Meta Connect Agenda All But Confirms A Smart Glasses SDK

The agenda for Meta Connect 2025 strongly suggests that a smart glasses SDK of some kind is inbound.

On the schedule, 3 of the developer sessions set to take place on day 2 include “new developer toolkit from Meta to be announced September 18” in their titles.

The first session is listed as being hosted by Lansing Lee, a Meta product manager. And Lee’s LinkedIn bio is “I help companies bring their apps to AI-powered smart glasses like Ray-Ban Meta”.

The second will be hosted by Valentina Chacón Buitrago, whose LinkedIn reveals that they worked on Meta’s now-defunct Spark AR development platform.

The third is set to be from Conor Griffiths, whose LinkedIn says that he manages “software integrations with external parties for Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta glasses”, as well as “the development of AR & AI content by external partners for Meta’s future wearable devices”.

Our discovery comes just days after CNBC reported that Meta has reached out to third-party developers to build “experimental apps” for its upcoming HUD glasses with sEMG wristband. CNBC said that this developer outreach relates to “particularly those who specialize in generative AI”, and suggested that Meta wants to use the apps to promote the glasses.

What’s entirely unclear is exactly what form a Meta smart glasses SDK might take.

The Ray-Ban Meta and Oakley Meta HSTN glasses have extremely limited onboard computing capabilities, more akin to a Fitbit than a smartphone or XR headset, and Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth has repeatedly cited this compute constraint as the reason that a traditional on-device SDK isn’t available.

That leaves two possibilities, as far as we can see.

One is that the SDK will be server-side, letting developers build integrations for Meta AI, rather than the glasses themselves. This would be akin to Alexa Skills, rather than traditional apps.

Hypernova is the codename for Meta’s upcoming smart glasses with a small heads-up display (HUD) in one eye.

While Meta hasn’t directly confirmed plans to soon launch HUD glasses, multiple executives have strongly hinted at it, and The Verge, The Information, The Financial Times, and Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman have all released reports claiming the launch is set for this year.

To be clear, this is not AR. The reports suggest that the small HUD will be used to show the time, weather, and notifications, to frame and preview photos, for turn-by-turn navigation, to show captions and translations of real-world speech, and to optionally display Meta AI responses as text instead of audio.

According to The Information, the addition of the HUD brings Hypernova to around 70 grams, compared to the 50 grams of Ray-Ban Meta glasses.

According to Gurman, Hypernova will be controlled by finger gestures from its long-in-development sEMG neural wristband, reportedly set to be included in the box.

In July, renders of Hypernova and its wristband were discovered in early firmware on a public Meta server, and an engraving visible in one of the renders seemingly revealed the product’s name: Meta Celeste.

The other is that the SDK could be limited to the upcoming HUD glasses with the sEMG wristband, and future Meta smart glasses with a display. We don’t yet know what chipset the HUD glasses will have onboard, but given the reported $800 price and 70-gram weight, it’s possible that it has notably more computing power. The addition of the display, and rich local input from the wristband, would also make an SDK more appealing.

The SDK could, of course, be a combination of these two possibilities. Perhaps some apps run server-side as an extension of Meta AI, and perhaps others run locally on the HUD glasses. The SDK could even fundamentally be about bridging these two avenues together.