An Outsider Critiqued Meta’s Smart Glasses. Now She’s in Charge of Them
Li-Chen Miller is helping lead the social network’s push toward Zuckerberg’s augmented reality ambitions
Meta Platforms’ Li-Chen Miller during Meta Connect in September 2023.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/BloombergLi-Chen Miller wasn’t even a Meta Platforms Inc. employee when she started working to fix the company’s video-recording sunglasses.
Miller was working at Microsoft Corp. in late 2021 when she purchased a pair of Ray-Ban Stories, the first version of Meta’s souped-up sunglasses. But her excitement about the novel idea was quickly overshadowed by all the ways she thought they could be improved. So she dashed off a detailed — and unsolicited — list of suggested fixes to Alex Himel, Meta’s head of wearables.
“She wrote me an email that articulated what she thought was good about the device and what was promising, and then a longer list of things that she would improve,” Himel said, recalling that he agreed with most of the ideas.