Home

Meta Hopes Mini Games Will Make You Forget Its Smart Glasses Are Recording You Naked

In the wake of the jarring revelation that Meta has been sending sensitive (sometimes naked) videos of Ray-Ban smart glasses owners to other real-life people in Kenya, the company has some other news that those same—suddenly very self-conscious—users of Meta-made smart glasses might want to know… Mini games are here!

That’s right—if you aren’t too busy joining the class-action lawsuit against Meta for collecting sensitive recordings of you and then sending those recordings to human reviewers, you may want to play (checks notes) GOAT or a game called 2048.

📢 BIG NEWS! 🕶️

We’re launching GOAT and 2048 on Meta Ray-Ban Displays, ambient games for the in-between moments. No controllers. No friction. Just intuitive EMG + gestures, layered into your day.

This is the future of play: human, lightweight, and present! pic.twitter.com/YZuXpVWDHi

— Dilmer 👓🔜 GDC (@Dilmerv) March 5, 2026

Both of those titles are new mini games that you can play inside the Meta Ray-Ban Display—the only pair of Meta-made smart glasses with a screen. As shown in the video above, GOAT appears to be a platformer that you control by using Meta’s Neural Band—a muscle-reading wristband that comes with the Meta Ray-Ban Display, allowing you to navigate the UI inside the smart glasses with finger gestures. And 2048, on the other hand, is a puzzle game involving numbers. I can’t say for sure, but neither seems to involve recording users of the smart glasses naked.

What does, unfortunately, pertain to recording sensitive moments are Meta’s smart glasses in general, though. Per an investigation from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet and Göteborgs-Posten, Meta’s Ray-Ban-branded smart glasses have a tendency to capture things like people using the bathroom, getting dressed, and having sex, and then send that footage to human moderators at a Kenya-based company called Sama. Meta’s right to do all of this is, of course, buried in its terms of service, but there’s a problem with that level of “consent,” which is that much of that footage was likely recorded unintentionally.

As noted in the report, there are instances where recordings captured things without the smart glasses even being on a person’s face—a woman entering the room and undressing, for example. Other seemingly unintentional recordings are of people using the bathroom or watching porn.

Not only that, but according to moderators interviewed by the newspapers, while faces are supposed to be obscured in the footage used for “annotation” purposes—videos that Meta uses to train its AI—oftentimes they’re fully visible. To put it lightly, the whole thing is, uh… bad. Think of the revelation we had with voice assistants and smart speakers back in the day, but worse, because smart glasses can see everything you’re doing as well as hear it.

But games! Let’s talk about the games. In addition to being tone-deaf, they’re also maybe not something that most people will be dying to use. Having reviewed quite a few pairs of smart glasses at this point, I can tell you that while the heads-up display (in Meta’s case, a 600 x 600 pixel monocular screen in the bottom right lens) is functional for simple notifications and alerts, it’s not something that you want to look at for long periods. I’m not sure that there’s much benefit to playing a game like that on a tiny screen glued to your eyeball as opposed to just using your phone.

To me, it’s also maybe an indicator that Meta is out of ideas at the present moment for how to expand the functionality of its smart glasses. Games aren’t a bad idea or anything, but they don’t feel particularly groundbreaking or important, and lord knows Meta is about to face some pretty tough competition soon, so I assume it’ll want to expand its head start when possible.

And the thing is, I might actually be okay with mini games on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, or at the very least, ignore them, but Meta is making it damn near impossible to swallow even the most benign update, like overglorified Sudoku. Call me a pessimist, but it’s hard to enjoy your dumb little platformer when you’re worried your smart glasses might send your uncensored credit card number to some guy halfway across the world. For now, the only mini game I want is the one where Meta actually acknowledges and respects the privacy concerns of the people who buy and encounter its gadgets, but clearly, that one is still stuck in development hell.

Source: Gizmodo

Previous

Next