Will Greenwald

Principal Writer, Consumer Electronics

OUR EXPERT

Will is a seasoned reviewer and certified TV calibrator with 20 years of experience, specializing in home theater, VR, smart glasses, and gaming.

Edited By:

Angela Moscaritolo

Updated August 26, 2026

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(Credit: Jeffrey Hazelwood/PCMag; Adobe Stock)

There’s been some pretty big backlash against camera-equipped AI smart glasses, to the point where they're now being called "pervert glasses." It's an understandable reaction, considering the reports of creeps, stalkers, pick-up artists, and social media influencers using them to spy on people. That's why I wrote a guide on how to spot smart glasses in the wild.

It doesn’t help that the most prominent camera-equipped AI smart glasses—Meta-powered models like the Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN—are also among the most prevalent overall. It would be understandable if you were against smart glasses solely because of their reputation. It would also be unfortunate, because smart glasses can be genuinely useful without having built-in cameras at all. In fact, that’s a growing trend among AI smart glasses, and I think they represent a much more optimistic future for wearable tech than anything with cameras.

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3 Reasons Smart Glasses Shouldn't Have Cameras

There are three reasons some smart glasses have built-in cameras: to let you take photos and videos, to power machine vision features, and to enable head tracking. Allow me to explain why none of these reasons actually make a great case for including the tech.

Even if you weren't distracted by the glare of the waveguide displays in the lenses, you probably wouldn't notice the camera unless you already knew it was there (Credit: Will Greenwald)

1. Your Phone Takes Better Photos and Videos

The primary use case for cameras in smart glasses is to capture photos and videos. When the camera isn’t being used to creep on people, it's a fun way to save memories without taking out your phone.

But this functionality is redundant. Yes, with smart glasses, you can take pictures and record video hands-free, but it won’t look as good as with your phone. Simply put, the cameras in smart glasses don’t produce great images.

Photos taken with the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 look fine, about on par with what a budget phone can muster (Credit: Andrew Gebhart)

The Ray-Ban Meta Gen 2 and its contemporaries have tiny cameras built into the end pieces of the frames that can capture 12-megapixel photos and 3K vertical video. That probably sounds like what your phone can do, but not all megapixels are created equal. We’re talking about a very tiny sensor behind a very tiny lens, and size matters a lot in cameras.

Larger sensors can capture more light per pixel, allowing them to perform better in low-light conditions. The bigger the sensor, the less noise and fuzz you’ll get when you shoot indoors. The sensors on smartphones are usually much larger than those in smart glasses. They’re also usually much higher resolution, using pixel binning to let clusters of individual on-sensor pixels work together to capture an image that’s lower resolution but takes in more light. As a bonus, they let you switch to taking photos at the sensor’s native resolution, so if you’re shooting in a well-lit environment, you can capture pictures four times the size of what glasses can give you.

This photo of my cat taken with a Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is way more detailed than any pair of smart glasses can capture (Credit: Will Greenwald)

Similarly, larger lenses can zoom in on your subject much more, letting you frame whatever you want to shoot and capture the most detail. The tiny lenses in smart glasses let you take wide-angle shots, but when you want to capture a friend, a pet, or a meal, you want to get in tight. You can either physically position yourself close to your subject, which is uncomfortable when using smart glasses, or crop, which means the 12MP image is trimmed to a fuzzy fraction of that.

Also, with a phone, you can see exactly what you’re shooting and how it’s framed. Unless your smart glasses have an in-lens display or another way to show you a live camera feed, you can’t actually frame your shot. Moreover, you can shoot in landscape format on your phone, and you aren’t limited to vertical photos and videos like you are with Meta glasses.

2. Machine Vision Belongs on a Screen, Not in Your Eyeglasses

Using cameras, smart glasses can scan your surroundings and feed the image to an AI server that can provide information about it. At its best, it can translate text in foreign languages, identify birds, and tell you more about the street you’re on or the restaurant you’re looking at. When it’s accurate, it can be very handy.

Google Lens visual search on a phone (Credit: Google)

It’s also already on your phone, which can probably do it better. On your phone, you have your pick of AI models and services, rather than being limited to the platform the glasses support. You also get visual results on a full-color touch screen instead of only through audio or, at best, through the smart glasses’ display that isn’t nearly as easy to interact with as a phone screen.

3. Head Tracking Works, But Is Barely Utilized

The third use case for cameras in smart glasses is actually useful, but very limited. Cameras enable head tracking and AR environment scanning, working with embedded motion sensors in the glasses to recognize where you are and how you’re oriented. This is called six degrees of freedom, or 6DOF, and it’s integral to VR and mixed reality headsets like the Apple Vision Pro and Meta Quest 3.

However, it’s almost completely absent on smart glasses. Display-free glasses like the Ray-Ban Meta have no reason to track your head movements. Even display-equipped glasses like the Meta Ray-Ban Display at most have limited three-degrees-of-freedom (3DOF) tracking that senses your head’s orientation, but not its position, and that relies entirely on motion sensors, no cameras required.

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The Snap Specs use cameras for machine vision and position tracking (Credit: Snap)

6DOF tracking will be much more useful on the upcoming XReal Aura and Snap Specs, both of which will have 3D interfaces that can show information not just in front of you, but all around the room. The Aura is a pair of bulkier prism-display smart glasses primarily designed for stationary use with a tethered control device. The Specs are completely self-contained and have waveguide displays, so they can be used on the go, but to be brutally honest, they look ridiculous enough that I’m not sure I’d want to wear them in public.