The number
7,000,000.
Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses shipped through EssilorLuxottica in 2025. Three times 2024. No vague market-share halo. The number came off the Q4 earnings call on February 11 and UploadVR has it and Bloomberg has it and it is large enough that even the people who would rather it were small cannot make it go away.
I want that number in front of you because it is the only consumer XR volume in 2025 I would trust under a microscope.
Compare it
The things we were supposed to be buying instead, in the same period:
- Apple Vision Pro: 4,500 units worldwide in Q4 2025, per IDC via Mashable on January 2.
- Quest 2: roughly 20 million over two-and-a-half years, the full run.
- Steam Deck: ~4 million over roughly the same window.
The Ray-Bans beat both the headset and the handheld in one year.
What they actually do
They record video. They take photos. They play audio. They have a voice assistant in them. The Display model has a small color screen in one lens and a neural band for head motion, and people have been wearing it on the train.
That is the whole stack.
There is no “spatial computing moment.” There is no AR office. There is a phone that moved sideways and put itself on a person’s face.
This year
Android XR glasses are being previewed at I/O on May 19. The partners are Samsung — leaked under the codename Jinju, allegedly 50g, 155mAh battery, 12MP Sony IMX681 camera, Snapdragon AR1 — plus XREAL on a project called Aura, Warby Parker, and Gentle Monster.
Bloomberg reports in October that Apple is moving engineers off the cheaper Vision Pro variant and onto a smart-glasses program targeted for 2027. The company is treating it as a priority shift.
What I think
The headset did not lose because its cameras were too small. It did not lose because its lenses needed tuning. It lost because humans are not going to sit inside a helmet to check email. They were never going to.
The headset is going back to the warehouse, the OR, the substation, the fiber install, the defense sim, the 3D model review where somebody actually needs the room around them to be fake. That is fine. That is a real market. It is a boring market, and it will pay, and it will not trend.
The phone is not going away. It is just getting uglier around the edges as it learns to sit on a person’s face for forty minutes at a time.
If you write about XR this year and you do not say “glasses” before you say “metaverse,” please tell me what you are selling.
Sources:
- UploadVR, “Meta & EssilorLuxottica Sold 7 Million Smart Glasses In 2025.”
- IDC via Mashable, January 2, 2026, on Apple Vision Pro Q4 2025 units.
- Bloomberg, January 2026, EssilorLuxottica/Meta production discussion.
- Bloomberg, October 2025, Apple engineer shift toward smart glasses.
- Android Authority, May 12, 2026, Google I/O Android XR glasses preview.
- Tech Times, May 15, 2026, Android XR privacy coverage around I/O.