I Strapped a Computer to My Face and Went to the Pet Store

Meta Glasses - Day 1

4:36

April 11, 2026

I got my Meta Ray-Ban glasses yesterday. Today I took them to a pet store. Not because that's the ideal first field test for AI-powered wearable technology. But because Dante needed bird food, and I wasn't about to sit in the house waiting for the perfect moment to try something new. That's not how I operate.

So here I am — glasses on face, transition lenses doing their thing in the Florida sun, trying to figure out how to use a computer I'm wearing while navigating a pet food aisle.

This is the beginning of something I want to document publicly. Not a review. Not a spec sheet. Just a real account of what it actually feels like to integrate new technology into your actual life — one errand at a time.

Why Meta Glasses

I've been watching the wearables space for a while. I work in AI infrastructure. I think about how humans interface with intelligent systems for a living. So when Meta dropped hardware that puts a camera, speakers, and an AI assistant on a pair of glasses — glasses you can actually wear in public without looking like you escaped from a science fiction convention — I paid attention.

The form factor matters. It's the whole game, actually. A device you won't wear is a device that doesn't exist. These pass the test. They look like regular frames. They sit on your face like regular glasses. They're a little heavier than my usual wire frames, but nothing I won't adjust to.

I got the transition lenses. I ordered the clip-on mirrored lenses for when the Florida sun gets serious. I've got a soft gel nose bridge and a camera cover coming from Amazon — a privacy slide that snaps onto the frame so I can physically block the lens when I'm not using it. Because I don't want to be that guy and I don't want anyone thinking I'm that guy .

The accessories matter too. I'm building a kit. Not just buying a gadget.

Day One Quirks

The phone call handoff is the first real friction point I found. If a call is already going on speakerphone and you try to route it to the glasses, it fights you. Flips back to speaker. Goes half-muted. You can hear them, they can't hear you. This is not a Meta problem, exactly. It's an Apple problem. Or rather, it's the gap between Meta's hardware and Apple's locked-down call audio stack. AirPods work seamlessly because Apple built the whole system. Meta is working around a wall Apple built. That's just the reality of the ecosystem right now.

Workaround: start the call from the glasses. Don't try to migrate a live call. Got it. Moving on.

What This Is Really About

I have a trip coming up...April 30th, I'm heading to New York City for the day. Meeting a group doing some historically significant work. We're hitting Federal Hall. St. Paul's Chapel. Fraunces Tavern — the oldest structure in New York, where George Washington said goodbye to his officers in 1783.

It's a real day. Real locations. Real people doing real things.

And I want to move through all of it with my hands free, camera ready, AI on tap, and nothing slowing me down. I want the glasses to be invisible — functionally invisible. I want to think about the moment, not the tool.

That's the goal. And I've got 19 days to get there.

The Training Wheels Phase

Right now I'm in the phase where you're aware of the thing on your face. You're thinking about it. You're not natural yet. That's fine. That's expected. You don't skip this part.

So I'm logging it. Every errand. Every quirk. Every moment something clicks or doesn't. This is going to be a running journal here on the site — the honest account of a technologist learning a new piece of hardware in real time, in public, without the safety net of a controlled environment.

If it works great, I'll tell you why. If it breaks weird, I'll tell you that too.

First report: comfort is solid. Transition lenses are working. Dante has his bird food. We're off to a decent start.

This is part of an ongoing series documenting the Meta Ray-Ban glasses experience leading up to a field test in New York City on April 30, 2026.