On the Ray-Ban Meta line, and the Oakley Meta HSTN that shares its behaviour, tape or a finger over the capture LED is detected and the camera is disabled. It is a deliberate anti-tamper measure. That makes the lit indicator on these frames the strongest single piece of hardware evidence in the whole category: the camera cannot run with the light hidden.
Frame ships open hardware with open firmware. Indicator behaviour is whatever the owner flashed onto it, and there is no anti-tamper layer underneath to fall back on. For a bystander this is the honest worst case: nothing about the light, lit or unlit, constrains what the camera is doing.
Entries marked reported are built from vendor documentation and press coverage rather than our own handling of the device. We have not put every frame in this list on a bench and watched the LED.
Vendors change indicator behaviour in firmware updates without changing the model name, so a description that was accurate at launch can be stale on the pair in front of you.
The body-worn and pen-camera row is marked general, because it describes an entire unbranded category rather than one product.
A capture LED is a few millimetres across and sits on a frame front at eye level. In daylight it competes with ambient light far brighter than itself, and at conversational distance it subtends a tiny angle. Bystander studies keep landing on the same result: people do not notice it.
The light also carries one bit. A still photo, a recorded video and a live stream to another person all look the same from the outside. Where the light distinguishes them at all it does so by flash duration, which is not something a bystander is timing.
Audio is a separate channel with no indicator on any device here. A frame with the camera off can still be running microphones.
Temple thickness is the most reliable tell on the mainstream frames. Camera glasses need battery, and the battery goes in the arms, so the temples are visibly deeper than an ordinary pair of the same style.
Hinge corners come next. A camera module needs a flat, squared-off corner on the frame front to look out of, where ordinary frames curve.
Display glasses without a camera exist and look almost like nothing, which is the category people misidentify most. They can still record audio.