Solos is suing Meta over its RayBan smart glasses, due to it infringing on patents.
According to a report from Bloomberg , Solos is seeking “multiple billions of dollars in damages” and is also looking for an injunction that could prevent Meta from selling its smart glasses, as part of this lawsuit.
The company also claims that the first-gen smart glasses violate multiple patents covering “core technologies in the field of smart eyewear.”
For those who might be unaware of what Solos is, they are a smaller company that sells smart glasses as well, including the AirGo 5 glasses that let you control music playback and automatically translate speech into different languages, and also integrate ChatGPT for answering questions and searching the web.
So they are very similar to what Meta offers with its EssilorLuxottica partnership for RayBan and Oakley glasses. Solos also claims that Meta and Oakley (a subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica) employees had insight into the company’s products and roadmaps. Solos introduced Oakley employees to its smart glasses tech back in 2015, and were given a pair to test in 2019.
Meta’s smart glasses are the fastest-growing product category in tech right now
The Meta RayBans have been insanely popular , even before the Gen 2 was announced late last year. Meta’s partner, EssilorLuxottica, wanted to double the capacity for manufacturing these glasses to 20 million, but there’s so much demand that they will need to push it to 30 million units in 2026.
Meta is surprised by how well these are selling, not just the regular Meta RayBans but also the Meta RayBan Display product that was also announced late last year. This is because Meta decided to use a popular pair of glasses and embed their cameras and other smart tech inside. Making it so people actually want to wear these.
In fact, these are doing so well for Meta that it ditched the Metaverse to focus on smart glasses.
