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

Whereas Meta continues to construct for the following section of digital connection within the metaverse, and give attention to new AI-based bets for proper now, it’s additionally nonetheless establishing its full roadmap for AR, and wearables that can increase your worldview with digital components.

Which it claims can also be part of its broader metaverse imaginative and prescient. However actually, the metaverse is VR, and AR is an entire completely different factor, regardless of how Meta tries to conflate the 2, within the hopes of claiming total tech sector management.

Meta’s massive hope in AR is its AR glasses, that are at the moment scheduled for launch in 2027. However with a purpose to acclimatize the marketplace for that subsequent stage, it’s already launched its first glasses mannequin, in Ray Ban Stories, that are Meta’s try to create a modern digital system, which additionally gives some connective performance.

However up to now, they haven’t been a success.

In line with a brand new report from The Verge, over 90% of Ray Ban Stories customers have stopped utilizing the system since shopping for 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 regularly used each month. Last April, Meta was reported to have sold just 120,000 pairs of the Ray-Ban Stories – less than half its 300,000 goal at that time.”

So of the 300,000 pairs bought, solely a fraction are nonetheless seeing common use, with the restricted characteristic set, which lets you take footage, take heed to music, reply telephone calls, and so forth., seemingly not catching on with a large viewers.

Which isn’t stunning. Again in 2016, Snapchat launched the primary iteration of its Spectacles camera-equipped sun shades, that are functionally similar to Meta’s Ray Ban Stories system.

And nobody cared.

Effectively, that’s not solely appropriate. Snap did see a rush of early gross sales hype, which led to it transferring over 150k models. However it additionally overestimated demand, leaving it with “hundreds of thousands” of unsold Spectacles sitting in warehouses a 12 months after launch.

That preliminary miscalculation ended up costing Snap over $40 million in losses, which means that round 300k Spectacles have been by no means bought in that preliminary manufacturing run.

But Snap is still selling them, and it’s nonetheless sticking with the idea, which seemingly factors to a future iteration of the glasses that will probably be absolutely AR-equipped, though Snap has reportedly been pressured to rethink some its AR plans because of rising prices, and decrease advert consumption.

Meta has additionally scaled again its AR timeline, each by means of cost-cutting and manufacturing missteps, with its acquisition of microLED maker Plessey failing to ship the advance that it hoped for its AR system.

But each Snap and Meta do have purposeful variations of their AR glasses in testing, that are already within the fingers of exterior customers for preliminary experiments.

They’re not polished but, they usually’re not prepared for the following stage of full business availability. However each firms are engaged on the following stage, which can put digital overlays onto your real-world view.

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

I imply, it’s an fascinating mission, however it additionally appears unlikely that Meta would count on enormous gross sales from this primary iteration of the system, which, on steadiness, just isn’t a serious purposeful leap over others available in the market.

Technically, they’re much more superior, however by way of what you possibly can really do with them, they’re not method past what Spectacles has lengthy offered. So I don’t know that Meta was actually attempting to push these as a serious providing, or whether or not this was all the time going to be simply the primary minor step in an extended AR growth pipeline.

It looks as if Meta actually wanted to construct a manufacturing pipeline, and set up partnerships for the long run, and Ray Ban Stories is simply the early precursor to what comes subsequent.

Certainly, The Verge additionally notes that, regardless of the losses, Meta’s nonetheless planning to launch a second-gen model of Ray Ban Stories subsequent 12 months, because it continues to maneuver in direction of the AR future.  

So whereas its preliminary foray into digitally-equipped glasses hasn’t caught on, possibly Meta sees this as a crucial stepping stone for that subsequent stage.