Google’s I/O developer conference is happening next week, and we expect news on a range of Gemini-powered, app-connected smart glasses arriving this year. Meta chose a good time to announce that it’s opened up app development for its 6-month-old Ray-Ban Display glasses.
When Meta announced its single-display smart glasses last September at the company’s Connect developer conference, many developers were surprised that there was no way to make any actual apps for them. The lack of app support made the expensive, hard-to-buy Ray-Ban Displays feel like a limited subset of what you could do on your phone.
The app development initiative announced Thursday says apps could be made as standalone experiences or connected to phone apps on iOS and Android, which could be extremely useful. Meta’s also allowing web apps to be built that can extend via phone browser into heads-up-display experiences on the glasses, which might be easier to build. It looks like a deeper version of the display-free glasses developer toolkit announced last year.
The Meta Ray-Ban Displays can show off a map, text, images or even a video in one eye.
As for what apps to expect, Meta suggests anything that could use text or images on the fly, such as news, sports or streaming media. Many of the possible apps Meta shows off in a brief video on its blog are simple games and checklists, though, which makes me wonder how distracting these types of pop-up apps would actually be on everyday glasses in the first place.
Google’s going to be discussing its own glasses app development strategies next week, and it’ll be interesting to compare how the approaches differ as big tech tries to find more ways to justify smart glasses with displays.