April 15, 2026
Meta Ray-Bans are mass-market. Apple's smart eyewear quietly hit the market last year. Snap, Google, and a half-dozen Chinese OEMs have entered the space. They're useful, they're addictive, and they're showing up in distracted driving cases.
Michigan's hands-free law (Public Act 277 of 2023) bans manual use of a 'mobile electronic device' while driving. Smart glasses fit that definition. Looking at a notification overlay, dictating a text, or scrolling a feed through a Ray-Ban frame is the same legal violation as picking up your phone.
Enforcement is still catching up. But in civil court, where we live, the standard is negligence per se — if the device contributed to the crash, the driver is on the hook.
Counterintuitive, right? You can see the road through them. But the eye-tracking research is clear: text overlays in the visual field pull cognitive attention away from the driving task even when the eyes stay on the road. It's a worse kind of distraction — one that looks like attentive driving from the outside.
We've already settled one Michigan case where the at-fault driver was wearing Meta Ray-Bans, had been receiving texts, and never noticed the slow-moving truck ahead. The discovery showed his glasses were displaying notifications at the moment of impact.
If the at-fault driver was wearing smart glasses, we want their device logs. Notification history. Active app data. Eye-tracking data if the device records it (some do). Audio command logs.
Most users have no idea how much of this their glasses store. We do. Preservation letters go out to the manufacturer within a week of being retained.
Apple disables most of CarPlay while driving. iPhones detect motion and lock down distracting apps. Meta Ray-Bans, as of this writing, do not have meaningful in-vehicle restrictions. That's going to be litigated. We're watching for the first design-defect case against an AR glasses maker for inadequate driver-mode restrictions.
If you've been hit by a driver wearing smart glasses, we want to know. It may be more than just a typical distracted driving claim.
If you suspect the at-fault driver was wearing smart glasses, get that into the police report. Officers may not know to ask. Tell them. Photograph the glasses still on the driver's face or on the dashboard. Get witness statements that mention the glasses.
Then call us. The device-data preservation window is short.
Distracted driving doesn't mean only phones anymore. AR glasses, smartwatches, infotainment touchscreens, even some vehicle voice-assistant interactions count. If a distracted driver hit you, we know how to prove it.
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