To Get Beyond ‘Pervert Glasses,’ Meta Should Remember the Lessons of VR

Back in 2016, floods of people were playing Pokemon Go in public parks and streets just about everywhere. Meanwhile, VR headsets were tech’s hot product, from the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive to PlayStation VR, Google Daydream and Samsung Gear VR.

I remember that year vividly and think about it compared to 2026, a year in which everyone seems dead-set against the rise of “pervert glasses” in a world inundated with force-fed AI.

There’s a notable backlash against wearable tech again, a call against smart glasses and those wearing them. I’m having déjà vu of the Google Glass days of 2013 — but back then, hardly anyone owned a pair. 

Not that many people own smart glasses today, either, but the numbers are in the millions. It’s more like VR, a product category that has perpetually hovered in the outlier zone, something not quite mainstream that also faced its own metaverse backlash several years ago.

Meta’s seen two waves of public backlash against its wearable products, but to me, the smart glasses pushback shows something more concerning: Meta never learned its own lessons from VR. There are some things VR did very, very right that smart glasses are doing very, very wrong.

Let me explain.

No way to try them

For years, VR was not a home product at all. It was a thing to be demoed, tried at a tech conference, a film conference or a location-based ticketed experience. The Samsung Gear VR and Google Daydream were seeded all over the place for people to experience immersive videos and games. Tribeca and Sundance showcased immersive experiences using VR headsets. Venues such as The Void built pay-to-try theme park-like experiences. You’d be wowed, for a bit, then go home. And, maybe, consider buying one.

That was the question: Was VR good enough to be worth buying? But the demos, the experiences, had their own merits. People actually had a chance to test it and figure out their own opinions for themselves.

Smart glasses in 2026 are black boxes. When I wear them around friends, they don’t know whether they’re smart glasses or not. They don’t know if they’re recording. They don’t know if I might see something in my lenses on hidden displays. They make guesses as to what I do with them. They remain a mystery for most of the people I know. Meta might have its retail stores for trying glasses, but the stores are few and far between, and the testing process is strange. And there have been very few ways to try out AR or smart glasses in art experiences.

No designed spaces to safely use them

I’ve been following the promises of augmented reality for years: Someday, we’ll find our neighborhoods transformed by overlaid information we’ll see floating in front of us, a merging of the real and virtual. We’ll find our public lives augmented. But that hasn’t happened, although I’ve seen plenty of art experiences and apps showing bits and pieces of it, in Snapchat, Pokemon Go, Apple’s various ARKit apps and AR Google Maps.

VR had another thing going for it: safe spaces with agreed-upon social contracts. 

VR headsets you buy for yourself are usually meant to be used at home. Occasionally, you might take them to a cafe or on a plane. But no one uses them while walking around the real world, and those who did for a stunt were mocked relentlessly, because it was exactly that: a stunt.

Location-based VR, which lets you walk around freely and even overlay experiences in mixed reality, is handled carefully. I just saw The Black Mirror Experience in New York, which was a ticketed event at The Shed, in a contained area with a zone carefully marked for VR, chaperoned by people who assisted with the headsets, watched people in the experience and helped when issues arose. Another VR experience I tried recently, called Space Explorers: The ISS Experience, worked similarly. That’s been how VR has worked in live events for over a decade, and it’s still how it works today.

There’s a term in immersive experience and game design that’s been around for decades: “the magic circle.” It’s the space where, within those boundaries, an agreed-upon world of play exists and is respected as separate from the rest of the world. I’m paraphrasing, but in immersive experiences set in real-world spaces, it’s a critical concept. Coming up with how an experience, and those in it, can respectfully coexist in a real-life space is hard. 

Augmented reality still hasn’t solved this problem because augmented reality isn’t a mass-adopted computing platform yet. It might be someday, and plenty of companies such as Snap, Apple, Google and Meta are pursuing AR glasses in an array of forms.

In the meantime, wearables with cameras and sensors are getting AI slapped on them and being sent out into the world, with no clear sense of how any magic circles or agreed-upon terms of use will work. Meta is just throwing this stuff out there and seeing how people will use it. 

Time to build new contracts

VR experiences “are thoughtfully designed as a kind of social contract,” says Ian Hamilton, a friend and peer on the XR beat who previously served as editor-in-chief of UploadVR before running his own newsletter and Good Virtual Reality podcast. “You surrender to an experience you want to have and you can remove yourself from it anytime.”

Ian sees the odd, unsolved social friction when it comes to smart glasses, including the way they unsettle people who aren’t looped into how they work, as he says it’s why he’s stopped wearing them in public. “I keep using my headsets because the settings in which I wear them are generally private and the experiences I have inside of them are part of a social contract that makes sense to me.”

I agree with Ian. The sad part about what’s happening right now is that Meta already built a contract around VR through years of work on Oculus and Quest headsets. In the winter, I thought Meta was pivoting too fast from VR to smart glasses and AI, and suffering the consequences of immature technology and no bridge between the standards established on Quest and the standards missing in the realm of smart glasses. Now, in a summer where everyone is calling smart glasses “pervert glasses,” and AI companies are begging for oversight after years of reckless acceleration, the criticisms are deserved.

But they’re also unfortunate, because the tech is still in its infancy and its possibilities are still taking shape, with the biggest players, including Google, Samsung and Apple, yet to enter the market.

Smart glasses and AR glasses promise to bridge the gap between us and the outside world. The reality is that smart glasses don’t actually do much with that relationship yet; they’re mostly placeholders. But we need to solve that relationship before these devices keep flying out into the world, otherwise people feel like they don’t have agency in the relationship. It’d be like wandering into someone’s immersive VR playspace without a headset. And the contracts need to be there for both the companies brokering the AI tools as well as the public spaces where they’re being used, especially with longer battery life, always-on AI, and facial recognition likely on the way.

Cory Doctorow, whose new book on AI refers to the difference between centaurs (those who use tech as tools with personal agency) and reverse centaurs (those who are being used as tools by tech), is right about what splits the benefits from the horrors of AI. It’s also what’s making early AI wearables feel so broken as a public device: Not enough people feel a sense of agency when they see them in public. The wearables need to feel like tools, and doorways, not surveillance threats. 

My only advice right now: Don’t call strangers perverts. Point your fingers at the tech companies, and hopefully, more thoughtful work on wearable tech will come. The possibilities of assistive wearable tech — for vision impairment, hearing loss, cognitive decline and more — and its potential to collapse distances and connect people are fascinating. But right now, too few people have access to the technology, and too much about it remains unclear.

I’m finding smart glasses easier to wear with each passing month. Meta’s frame designs are getting more comfortable and more like regular, everyday glasses. But I’m not finding them any easier to use or manage — or feeling any more comfortable wearing them in public. 

Comparatively, VR wasn’t so bad after all.