Meta Has Officially Unveiled Its Purported Ray-Ban Display-Style Smart Glasses.
Yesterday, at the Meta Connect 2025 event, CEO Mark Zuckerberg officially unveiled the long-discussed and recently revealed smart glasses with a display. The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses will cost $799 and go on sale September 30 .
The next generation of Meta smartglasses will feature a full-color, monocular 600 x 600-pixel heads-up display (HUD) in one of the lenses, visible only to the user. The smartglasses with a display will also include enhanced versions of the audio, video, and AI features found in the Meta glasses without a display.
The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses will be controlled by a wearable device called the “Meta Neural Band,” which allows users to “type” on any surface to send messages, as well as control other functions of the display and smart glasses using small muscle movements.
According to Zuckerberg, users will be able to “silently control the glasses with subtle movements.” An example from the keynote: adjusting music volume by mimicking the movement of a volume knob. The bracelet will last 18 hours without recharging and has an IPX7 rating, making it fully submersible in water up to one meter deep.
In his keynote, Zuckerberg demonstrated text messaging on the Display glasses and stated that video calling via WhatsApp would be available on the new glasses (though, notably, the demo didn’t work at the event itself).
The Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses will feature a 12-megapixel camera with 3x zoom, and the addition of a display screen will give users a viewfinder and the ability to preview captured photos and videos before sharing or saving them.
Why I’m looking forward to trying these glasses
I’m not one to “wait and see,” but I ‘m looking forward to trying out the displays. I’m also not one to cherish tech giants, but I can’t deny it: overall, the best new hardware I’ve used in the last 10 years has been made by Meta. Meta’s Quest VR headsets are excellent and affordable (though I don’t consider VR anything other than a cool feature), and I have nothing but praise for Meta Ray-Bans , and this is after wearing the second-generation Metas as my everyday glasses for about a year.
I do have some questions, though: I’m not sure texting and otherwise interacting with a computer through a pair of glasses is what I need in my life; despite Mark Zuckerberg’s software assurances, I wonder how intuitive the neural controls will be; and Meta’s vision of a ” personal superintelligence ” scares me. But overall, if Display works as well and easily as the other recent Meta devices in my home, these glasses will be amazing. They could change the lives of people with hearing loss—Display Glasses will be able to add “subtitles” to conversations in real time. They could also actually make life a little easier for people with ADHD: if I lose my car keys, the glasses will (presumably) be able to tell me where I left them.
I’m old enough to remember how being prepared for everything new meant carrying around a digital camera, a flip phone, a calculator, a GPS navigator, a watch, and many other things that I lost along the way. All of this equipment has now been transformed into a smartphone. If Display works as Meta promises, this could be the next big thing, when you won’t even need a phone, just the glasses you already wear.
And that’s a big “if.” Neural wristbands, head-up displays, and AI that “sees what you see”—it all sounds incredible, but the hype surrounding keynotes touting amazing features that turn out to be half-baked gimmicks that no one needs is a cliché in the tech industry. But I’m still excited. By the end of the month, I might even see the future; who wouldn’t be excited?