Takeaways
- Oakley Meta Vanguard is a brand-new line of Performance AI glasses, engineered for high-intensity sports.
- Multiple capture modes let people record high-quality video and audio while staying present during their workout.
- Meta teams overcame technical challenges to build an embedded device that can access LLMs on a small form factor.
- The project fostered professional growth and collaboration across AI, hardware, product design and more.
The first time Sean O'Reilly, director of engineering, wearables, used Oakley Meta Vanguard glasses, he was on a run to the Golden Gate Bridge. This was in the early days of product development, before the Performance AI glasses even had a name. Sean had run this route hundreds of times before, but he’d never been able to share his workout because he didn’t run with his phone.
“I used the autocapture feature on my Vanguard glasses to grab a clip of me touching the Hopper’s Hands plaque at the end of my run, shared it with the team and they went wild with enthusiasm. It wasn’t even the most complicated feature we were working on at the time, but it was tangible proof that we’d built a product with an amazing form factor, high-resolution camera and next-level capabilities. It met me exactly where I was on my fitness journey. We’ve been excited to share our Performance AI glasses with other athletes ever since.”
Introduced at Meta Connect 2025, Oakley Meta Vanguard represents a brand-new line of Performance AI glasses built for high-intensity sports. They’re equipped with Athletic Intelligence features designed to elevate people’s workout experience, including a five-microphone array that’s optimized to reduce wind noise and integrations with popular fitness apps. To fine-tune these features, Sean and his team tested Vanguard glasses on professional athletes — and on themselves.
Overcoming technical obstacles to build Oakley Meta Vanguard
Benjamin Bethurum, product designer, wearables, was one of the people responsible for envisioning, designing, testing and iterating early prototypes of Vanguard. “One of our biggest challenges when building the Performance AI glasses was that we couldn’t just sit at our desks to test them. We had to go out and put in the sweat to make sure they performed at the level we expected,” he says.
They weren’t just measuring the battery life or testing product fit, either. Benjamin and his teammates had to problem-solve a number of technical challenges to make the Performance AI glasses work for new high-intensity use cases.
Building an embedded device that can access LLMs is extremely difficult,” explains Sean. “Most AI today relies on servers with high latency requirements. People can wait 10 to 20 seconds for a chatbot on their laptop to respond, but that doesn’t work for fitness products. We’re running these LLMs on a tiny device with limited battery capacity, so we have to be super efficient while still equipping the glasses to respond naturally to user queries. It creates an interesting challenge, both on the server side and locally on the glasses.
“This device is at the forefront of small AI models, which really sets it apart.”
Sean also described how his team pushed the technology to new limits when building out the various capture modes of Vanguard.
“It's very technically challenging to engineer things like a 60 frames-per-second camera with high-definition capture and hyperlapse mode in this small of a form factor. Video capture is highly power and processing-intensive, so running anything concurrently is a big challenge. I’ve worn my Vanguard glasses for long runs and been able to record amazing content that I wouldn’t have otherwise. It just goes to show what AI can do and how far we can push the limits of this device.”
Expanding skills in a new wearables category
In addition to solving specific feature bugs, teams also grew their professional skills by launching new Performance AI glasses.
“I’ve worked on many different products throughout my career, from electric scooters to connected homes,” says Benjamin. “When the opportunity came to pioneer a new kind of AI glasses at Meta, I jumped in.”
This decision has led Benjamin to multiple career opportunities, and he loves how fast-paced his role is.
“The challenge space increases exponentially every year as we scale our product lines, new hero features come into play and frontier AI capabilities emerge. We’re just getting started with wearables, so there’s still a ton of opportunities ahead.”
For Sean, his team’s ability to deliver Vanguard boils down to cross-domain expertise and collaboration across teams.
“To build a product like this, we need experts in every dimension — AI, hardware, audio. The whole cross-functional engineering team has to come together to make it work. We can’t build in silos. In creating Oakley Meta Vanguard, we’ve united high-quality talent across the board to push the boundaries of new technology and build something useful.”
Benjamin agrees, sharing how the launch of Vanguard is the result of years of hard work across the organization. “It’s pretty moving to finally finish a product of this scale. Hundreds of people worked day and night to bring these Performance AI glasses to life. I think about all the long bike rides, hikes and kayaking trips it took to get here. We’ve done it. It’s an incredible feeling.”
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