Meta’s smart glasses become a buzzy and popular product in an industry with a history of failure.
The guy who slammed a pickup truck into revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street on New Year’s Day used Meta smart glasses while plotting and carrying out the attack, the FBI said Sunday.
While there is no evidence that the glasses were necessary for the assault, which killed 14 people and injured hundreds more, their use as a tool to carry out a terrorist act is a concerning development for the product, which Meta debuted in 2023.
Meta smart glasses are the company’s foray into an area where Google and Snap had previously attempted and failed: functional eyeglasses that also include many of the features of a smartphone, such as a camera, a speaker, and an AI assistant that can translate text and search the web for answers to questions. Meta’s website has models priced from $299 to $379.
Ray Ban licensed the spectacle frames, and Meta contributed the technology. Ray-Ban did not reply to a request for comment, and Meta declined to provide sales figures; last year, market research company IDC claimed that Meta had sold over 730,000 pairs, a remarkable feat in the competitive wearable electronics sector.
Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, stated on the company’s July earnings call that demand for the glasses was “still outpacing our ability to build them” and that they were “a bigger hit sooner than we expected.”
The glasses have also drawn a lot of criticism for potentially violating people’s privacy, even though they enable their users to record anything in their fields of vision. To let everyone around them know that they are recording, the glasses contain a little light. However, two Harvard students transformed a pair of the glasses into a real-time facial recognition tool last year to demonstrate that it was possible. Their technology used artificial intelligence to look for faces in the wearer’s range of vision, find internet matches, and nearly quickly display the person’s biographical details.
According to IDC, smartwatches and earbuds now dominate the smart wearable industry, but sales of smart glasses are predicted to gradually rise over the next few years.
The special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, Lyonel Myrthil, stated at a press conference on Sunday that Shamsud-Din Jabbar wore the glasses when he was renting a house in New Orleans in October and used them to take pictures of the French Quarter. Jabbar used the glasses to capture Bourbon Street, and the FBI has released the footage.
“Meta glasses look like ordinary glasses, but they let you take pictures and videos without using your hands.” Additionally, they enable the user to perhaps broadcast via their video, according to Myrthil.
“Jabbar did not turn on his Meta glasses to broadcast his actions that day, but he was wearing them when he carried out the attack on Bourbon Street. We think Jabbar wore the glasses all evening,” he added, adding that they remained on his person when NOPD neutralized him.
After driving his vehicle into crowds of people, 42-year-old Jabbar was shot and killed by police.
On Sunday, Andy Stone, a representative for Meta, told Next Tech Plus News that the firm “is in touch with law enforcement on this matter,” but he would not elaborate. In most cases, Meta complies with court orders to provide law enforcement with user information.
“Jabbar’s alleged use of the glasses shows a slight but significant escalation in the established tactics of terrorists scoping out target areas before attacking,” said Sam Hunter, head of strategic initiatives at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Education, and Technology Center.
Hunter remarked, “It’s becoming so understated that simply riding around on his bike with regular glasses doesn’t look strange.” “They are not prohibitively expensive.”
According to him, the video captured by the Meta glasses also depicts locations from a somewhat more natural perspective than would be possible with a smartphone or a camera placed on a helmet.
“When you’re trying to plan an attack, you’re really getting a sense of the eyeline, eyesight, and all the things that you’re going to want to look out for,” Hunter explained. “As you watch the footage, it becomes increasingly clear that this is how things truly appear and feel in that setting.”
“Because they’re so covert in capturing that footage, I wouldn’t be shocked if you see versions of them or people using them for attack planning in the future,” he stated.
By :- Next Tech Plus
