Not Amused: Meta Wants Muse on Your Face
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TEC363: Meta wants a computer on your face and an AI agent in your wallet. At Meta Connect 2026, the company showed off the Meta VR Glasses, a 100-gram headset tethered to a pocket puck that ships in spring 2027 for $1,299.99, along with the camera-free Ray-Ban Meta Audio, the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3, the budget Meta Adventurer, and updates to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. The product underneath all of it is Muse, Meta’s new personal AI agent, built on the Muse Spark model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.
Dom Bettinelli, Pat Scott, and Fr. Andrew Kinstetter, Dom’s “VR panel,” look at what Meta announced and ask whether any of it deserves your trust. Muse can book travel, fill out forms, negotiate a bill, and pay with one-time card numbers through Stripe’s Link, and it keeps working after you close the app. Picture looking at a jacket in a shop window, asking for your size, and walking on while the agent buys it. Fr. Andrew thinks that will change impulse buying forever. Pat isn’t amused.
The panel weighs the new VR glasses against the Quest 3 and the Apple Vision Pro. They’re lighter and far cheaper than Apple’s headset, with a narrower field of view, a cord to a puck, and a price more than twice the Quest 3’s. Is this a personal movie theater for frequent flyers, or one more gadget to carry? They also get into Meta’s FDA-cleared hearing feature for its AI glasses, and why always-listening watches and glasses raise hard questions for priests hearing confessions, doctors, counselors, and anyone else who keeps a confidence.
Then there’s the Facebook Marketplace seller whose Muse agent negotiated a sale, gave a stranger his home address, and told the buyer he was there when he wasn’t. The seller got a bad review for it. Add the Harvard students who paired Ray-Ban Meta glasses with the PimEyes face search engine to pull up strangers’ names and addresses, plus Reality Labs‘ roughly $88 billion in losses since 2020, and it comes down to whether Meta has earned the right to see what you see.
Drawing on Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, Fr. Andrew asks whether these tools help us become more fully human or quietly take over the human act. Dom lays down his rule for any AI: always say you aren’t a person. Then the panel ranks each device as buy, wait, or skip.
For picks, Fr. Andrew recommends Pexels for free stock photos with no AI-generated uploads, Pat suggests an Anker USB-C to Ethernet adapter for troubleshooting slow laptops, and Dom makes the case for the Ninja CREAMi Deluxe ice cream maker.
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Links for this episode:
- Meta: The Biggest News From Connect 2026
- CNBC: Meta’s Reality Labs lost over $4.6 billion in the second quarter
- Axios: Meta debuts Muse Spark
- Washington Post: Trump says he’s renaming AI to “super intelligence”
- Pope Leo XIV: Magnifica Humanitas
- Meta: Introducing Meta VR Glasses
- Apple Vision Pro technical specifications
- Knoxlabs: Meta VR Glasses specs, price and release date
- Meta: Introducing Ray-Ban Meta Audio glasses
- MacRumors: Apple Watch Audio Intelligence and Siri Recap
- Engadget: Meta brings FDA-cleared hearing enhancement to its smart glasses
- Meta: New features for Meta Ray-Ban Display
- Meta: Introducing Muse, a personal AI agent
- Muse
- TechCrunch: OpenAI launches Dots
- The Next Web: Meta’s Muse gave a Marketplace buyer a seller’s address
- Meta: Security and safety for AI agents, our approach with Muse
- Harvard Crimson: Harvard students’ I-XRAY glasses
- PimEyes
- Pixabay: Royalty-free sound effects and music
- Ninja Pods & Grounds Specialty Single-Serve Coffee Maker
- Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts!
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Picks of the Week:
- Andrew: Pexels
- Pat: Anker PowerExpand USB-C to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
- Dom: Ninja CREAMi Deluxe 11-in-1 Ice Cream Maker
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Disclaimer: Hosts, panelists, and guests may have a financial interest in the companies discussed through investments or other means. Their opinions and recommendations are not affected and do not present a conflict of interest. We offer this statement in the interest of full disclosure.