfarer-style frame, built for this explainer. Part positions are schematic, not taken from Meta's design files.

03Phone and glasses

On a phone, a person types and taps, and reads a screen held in the hand. On glasses, input is the camera view, voice and, with the Neural Band, wrist muscle signals; output is open-ear audio and, on the Display model, a screen in the right lens. Gaze appears in Meta's filings, not in the shipping Ray-Ban models.

An ad on a phone sits on a screen. Meta's filings place content in what the wearer sees and hears, chosen from what the camera, the microphones and the wearer's attention report.

04419 patents from Sony

Sony Group Corporation agreed to transfer XR patents to Meta Platforms, Inc. under a confirmatory assignment dated December 2025. The patents were filed between 2010 and 2022 and cover head-mounted displays, XR glasses, display control and image processing; examples are US 10,816,814, a head-worn filter that lets a camera film the wearer's face, and US 10,893,212, a camera array that estimates depth.67 The seller is Sony Group, not Sony Interactive Entertainment. The price is not disclosed.8

None of the reported Sony patents covers advertising. They add hardware: optics, displays and cameras. The USPTO assignment record itself was not opened for this article; the figures come from Road to VR, ZDNet Korea and IAM.

05Meta's filings

Nine Meta filings describe the mechanics of camera-led, attention-aware content. A published application is not a granted patent, and three of these are abandoned.

Two Meta statements sit next to the filings. Live AI, launched in early access on 16 December 2024, adds video to Meta AI, and Meta wrote that "eventually live AI will, at the right moment, give useful suggestions even before you ask".9 Since 16 December 2025 Meta uses text and voice chats with Meta AI to personalise content and ads; the announcement does not name the glasses.10

No Meta filing found for this article bills advertisers for real-world gaze. That idea appears in an older Google patent.11

06Status, 3 November 2026

1. No ads ship on Meta glasses.
2. Several of these filings are abandoned.
3. A patent application describes an option, not a product.
4. Camera, microphones, capture LED and wrist EMG already ship.

Meta changed the privacy defaults in April 2025: AI features on by default and voice recordings stored for up to a year, without an opt-out.12