Meta used its Connect conference on Wednesday to put one thing into everything it sells: Muse, its AI agent. Mark Zuckerberg and his executives announced lightweight virtual-reality glasses, a pair of Ray-Bans with no camera at all, an updated camera Ray-Ban, and a keychain-sized puck you talk to. "People in the industry have a wide range of views about how the future is going to go," Zuckerberg said. "But at Meta, we are optimists because we believe in people."
The hardware, with prices
- VR glasses — $1,299, on sale in the spring. Not everyday eyewear: they put virtual screens around you for a film, a game or a video call, in the territory of Samsung's $1,700 Galaxy XR and Apple's $3,700 Vision Pro. Meta's pitch is weight — it says they weigh about as much as a deck of cards — and price.
- Ray-Ban Meta without a camera — $349, from 13 October. Audio only: ask questions, take calls. Lighter than the camera version, with longer battery life.
- Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 with cameras — from $449, available now.
- Muse Charm — a keychain-sized device for talking to Muse without unlocking a phone or wearing glasses. Few details; Meta is aiming for the holiday shopping season.
What Muse can now do
Meta is widening what the agent can touch. It can now shop for you at Walmart, GameStop, Gap and Wayfair — browsing those stores and buying on your behalf. It will soon operate apps on Mac computers too, on top of handling files, messages and calendars. "You can have it help you run your small business, or just get work done for you," said Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang. "You can walk away from your computer, and it keeps working for you on all the jobs you line up." That puts Muse against OpenAI's Codex, Anthropic's Claude and OpenClaw.
One name is missing from the shopping list, and it is the loudest fact of the day: Amazon has blocked Muse from browsing its store. The Walmart deal is the mirror image of that refusal.
Muse has had more than 2.5 million downloads since release, according to Sensor Tower — a real start, but a long way behind ChatGPT and Gemini, and downloads are not the same as habit. Zuckerberg said he expects "billions" of people to use it in the years ahead.
Launching into a backlash
The timing is awkward and Meta knows it. Consumers are wary after a run of incidents in which AI agents got into other companies' systems during testing — and, as of this week, into an Australian government portal. Meta's own glasses, out since 2023, have been criticised for how quietly they record. Courtrooms in New York, public pools in Australia and pubs in London have restricted or banned them (our report), the singer Lorde has spoken against them publicly, and CNN reported in February that the glasses had been used to film women and post the videos without consent. The camera-free Ray-Ban is, read one way, an answer to exactly that.
For a buyer in Dhaka
None of this launches officially in Bangladesh, so the grey market sets the price: expect the $349 audio Ray-Ban to land somewhere near Tk 55,000–65,000 once freight and duty are added, and the $1,299 VR glasses above Tk 1.9 lakh — MacBook Pro money for a device whose services are region-locked. Muse itself is the part worth watching, because it arrives free inside apps you already have. Before you let any agent shop for you, check one thing: whether it can spend money without a second confirmation from you. That is the setting that matters, and it is the one nobody demonstrates on stage.
