The man who rammed a pickup truck into revelers on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street on New Year’s Day wore Meta smart glasses when he was planning and conducting the attack, the FBI said Sunday.
While there’s no indication that the glasses were essential to the assault, which killed 14 people and wounded dozens more, their use as an aid to carry out a terrorist attack is a disturbing turn for the product, which Meta launched in 2023.
Meta smart glasses are the company’s incursion into an area where Google and Snap had tried and failed: functional eyeglasses that also provide a lot of features that a smartphone would, including a camera, a speaker and an AI assistant that can do things like translate text and search the web for answers to questions. Models retail from $299 to $379 on Meta’s website.
The glasses’ frames are licensed through Ray-Ban, and the tech is provided by Meta. Ray-Ban didn’t respond to a request for comment, and Meta declined to share sales numbers; last year, market research firm IDC estimated that Meta had sold over 730,000 pairs — a rare success in the tough wearable tech market.
In Meta’s earnings call in July, CEO Mark Zuckerberg claimed that the glasses were “a bigger hit sooner than we expected” and that demand was “still outpacing our ability to build them.”
The glasses, which allow owners to record everything within their fields of vision, have also been heavily criticized for how they may be used to invade people’s privacy. The glasses have a small light to indicate to people nearby that they’re recording. But last year, to prove it could be done, two Harvard students turned a pair of the glasses into what was effectively a real-time facial recognition tool. Using artificial intelligence, their tool scanned for faces in the wearer’s field of vision, searched for online matches and brought up biographical information about the person almost instantly.
IDC has also found that the smart wearable market is dominated by smartwatches and ear wear, but smart glasses are expected to slowly increase in sales over the next few years.
At a news conference Sunday, Lyonel Myrthil, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Orleans field office, said Shamsud-Din Jabbar wore the glasses while he was staying in a rental home in New Orleans in October, when he scoped out the French Quarter and recorded the area on video. The FBI has published video of Bourbon Street that Jabbar recorded with the glasses.
“Meta glasses appear to look like regular glasses, but they allow a user to record videos and photos hands-free. They also allow the user to potentially livestream through their video,” Myrthil said.
“Jabbar was wearing a pair of Meta glasses when he conducted the attack on Bourbon Street, but he did not activate the glasses to livestream his actions that day. The glasses were on the person of Jabbar following him being neutralized by NOPD, and we believe he was wearing them throughout the evening,” he said.
Jabbar, 42, died in a shootout with police after he drove his truck into crowds of people.
Meta spokesperson Andy Stone told NBC News on Sunday that the company “is in touch with law enforcement on this matter” but declined to comment further. Meta generally complies with court orders to turn users’ information over to law enforcement.
Sam Hunter, the head of strategic initiatives at the University of Nebraska-Omaha’s National Counterterrorism, Innovation, Education and Technology Center, said Jabbar’s purported use of the glasses displays a slight but meaningful escalation in the established tactics of terrorists’ scoping out target areas before attacking.
“It’s getting so discreet that it doesn’t look weird just riding around on his bike wearing a pair of normal glasses,” Hunter said. “They’re not cost-prohibitive.”
The video shot by the Meta glasses also shows areas from a slightly more intuitive angle than a smartphone or a helmet-mounted camera would, he said.
“From a reconnaissance perspective, you’re really getting a sense of the eyeline and eyesight and all the things that you’re going to want to look out for if you’re trying to plan an attack,” Hunter said. “It’s starting to get more and more into the footage of this is what it actually looks like and feels like when you’re in that environment.”
“I would not be surprised if you see versions of them or folks using them for attack planning in the future, again because they’re so discreet in terms of capturing that footage,” he said.
The post What are Meta’s smart glasses? Product worn by New Orleans attacker appeared first on NBC News.
