On 1 November 2024, in an interview with the Financial Times, Francesco Milleri, CEO of EssilorLuxottica, ventured a prediction: smart glasses “will replace smartphones, just as streaming platforms replaced CDs”[1]. Since that prophecy, the market has changed scale: EssilorLuxottica claims to have sold more than seven million glasses equipped with artificial intelligence in 2025. Do the obstacles that had contributed to the failure of Google Glass still remain? What uses could impose these new objects in our daily lives? Is the general public ready to adopt them? And can our legal, social and behavioural norms keep pace with their spread? An examination of the applications, the resistances and the possible consequences of the advent of connected glasses makes it possible to sketch a few answers.
More than ten years after the failure of Google Glass, the dazzling comeback of smart glasses gives cause for reflection. Let us therefore take a small step back to better understand what happened. In 2014, the early adopters, nicknamed “glassholes” by part of the population, were highly critical of the product launched by the Mountain View giant. Beyond battery life that was too short and a limited user interface, other factors led Google to halt the launch: a practically visceral social rejection and venues refusing their use for reasons of confidentiality or intellectual property.
In 2026, the situation has changed in several respects, starting with a commercial adoption that is far more rapid. Professional uses have helped demonstrate the value of the format in industry, logistics and healthcare, while Meta and EssilorLuxottica chose, with Ray-Ban and then Oakley, to bring smart glasses into the world of consumer products. In industry, they can notably make it easier to inspect equipment, document operations or speed up maintenance training thanks to instructions displayed in the field of vision. In logistics, they allow an operator to keep their hands free while accessing contextual information. Healthcare, too, offers significant prospects, from remote assistance in telemedicine or surgery in the countries of the Global South[2], to certain applications intended for people with a visual or hearing impairment.
Beyond these commercial advances, the manufacturers’ promise for 2030-2035 lies, as the head of EssilorLuxottica argues, in the at least partial replacement of the smartphone. To achieve this, several technological obstacles will still have to be removed: further miniaturising the components, improving battery life, enriching the display without weighting down the frame, and offloading a growing share of the computation to remote infrastructure. Contextual artificial intelligence could then make it possible to translate a conversation in real time, to identify a place or an object being looked at, to guide a journey or to provide a piece of information without taking a phone out of one’s pocket. The break would then be profound: in moving from the smartphone to the glasses, the digital interface would gradually leave the hand to move closer to the user’s perceptual field. But is society ready for this change?
The technical limitations remain considerable, particularly on energy autonomy: while manufacturers announce increasing usage times, will they manage to keep their commitments? Nothing is less certain, since the energy requirement rises with usage. The question of cost also remains decisive as the glasses take on functions close to those of a smartphone. But public distrust could constitute an even more lasting obstacle. According to a survey published by the CNIL in May 2026, 67% of the French people questioned consider that connected glasses pose a risk to privacy and 36% say they wish to acquire some[3]. Above all, 81% believe that the risk of being photographed or filmed without consent is greater with connected glasses than with a smartphone. The concerns bear notably on image rights, consent, surveillance and the possibility of no longer knowing with certainty when a recording is taking place.
These concerns are not a matter of declared opinion alone. In mid-August 2026, the German NGO HateAid filed a criminal complaint against Meta, EssilorLuxottica and several distributors, considering that the glasses allow clandestine recordings liable to breach German law — an analysis that at this stage remains that of the NGO, the Frankfurt prosecutor’s office carrying out a preliminary examination[4]. A few days earlier, the courts of England and Wales had announced the confiscation of these glasses at the entrance to their premises[5]. The State of New York had already banned, as of 20 July 2026, wearable devices integrating notably recording functions in its courtrooms[6]. Two American consumers, Gina Bartone and Mateo Canu, have moreover brought a class action in California against Meta Platforms and Luxottica of America, accusing them notably of collecting and processing private audiovisual data[7].
In France, the CNIL is sounding the alarm on these risks, recalling that the right to respect for private life applies in all places, private as well as public, and that the non-consented recording of a person’s image in a private place constitutes a criminal offence[8]. This awareness does not, however, seem to be curbing the abuses already revealed by Swedish media: subcontractors employed by Meta in Kenya are said to have viewed intimate scenes filmed by users of connected glasses, sometimes placed on a bedside table[9]. This news gives an indication of the scale that a consumer use of these products could take on, and calls for a closer look at the legal framework governing them.
The paradox is that connected glasses are not arriving in a legal vacuum. In France as in the European Union, respect for private life, image rights, the GDPR and certain criminal provisions already govern the capture and processing of personal data. The difficulty has more to do with applying these rules to an object whose function can become hard for third parties to perceive. Taking out a smartphone and pointing it at someone is generally an identifiable gesture; looking at a person while wearing glasses can prevent that person from knowing whether they are simply being observed, photographed, filmed or analysed by an artificial intelligence. Following the revelations concerning the processing of certain images from Meta glasses, members of the European Parliament questioned the European Commission on the application of the GDPR. For its part, the CNIL announced that it wanted to open discussions with its counterparts so that this work could be carried out at the level of the European Data Protection Board. The forward-looking question is therefore less that of the existence of the law than that of its capacity to remain effectively applicable when capture becomes mobile, discreet and potentially permanent.
The risks associated with connected glasses are not, however, limited either to data protection or to image rights. The digital uses that precede them have already provided many clues as to their possible cognitive consequences. Intensive use of certain social networks is associated with difficulties affecting several dimensions of attention and inhibitory control, while digital multitasking draws more heavily on cognitive resources and can increase certain physiological markers of stress[10]. Research in neuroscience also shows that, in young people with problematic use of the internet or the smartphone, the brain does not mobilise in the same way certain functions essential to maintaining attention, resisting distractions or controlling impulses.[11]. More recently, the first work devoted to generative artificial intelligence suggests that, by delegating certain intellectual operations to the machine, its use can also change the way we mobilise our critical thinking[12].
Connected glasses could take this evolution a step further. Until now, the user still has to perform a gesture to access their digital world: taking out their phone, looking at their watch or opening their computer. If the glasses gradually become a substitute for the smartphone, notifications, social networks, browsing and artificial-intelligence assistants will be able to accompany their field of vision directly. Yet research on augmented reality already shows that adding visual information can change mental load depending on the quantity, the relevance and the moment at which it is presented[13]. The risk would therefore no longer be only that of the time spent in front of screens, but that of the gradual disappearance of the moments without digital solicitation. In the long run, the border between attention paid to the physical world and attention captured by the digital environment could become much harder to preserve. The long-term consequences of such a change remain to be measured; the mechanisms liable to produce them, for their part, are already sufficiently documented for the question to be asked as of today.
At this stage, it is difficult to answer the question. While it is undeniable that this product can bring significant progress in industry, healthcare and many other sectors, its consumer use raises, as we have seen, a certain number of risks, and it remains hard to see how the legislator will manage to govern them within the timeframe of the market. One can also, more broadly, question the invasive character of these new tools. We are already extremely connected. What will become of our interactions if glasses come between us, capable of distracting us at any moment — with an effect potentially more disruptive than that of an interlocutor who interrupts the conversation to pick up their phone? The real upheaval could thus be less technological than social: tomorrow, we might no longer know whether our interlocutor is only looking at us, translating our words, questioning an AI about what they see, receiving a notification or recording the scene. If these glasses become a major interface of our daily lives, the question will perhaps no longer be only whether we have agreed to live connected, but whether we will still be able to identify the moments when we are not. So, will we accept this permanent connection, or will these glasses on the contrary constitute the point from which part of society will seek to take its distance from the digital world? A major unknown also remains: will the social acceptability of this permanent connection be the same everywhere? The regulatory responses already observed show at least that the spread of the technology will not necessarily follow a uniform trajectory. As a result, more broadly, the advent of connected glasses forces us to anticipate, far more than we do today, the place we want to give to the technologies that are about to transform our daily lives.
[1]Financial Times, “EssilorLuxottica boss says smart glasses will ‘replace’ smartphones”, 1 November 2024: https://www.ft.com/content/17bbc42c-543c-4535-9dbf-744b9010f7e4
[2] Zhan Zhang, Enze Bai, Karen Joy et al., “Smart Glasses for Supporting Distributed Care Work: Systematic Review”, JMIR Medical Informatics, vol. 11, 28 February 2023, e44161: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10015357
[3] CNIL, “Connected glasses: the CNIL calls for vigilance”, 11 May 2026: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/lunettes-connectees-appel-a-la-vigilance
[4]Les Echos, “Meta called out in Germany by a privacy-rights association over its connected glasses, EssilorLuxottica falls on the stock market”, 13 August 2026: https://investir.lesechos.fr/actu-des-valeurs/la-vie-des-actions/meta-epingle-en-allemagne-par-une-association-de-defense-des-droits-prives-pour-ses-lunettes-connectees-essilorluxottica-decroche-en-bourse-2246835
[5]The Guardian, “England and Wales ban Meta Glasses from courtrooms”, 11 August 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/11/meta-glasses-banned-from-courts-in-england-and-wales?utm/
[6]Les Echos, “When connected glasses discreetly train AIs”, 2 April 2026: https://www.lesechos.fr/idees-debats/editos-analyses/quand-les-lunettes-connectees-entrainent-discretement-des-ia-2228604
[7]Bartone et al. v. Meta Platforms, Inc. et al., No. 3:26-cv-01897, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, action filed on 4 March 2026
[8]CNIL, “Connected glasses: the CNIL calls for vigilance”, 11 May 2026: https://www.cnil.fr/fr/lunettes-connectees-appel-a-la-vigilance
[9]Le Monde, 6 March 2026, https://www.lemonde.fr/economie/article/2026/03/06/ia-quand-les-sous-traitants-des-lunettes-meta-a-nairobi-voient-tout-vraiment-tout_6669773_3234.html?search-type=classic&ise_click_rank=3
[10] Rosa Angela Fabio and Giulia Picciotto, “The relationship between social media use and adolescent inattention and impulsivity: A systematic review”, 2026, DOI: 10.1016/j.ridd.2026.105237: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41616599/
[11] M. León Méndez, I. Padrón, A. Fumero and R. J. Marrero, “Effects of internet and smartphone addiction on cognitive control in adolescents and young adults: A systematic review of fMRI studies”, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, vol. 159, April 2024, 105572
[12] Hao-Ping Lee, Advait Sarkar, Lev Tankelevitch et al., “The Impact of Generative AI on Critical Thinking: Self-Reported Reductions in Cognitive Effort and Confidence Effects From a Survey of Knowledge Workers”, Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Association for Computing Machinery, 25 April 2025: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3706598.3713778
[13] Nor Farzana Syaza Jeffri and Dayang Rohaya Awang Rambli, “A review of augmented reality systems and their effects on mental workload and task performance”, Heliyon, vol. 7, no. 3, 2021, e06277: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33748449/
