It was a tale of two “Metas” during Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Connect keynote today. The company’s CEO seemed to rush through updates about the “metaverse” (Quest 3 and Horizon) in favor of AI and glasses. His tone and body language were both starkly contrasted from one topic to the other — spending, at best, 30 seconds on Horizon. And for good reason: Meta’s advances in AI and glasses are providing (and will increasingly provide) value to everyday consumers. But more on that in a bit.

Virtual-Reality Headsets Won’t Go Mainstream — Now Or, Likely, Ever

The big “metaverse” news at Meta Connect was the launch of Meta Quest 3S, a high-quality mixed-reality headset for $299. While this price point makes VR headsets a bit more price-accessible to mainstream audiences, one of the biggest friction points to mass VR adoption remains: form factor.

Nearly three-quarters of VR headset sessions last under an hour (and over a third are less than 30 minutes). Simply put, VR headset fatigue is very real, so Meta’s assertions about Quest 3 as a “mainstream” experience or a path to becoming a general computing platform are far from the realities of everyday consumer behavior. The same, however, cannot be said for Meta’s other hardware endeavor.

Smart Glasses Put Computing Power Into A Familiar Form Factor

The combination of AI, a conversational user experience, and stylish glasses make for a perfect storm of usability. Not only do Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses make it easy to experience a new category of computing, but they are also useful to the masses … today. And the tech (both software and hardware) is rapidly becoming even more useful, from doing live translations to remembering where you parked.

And with a peek into Orion (Meta’s decade-long foray into full-holographic augmented-reality glasses), Meta pretty convincingly demonstrated a future 3D computing platform that solves for the many headwinds that virtual reality (VR) and VR headsets won’t overcome.

As the smart tech behind Meta’s various glasses matures, it has the potential to disrupt everyday consumers’ interactions with brands — making it more easy and more instant to transact. As always with emerging tech, Forrester advises brands to test and learn while tempering expectations around any immediate ROI.

Forrester clients: Let’s chat more about this via a Forrester guidance session.