Competing smart glasses manufacturer Solos is suing Meta for patent infringement. The lawsuit seeks an injunction to halt the sale of Meta’s Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, in addition to demanding “multiple billions of dollars” in damages, according to a Bloomberg report
Solos filed the lawsuit alleging that Meta’s first-generation Ray-Ban Meta Wayfarer smart glasses infringe on several patents. These patents reportedly cover “core technologies in the field of smart eyewear.” Though Solos is a lesser-known company compared to Meta and its partner EssilorLuxottica, it markets various pairs of glasses that offer features similar to those provided by Meta.
For example, the company’s AirGo A5 glasses allow you to control music playback, automatically translate speech into different languages, and integrate ChatGPT for answering questions and searching the web.
Beyond the similarities in their products, the smart glasses manufacturer claims that Meta copied its patents because employees from Oakley (a subsidiary of EssilorLuxottica) and Meta gained insights into Solos’ products and roadmap. Solos states that in 2015, it introduced Oakley employees to the company’s smart glasses technology and even gave them a pair of Solos glasses to test in 2019.
Additionally, the smart glasses manufacturer alleges that a MIT Sloan Fellow, who researched the company’s products and later became a product manager at Meta, brought valuable knowledge of Solos’ technology to her role. According to Solos’ lawsuit, by the time Meta and EssilorLuxottica began selling their own smart glasses, both parties had amassed years of direct, senior-level knowledge about Solos’ smart glasses technology.