Smart Glasses Are About to Replace Your Phone. The Root Goes Back to a 13th-Century Italian Monk.

Key Takeaways

• •Smart glasses sales expected to hit 20 million units in 2026 — up from 6 million in 2025
• •Meta controls 73% of the market; Ray-Ban Meta is the top seller in 60% of Ray-Ban stores across Europe and Middle East
• •Average price dropping to $300-400, making them mass-market for the first time
• •The first wearable eyeglasses appeared in Italy around 1286 — we've been putting tech on our face for 740 years

Source: Industry analysts (2026 projected)

Timeline

Something is happening with the thing on your face.

In the first half of 2025, global shipments of smart glasses rose 110 percent year-over-year. AI-enabled models represented 78 percent of all units shipped. Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses sold over 2 million pairs, making them the top-selling product in 60% of Ray-Ban stores across Europe and the Middle East. Analysts now expect 20 million smart glasses to ship in 2026 — quadrupling last year's numbers.

And it's not just Meta. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel confirmed that Snapchat will launch AR glasses in 2026 — the first major tech company to bring augmented-reality glasses to mainstream consumers. Samsung is developing its own pair. Google is reportedly building a successor to Glass. Apple has patents filed for lightweight AR spectacles. The entire industry is converging on the same idea: the next big computing device isn't in your pocket. It's on your nose.

But before we talk about where this is going, let's talk about where it started. And it starts in a monastery.

The winners of the smartphone boom think they know what the next big tech gadget is. They're putting it on your face.

— CNN Business, March 2026

THE ROOT

Around 1000 AD, a polymath named Abbas ibn Firnas in Cordoba, Spain, developed "reading stones" — polished hemispheres of quartz that could be placed on manuscripts to magnify text. The technology spread through the Islamic world and eventually reached European monks, who spent their days copying manuscripts in dim scriptoriums and desperately needed help seeing the tiny letters.

The English friar Roger Bacon described reading stones in his 1268 work "Opus Majus": "If anyone examines letters through the medium of crystal or glass or other transparent substance, if it be shaped like the lesser segment of a sphere... he will see the letters far better and they will seem larger to him."

But reading stones had a problem: you had to hold them over the page. Somewhere in northern Italy — likely Pisa or Venice, where glassblowing was most advanced — someone had the idea of mounting two magnifying lenses in a frame that balanced on the bridge of the nose. The first wearable eyeglasses.

The earliest documentary evidence comes from a sermon delivered in Florence on February 23, 1306, by Friar Giordano da Pisa. He told his congregation: "It is not yet twenty years since the art of making spectacles, one of the most useful arts on earth, was discovered. I myself have seen and conversed with the man who made them first."

There exist reading stones, recently invented for the benefit of old people whose sight has become weak.

— Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, 1268

That puts the invention around 1286. The inventor's identity is disputed — some credit Salvino D'Armate of Florence (though his claimed tombstone inscription is likely a later fabrication), others point to unnamed Venetian glassmakers. What's not disputed is the impact: for the first time in history, a technology was designed to be worn on the face to augment human capability.

THE EVOLUTION

For 500 years, eyeglasses were primarily a vision correction tool. Then humans started getting creative.

In 1784, Benjamin Franklin — tired of switching between his reading glasses and his distance glasses — cut two different lenses in half and sandwiched them together. Bifocals. A single frame that served two purposes.

In the 1920s, Sam Foster started mass-producing sunglasses on the Atlantic City boardwalk, turning eyewear from medical device to fashion accessory. By the 1960s, sunglasses were cultural signifiers — Jackie Kennedy's oversized frames, Steve McQueen's Persols.

But the idea of putting electronics on eyeglasses took longer. In 1961, Philco Corporation built a head-mounted display for the US military called the Headsight — a screen mounted on a helmet with magnetic head tracking. Ivan Sutherland created "The Sword of Damocles" in 1968 — widely considered the first augmented reality headset, though it was so heavy it had to be suspended from the ceiling.

The consumer attempts started with Google Glass in 2013. Priced at $1,500 and looking like a cyborg monocle, Glass was technically impressive but socially disastrous. People wearing them in bars and restaurants were dubbed "Glassholes." Privacy concerns were immediate and intense. Google pulled Glass from consumer sale in 2015, redirecting it to enterprise use. The lesson was clear: smart glasses needed to look like glasses first, and smart second.

THE BREAKTHROUGH

Meta and EssilorLuxottica (the company that owns Ray-Ban, Oakley, and most of the eyewear industry) absorbed that lesson completely. When they launched Ray-Ban Meta in 2023, the glasses looked almost identical to the classic Ray-Ban Wayfarer. Small cameras on either side. Directional speakers built into the temples. A touchpad for controls. And Meta AI built in — you could ask it to identify objects, translate signs, or answer questions about what you're looking at.

The price was $299. Normal-looking. Affordable. Actually useful.

By 2025, EssilorLuxottica reported that they'd sold over 2 million pairs and were scaling production capacity to 10 million annual units by end of 2026. The Snapdragon Wear Elite chip — designed specifically for smart glasses — was announced at MWC 2026, enabling features like real-time translation overlay, navigation arrows in your field of view, and AI-powered object recognition.

The average price of smart glasses is dropping to $300-400, putting them within reach of the same demographic that made AirPods ubiquitous. The US and China together are expected to control 80% of global demand.

WHY IT MATTERS

Here's the 740-year arc: in 1286, someone in Italy put glass on a frame and balanced it on their nose so they could read a manuscript. In 2026, someone in California put a camera, a computer, and an AI on a frame and balanced it on their nose so they could read the world.

The transition from smartphone to smart glasses won't be sudden. It'll be gradual, the way smartphones didn't kill laptops — they just took over certain tasks. But the trajectory is unmistakable. When you can get directions, translate languages, identify plants, and record memories just by looking through your regular-looking glasses, the phone starts to feel like a lot of effort.

A 13th-century Italian monk needed to read small text. A 21st-century commuter needs hands-free navigation. The solution for both was the same: put the technology where the eyes already are.

We've been doing this for 740 years. We're just getting started.

How did this make you feel?

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