On Sunday, the FBI released footage from Shamsud-Din Jabbar’s Meta glasses. Jabbar drove a rented Ford F-150 into a crowd of people on New Year’s Day in New Orleans. He brought IEDs, but they didn’t go off. He died in a shootout with police. He planned it all with a stylish pair of Ray-Bans kitted out with Meta cameras.
The Ray-Ban Wayfarer is a glasses icon. These are the glasses that Bob Dylan used to hide his eyes. The Blues Brothers escaped the cops in Illinois while wearing Ray-Bans. Don Henley sang about them in The Boys of Summer. When Corey Hart said he wore his Sunglasses at Night, he was talking about Ray-Bans. A pair of giant Ray-Bans marks the spot where musician Buddy Holly died in Iowa.
Add to that list another grim cultural moment: a man who killed 14 people and injured 35 more staring at himself in the mirror of a rented room. Testing his new technology—a pair of Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses—which he’ll use to plot a terror attack.
The FBI-provided footage is almost 4 minutes long and has no sound. It’s five different clips from multiple sources, only the first two come from Jabbar’s glasses. In the first, he’s riding through the French Quarter on a bicycle on Halloween. In the second clip, Jabbar stares into a mirror, the Ray-Bans capturing his sweaty face.
“Meta glasses appear to look like regular glasses but they allow a user to record video and photos hands-free,” Lyonel Myrthil, FBI New Orleans Special Agent in Charge, told reporters during a press conference following the release of the footage. “They also allow the user to potentially livestream through their video. Jabbar was wearing a pair of Meta glasses when he conducted the attack on Bourbon Street. But he did not activate the glasses to livestream his actions that day.”
The FBI video also included clips from security footage in the area showing Jabbar setting up for the attack. He’s wearing glasses in the videos. Jabbar placed two IEDs on the streets, which failed to detonate, and died in a shootout with police after exiting the F-150. The guns he used were purchased legally in Texas.
Meta and Ray-Ban launched their first pair of smart glasses back in 2021, but the product didn’t surge in popularity until a few years later. Other companies have attempted to market smart glasses before, but they’ve been failures. The most famous failure was Google Glass, a 2013 attempt by the tech giant to get people to put cameras on their faces.
People hated Google Glass. By 2013, many people already had a device on them that would take a photo or video of anything around them, but there was still a lot of widespread resistance to the idea of constant surveillance. Google Glass was bulky and obviously a camera and a lot of people pushed back. Some businesses even prohibited people who wore the ugly cameras from entering their stores, bars, and restaurants.
Meta’s grand innovation in the smart glasses space is concealment. Ray-Ban is one of the most iconic and ubiquitous sunglasses brands in the world. Its Wayfarer is so popular that it’s inspired countless knockoffs. A passing glance at a pair of Meta glasses doesn’t register alarm in people. Unless you’re looking closely, they’re just glasses.
Ray-Bans are iconic and cool. They’re so ingrained into American culture that we don’t think about them when we see them. When Mark Zuckerberg approached the brand to host his smartglasses platform, he was borrowing the brand’s easy coolness.
It worked. And now anyone can be effortlessly cool while recording absolutely everything around them. And no one will bat an eye.
English (US) ·