It has finally happened: Meta has unveiled a pair of consumer-ready smart glasses that have a display at the Meta Connect event. These glasses have been in the pipeline for quite a while, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg intending for them to serve as a bridge between the Meta Ray-Ban glasses and the Meta Orion glasses of the future.
The event kicked off with Zuckerberg presenting a live demo through the glasses, as he picked them up, put them on, and then headed for the stage. Emerging in front of a crowd of people as they watched all of this unfold on a big screen as well, Zuckerberg made a pretty strong statement.
But this barely scratched the surface of what these glasses — called the Meta Ray-Ban Display — can do. Here’s everything you need to know, and why I think that Meta is genuinely on to something huge here.
Meta Ray-Ban Display are even cooler than anyone expected
Zuckerberg talked about how Meta has been working towards this moment, which they believe will usher in the future of computing, for a decade, and it showed. Barring the couple of technical hiccups that always seem to happen after you’ve rehearsed a demo a hundred times.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display have a crisp, non-AR (Augmented Reality), high-resolution display that shows content on one side of your field of view. You can view incoming notifications, get directions to a place, browse through apps, make video calls, or ask Meta AI to help you with something.
During early reports a few weeks back, I didn’t expect much from these glasses. These are, after all, an experimental product, designed to gauge consumer interest. But they can do so much more than I initially thought. Let’s talk about what makes these glasses truly feel like science fiction come to life.
Meta’s neural wristband
The crème de la crème of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses is the company’s neural wristband. When the glasses were shown off on-stage, it truly felt like a scene out of a movie when Zuckerberg and Meta CTO Bosworth used the wristband to navigate the glasses.
The wristband reads miniscule gestures and applies them to the glasses’ user interface. Swiping your finger in any direction means navigating through the UI in said direction. Tapping and double tapping means selecting something, or performing a certain action.
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One of the coolest, most innovative bits shown off was when Zuckerberg pretended to grab a volume knob and turn it to one side, which made the glasses increase the volume of the song that was playing.
Even cooler still was when Zuckerberg showed off how you respond to texts. You simply write in the air or on a surface with your fingers, and the wristband understands what you’re trying to say, and inputs that text into the messaging app that you’re using.
Meta’s Live AI mode
Another amazing feature of the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses is Live AI mode. This is currently limited to one hour of use, though Zuckerberg says that the team over at Meta is hard at work to extend this time limit as soon as possible.
When you activate Live AI, the glasses can see and hear everything you can. You could be standing in a kitchen with some ingredients laid out in front of you, and Live AI will guide you on how to cook up something delicious.
If you’re out and about, Live AI can also help you with practically anything. It’s the AI assistant that smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have been dreaming of creating, but with much more natural implementation.
There’s so much more, too!
Of course, there’s still more to talk about. Like I said, this is science fiction come to life. The wristband was amazing to behold, and the display experience of the glasses themselves is also superb. However, there are other features present as well, some of which were expected, as they’ve already been shown off by other companies in the past.
Live subtitles, for example, is a really fun tool. With it enabled, the glasses generate very accurate subtitles for the person you are looking at. These subtitles can also be shown to the user in their native language, bringing a visual element to the live translation on the regular Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses.
The live subtitles feature also focuses on something that Zuckerberg touched upon during the event: human connection. Zuckerberg said that phones had created a distance between people who would be sitting next to each other, but that with glasses, this distance would be reduced. You won’t be taking out your phone to do something trivial: you’ll just make a gesture for your glasses, and continue interacting with the people in front of you.
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Meta also teased something crazy: an AI-powered tool for users to generate custom, fully-immersive virtual worlds. This will, naturally, be a lot better to experience on Meta’s Quest headsets, due to the visual isolation from your surroundings. However, this will lead to pretty crazy and super fun features making their way to the Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses as well.
The glasses will become available for purchase from September 30, and will retail for $799. That might seem like a steep price to a lot of you, and Meta did account for that in its sales projections.
But, honestly? I think that this is a pretty acceptable price tag for XR (Extended Reality) enthusiasts who want to get a taste of the future in advance.
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