Meta Expected to Unveil Camera-Free Smart Glasses at Connect Conference

Meta and Dolby Laboratories announced earlier this month that Meta AI glasses will capture audio in Dolby Atmos and that Dolby Vision experiences will expand across Instagram and Meta's next VR headset, deepening Dolby's role in social, AR, and VR media. The move extends Dolby's technologies beyond traditional cinema and home entertainment into everyday content creation and sharing, embedding its formats directly into one of the world's largest consumer ecosystems. The Meta deal sits alongside recent updates to Dolby OptiView, including the addition of Dolby Vision and AI powered Sports Intelligence, as part of a broader push beyond traditional cinema and home entertainment. Dolby Laboratories' narrative projects $1.6 billion revenue and $390.9 million earnings by 2029, requiring 6.4% yearly revenue growth and about a $164.7 million earnings increase from $226.2 million today, with a $79.00 fair value implying 36% upside to its current price. Some of the lowest analysts were already cautious, assuming revenue would only reach about US$1.6 billion and earnings US$396.8 million by 2029, leaving investors to weigh that more pessimistic view against the Meta-driven expansion story.

Qualcomm Incorporated has introduced the Snapdragon Sound Elite Gen 2 Platform, a new solution for intelligent audio wearables that combines high-quality audio, on-device artificial intelligence and advanced connectivity. The platform is designed for earbuds, headphones, open-ear devices, audio glasses and camera-enabled wearables, and delivers up to twice the AI capability of its predecessor while cutting power consumption by up to 40% and footprint by up to 30%. It includes Qualcomm aptX Lossless, XPAN, fifth-generation Active Noise Cancellation, cVc technology and the Snapdragon Audio Sense Solution, plus integrated micro-power Wi-Fi 6E for direct-to-cloud connectivity. The multimodal capabilities can power real-time translation, contextual assistance and personalized hearing, while camera-enabled devices can gather context about the surrounding environment. Qualcomm faces competition from Apple Inc. and Alphabet Inc., which have expanded their own wearable and AI audio lineups. Qualcomm shares have gained 16.2% over the past year compared with the industry's growth of 40.4%, and the stock carries a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell).

Meta's $14.3 billion deal to buy up the employees of AI startup Scale AI, including Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang, who received about $5 billion as part of the deal, appears to be paying off. Meta's new AI products developed under Wang's leadership have added roughly $200 billion in market value, and Meta has added about $234 billion to its market cap in the past five days. At Meta Connect, Zuckerberg unveiled the Muse Charm, a standalone pocket device built exclusively for voice interaction with the company's new Muse agent, along with the Meta VR Glasses, a 100-gram spatial computing device priced at $1,299 with 5K micro-OLED displays, and the third-generation Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 glasses starting at $249. Muse reached 2.8 million downloads in its first 12 days across the US and Canada App Stores, and surpassed OpenAI's ChatGPT in early adoption, with 1.8 million downloads in Muse's first 12 days compared to 1.3 million for ChatGPT. Muse also set a new US daily download record of 264,000 on Sept. 19, its third straight day above 200,000.