Meta has made its biggest retail move yet, and the store layout tells you everything about where the company thinks AR is heading.
Starting this summer, Meta is opening dedicated “Meta Lab” spaces inside more than 50 Best Buy locations across the United States and Canada, giving everyday shoppers a chance to try on AI glasses and VR headsets before buying them. The first locations are already open, with more rolling out through the rest of 2026.
What Is Meta Lab @ Best Buy?
Each Meta Lab space is roughly 900 square feet — a store-within-a-store concept staffed entirely by Meta’s own trained sales specialists rather than regular Best Buy employees. Visitors can try on the full range of Meta’s AI glasses lineup, including Ray-Ban Meta, Oakley Meta Vanguard, Oakley Meta HSTN, and the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses. There are also dedicated Quest headset demo stations where shoppers can try gaming, fitness, and virtual theatre experiences.
The spaces include smart mirrors, a dedicated style wall, personalised fittings, and interactive UV light displays showing how lenses adjust in different lighting conditions. Specialists are on hand to guide visitors through everything, including controlling the Ray-Ban Display glasses using the Meta Neural Band — no smartphone required.
Why This Matters: The Glasses Are the Priority Now
Here’s what the retail design actually tells us. Walk into a Meta Lab and you’ll notice that the AI glasses get the dedicated wall, the smart mirrors, the fitting area, and the lighting demonstrations. The Quest headsets sit alongside them — they don’t anchor the space.
That’s a significant shift. For most of the past decade, Meta’s consumer hardware story has been built around VR headsets. Now the headsets are sharing a 900-square-foot room with eyewear, and they’re not the featured product. Meta’s centre of gravity has moved — and this retail rollout makes that official.
The reason isn’t hard to understand. More than half of Best Buy’s customers say they want to try Meta’s AI glasses in person before buying them. Glasses are as much a fashion purchase as a tech purchase — fit, feel, and appearance all matter in a way that a spec sheet can’t convey. Meta has finally treated that as the priority it always was.
At AugmentedReality.com, our take: This is one of the most telling moves Meta has made in years. The shift from VR-first to glasses-first in a major retail environment signals that Meta genuinely believes the everyday AI glasses category is about to break through. Whether that plays out depends on whether the in-store experience actually converts curious browsers into buyers — and the next two quarters will answer that question pretty quickly. What we do know is that putting trained specialists in 50+ locations, rather than leaving Meta hardware to sit in a box on a shelf, is exactly the kind of move the category has needed for a long time.
Where to Find a Meta Lab
Locations already open include stores in California, Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Minnesota, Nevada, Colorado, South Carolina, and Alabama. Further locations across the US are scheduled to open through summer and into the end of 2026.