The user experience of headphones is about to evolve. This is what Apple, Samsung and Meta have been suggesting in recent months, by looking at concept studies, integrating cameras into the small wireless tips, in the ears. If Apple was the most active on the subject last year, it has just been joined at the beginning of 2025 by Facebook's parent company, Meta, and Apple's historic competitor, Samsung.
The brand with the apple has experimented with the idea of cameras in its AirPods and according to Mark Gurman, the famous Apple specialist working for Bloomberg and the analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple is planning to evolve its range by integrating this new appendage. The equipment would not arrive anytime soon, however, the Cupertino firm would be the most advanced of the three on the subject, while the first evidence of this work dates back to February 2024.
Samsung and Meta came forward later, while a new report from Bloomberg has just listed the two Big Tech companies among those working on wireless headphones with cameras. Their work would be closely linked to that around their mixed reality products, whether headsets or glasses.
At Meta, the project is called "Camera Buds", and would arrive in parallel with the firm's work to launch smart glasses with Oakley, which has become particularly popular in recent months in a new urban clothing fashion that recovers elements from the outdoor environment. Reality Labs, which takes care of Meta's devices, plans to launch these glasses as early as 2025, as well as a more advanced pair in terms of augmented reality by 2027.
The progress of the work at Samsung is more vague, while the sources mentioned by Bloomberg only announced that the brand was considering a version of its headphones with a camera inside. But as with Meta, the work could quickly be integrated into its development branch for augmented reality, as a temporary solution or alternative to smart glasses. A way to understand, a little more, how these brands are motivated to integrate a camera into their headphones…
What are headphones with a camera for?
Since the first avenues suggested by Apple for work on headphones with an integrated camera, the idea of synergy with mixed reality glasses and headsets has been established. The idea with these cameras would not be to take photos or videos, but to provide the necessary view to an intelligent system that could analyze the environment around you, look at an object and ask the headphones' voice assistant for information about it.
The use would mainly differ from the brand's ambitions with its headsets and smart glasses. For example, Apple could very well seek to integrate these new AirPods with a camera into the experience around its spatial computer, the Vision Pro, when Meta could benefit from its Ray-Ban glasses or its Quest headsets. Samsung, for its part, has not yet presented a mixed reality headset, but recently announced it behind the Moohan project, developed in collaboration with Google and the upcoming Android XR software platform.
Several problems are likely to lengthen the development of these cameras, that said. Even if it seems simpler to launch headphones with cameras rather than to develop ultra-light glasses integrating screens or projections on the lenses, several barriers exist. One of the most explicit is the difficulty of use for all individuals with long hair. The other difficulty would concern the angle of the camera. How to integrate a model with a sufficiently well-defined sensor, a sufficiently large lens, and an orientation sufficiently close to that of our eyes, on small tips present in our ears.
One thing is certain, these three brands will certainly seek to monetize their work and their artificial intelligence tools, in the service of their voice assistants, and therefore headphones. Unless these projects end up in oblivion, and the idea of integrating eyes into our ears makes our heads spin too much?
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