These glasses are just "annotated reality" rather than full AR, with just 1 small display; think Google Glass but 100x more discreet. So discreet input and output on a device with a camera.
I use them for taking videos when I'm out and for listening to music without putting on headphones or earphones. While it is not the best at anything, it is definitely capable of doing a lot of things well enough and that is what matters a lot of times.
You won't blend in wearing the Oakleys, but they look like what they are, which is an insane mirrorshades cyberpunk HUD, and if the wearer can own that they could actually look kind of sick.
Of course, I'm technically underwhelmed and unimpressed by what I've seen of the actual technology, but that's hardly the most important thing.
Can you imagine trying to talk to someone face to face, but they are giving you a blank stare as random notifications and tiktok videos are being beamed inbetween their eyeballs and you.
Meta seems like one of the few large tech companies where if the whole company vanished, the world would be purely a better place.
I will never buy a Meta product again, the brand reputation is lower than dirt to me. Even ignoring all the other awful things Meta does, they have no reason to require a verified account to play two local-only games that I already paid for. No matter how cool glasses like these may look, I have no trust that the brand will not suddenly demand more money or information from me to continue using a product I have already purchased.
I have been reading the book called Apple in China and hardware is so hard. 30 hours of battery with wireless communication (I wonder if this is BLE 6.0 alone) between the EMG + Wave guide tech is not easy.
This is the second long term bet by meta that is panning out, the first being investing in long horizon AI projects(pytorch and a bunch of AI models), though that org has had rough times it did yield something good.
Insanely cool, and awesome to see a viable wave guide device.
It's so cool that it might outweigh my reluctance to strap facebook to my face.
Why do I need to pay $800 for this? I already paid a grand to have a phone disrupt my every waking moment!
Unfortunately, Meta, and Zuckerberg, have been involved in far too much malfeasance. I just can't ethically justify buying a product from them again. I'm hoping that viable competitors become available, but it's going to be hard to compete with Meta's investment, especially on the HCI front.
And also, I hereby ban them in our office. Thou shalt not wear spyware while looking at the screens that contain our company IP.
With traditional cameras, feature phones, and smartphones, if someone wanted to be creepy with the camera, they'd have to point the device at someone, which tended to look exactly like they are using the camera.
(IIUC, some countries even required a shutter sound, for anti-creepy reasons, when the pointing of the phone wasn't enough warning.)
Now, the wearer of the glasses spy camera just has to look in the general direction that creepiness should be sprayed.
The creepiness isn't even that of the wearer; it could also be that of the tech company.
Is this going to end up another Google "Glassholes" situation, with the wearers shunned?
But the wrist/hand control is the thing that impressed me the most in today's release. I'd hope for this to go far beyond just the glasses.
Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/21/apple-smart-glasses-eve... or some other Mark Gurman leak
I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs to use them in polite company.
The Apple Vision Pro is AR glasses at the Apple Newton evolutionary stage, an early smart PDA (Yes I'm the sucker that bought both at their respective launch, 3 decades apart).
The Meta Ray-Ban Display is AR glasses at the Windows Mobile/Blackberry stage.
Apple will likely swoop in and launch the final refined version of the AR glasses (thin, 8 hour battery, eye gaze control, retina based authentication, tethered to the iPhone, Apple AI, etc), when the tech is available at a decent price point for mainstream launch.
And yes, being the unrepentant Apple FanBoi, will be buying the Apple iGlass at the launch.
Among Meta's many technical contributions: React PyTorch osquery GraphQL Presto/Trino RocksDB Jest OCP Llama
100%
And being sensitive sweat is kind of a deal breaker when you are working out.
I struggled with this question too. Unfortunately our current system doesn’t make it easy for startups to build this stuff at scale without being gobbled up (the FTC under Lina Khan seemed to want to change that but oh well) so Im resigned to using Big Tech products if they’re the only option.
> released on May 1, 2018 to generally positive reviews. By July 2019, the Go was estimated to have sold over two million units. On June 23, 2020, Facebook Technologies announced it would be ending the sales of the Oculus Go later that year
If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.
Edit: Lmao, fake downvotes while another comment which is essentially the same gets upvoted. The veil has been lifted :D.
The point is, if you want to secretly record, it's already trivial to do it.
You actually know that? how? Just the leaked road map or something more concrete?
Personal computers? Apple wasn’t first. Smartphones with screens? Apple wasn’t first. Tablets? Not first by a mile. True Wireless Earbuds? Nope, not at all first. Smartwatches? Hell no, not first.
And yet, Apple’s a category leader in every single one of these areas.
I don’t think it matters if Meta releases something first; Apple wins by doing it way better. Arguably, Vision Pro was way too early, even though it’s an incredible experience.
One of my biggest annoyances is the OS on the Ray Ban Metas. If they just served as dumb I/O they'd be an incredible product and everything else about them, e.g. battery life, weight etc, would be so much better.
I have a HUD in my car that shows me directions, speed etc and when I'm looking at that the rest of the view out the windscreen is hardly even there to my visual perception even though I'm looking right at it. This seems to be getting largely overlooked but I feel like over time statistics are going to emerge that HUD type displays are increasing accidents rather than preventing them.
They wouldn't do this if the conversation is important to them. Not as much as one would glance on a smartwatch when they get a chirp, which, I believe is perfectly socially acceptable in most business/casual situations.
And if they do it's nothing new - it's a literal equivalent of talking to a person deep into their phone. Exact same audiovisual media consumption - just a different form factor and display technology. Or, in a pre-phone era, a newspaper.
I don't think this technology introduces anything new to this issue.
1) “Meta AI with camera use is always enabled on your glasses unless you turn off ‘Hey Meta", which basically makes glasses defunct.
2) “voice transcripts and stored audio recordings are otherwise stored for up to one year to help improve Meta’s products.”
[1] https://www.theverge.com/news/658602/meta-ray-ban-privacy-po...
Your attention reacts differently
The faster it happens, the more addictive it is. It's the difference between oral administration of drugs and IVing them directly into one's veins.
The whole product category seems to be everything wrong with tech turned up to 11.
with up to six hours of mixed-use battery life and up to 30 hours of battery life total thanks to the portable (and collapsible!) charging case
1. A world wide localization map that can let the glasses SLAM system do useful things.
2. I believe the Puck runs on a custom OS. The glasses are probably on somekind of a real time Microcontroller driven thing(would be surprised if its much more than firmware, code wise) that needs to efficiently package sensor data and send it over BLE to the puck/wristband. I am not sure they have open sourced those two components.
I hope they open source both of those for public good.
A reminder, users cannot opt out of current Meta Ray Bans data recording/storage/training if you actually want to use them as smart glasses.
That was the promise when I originally bought the Quest 2, but a year later they forcibly tied those accounts to Meta accounts and through that, facebook accounts. Now I can't use my Quest 2 because it is locked into an account verification screen, demanding that I upload a photograph of my drivers license to access the games I already purchased from the quest store.
Meta cannot be trusted.
And yet, Meta is squeezing every cent they can out of our attention spans, and knowingly tearing apart the fabric of our society in the process. Do I discourage the kids from doing amazing stuff with Meta's gadgets? I don't think so. They're not my kids. It's not really my place to be having those conversations with them.
And yes, if someone made a habit of pointing their cellphone camera at the screen all day, I would ask them to please knock it off.
I don't trust Facebook installing cameras in our workspace, or trust that they couldn't be compromised by another party who might want to watch what we're doing.
You can't just jump in, the lead up to getting this stuff going is a 5 year+ horizon, and Google, Meta, OpenAI and Anthropic are still moving exceptionally fast. Apple has shown they are nowhere near. They missed the boat on buying Anthropic, OpenAI was never going to sell with Musk behind it. There's no path forward for them, let alone catching up.
But the reality of it is that it's probably still to early to say if these devices will have mainstream appeal. I see a lot of people saying "well, i no longer need to take the phone out my pocket", but that has been the case for a couple of years with smartwatches, for example, and it has not meaningfully changed our dependency from the smartphone or the smartphone market dynamics that much.
Apple was first to the personal computer. First to the smartphone. First to the tablet. First to wireless earbuds. The vast majority of the company's revenue comes from segments where they had a multi-year head start over their competitors.
In fact products where they play catch up are more prone to failing (Vision Pro, Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music Connect, AirPower, Airport).
Apparently eye tracking must distinguish meaningful gaze from the natural jitters. I was thinking at that time, as an AAPL investor, that Apple seems to be wasting money on worthless R&D endeavors.
It only became apparent to me, much later with the launch of the Apple Vision Pro, how his seminal research on saccades contributed to the design and realization of the AVP.
And, yes, surely, one needs to periodically switch attention to mirrors and instruments, and I must imagine that shorter gaze movement distance shouldn't hurt. It's the same as checking the speedometer - you don't see the road, only have a rough idea from the peripheral vision.
Although I can imagine that a HUD can be actively distracting, constantly intercepting attention, e.g., flickering.
It's strange that the only comment in this thread praising and supporting Meta comes from an account basically reactivated since 2023.
Was there anything compelling about this topic that forced you to reactivate a long-lost account just to state you're oblivious to Meta's shenanigans and their products show a ton of promise?
Many earbuds, like Airpods, have transparency mode. The end result is the same…music while hearing background noise. In fact airpods are better because of the ANC mode that tunes out noise except conversation and other “important” sounds. I can also wear airpods indoors without looking like a dork, so that’s also plus. I’m not seeing why this is novel or interesting?
> I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them.
This seems like a compelling use case. How is the video quality?
Normal method:
* Search for a recipe
* Leave my phone on a stand and glance at it if I forget a step
Meta glasses:
* Put glasses on (there's a reason I got lasek, it's because wearing glasses sucks)
* Talk into the void, trying to figure out how to describe my problem as well as the format that I want the LLM to structure the response
* Correct it when it misreads one of my ingredients
* Hope that the rng gods give me a decent recipe
Or basically any of the things shown off for Apple's headset. Strap on a giant headset just so I can... browse photos? or take a video call where the other person can't even see my face?
(I didn't have control over temperature settings.)
I bet the device hardware is small/cheap and susceptible to interference
But hey, at least it's not all faked
> In an interesting twist, CTRL-Labs purchased a series of patents earlier this year around the Myo armband, a gesture and motion control device developed by North, formerly known as Thalmic Labs. The Myo armband measured electromyography, or EEG, to translate muscle activity into gesture-related software inputs, but North moved on from the product and now makes a stylish pair of AR glasses known as Focals. It now appears the technology North developed may in some way make its way into a Focals competitor by way of CTRL-Labs.
The tech is impressive, but people are already getting concerned about excessive screen time via zombie doomscrolling. Moving it from the pocket to literally in people's face will only worsen it.
And by Meta of all companies, with concerning privacy practices and of course motivated to hold your attention to serve you more ads.
I had an Oculus CV1 in 2019 but sold it when it became mandatory to migrate to a Meta account.
Imagine seeing everyone with glasses with suspicion because you don’t know if they’re filming you, reading notifications or actually conversing with you.
Right… so having notifications in your face ALL DAY is going to _help_ you stay connected to the real world.
The default has become to get consumers locked in as much as possible, be for your data or money exploitation or both (check the Slack thread for a non the non-profit HackClub).
If you pay 800 dollars for this device and a year after they ask you for your driver's license (as for the top comment). Are you willing to waste those 800 dollars you payed for it or will you upload any sensitive docs demanded from them? Or if they decide to phase it out early because there is no real adoption, will you get your money back? Will they make the device open so it can still be used by their "owners"?
So the way I see it: you give big money to already super rich companies. You also give them your data. You are forced to comply their rules and in even in any of those cases when they decide you shouldn't use it anymore they deprecate it and keep the device close. No, thanks.
The bottom line is this: do extensive research before making a single penny leave your wallet to try to minimize getting fucked up as much as you can.
We should educate as many people surrounding us as possible so they can make good or informed purchase decisions as well.
This should also be taught to children so from an early age they can understand very well that privacy and data has proven to be extremely profitable to virtually any company out there.
spy state actor's wet dream comes even more true with this, even more than with already overly de-privaciced public spaces.
They had to clarify it was “consenting” since it’s the opposite of their normal default.
(You also have to wonder how consensual it really was.)
- are prescription glasses available for display ? I guess not ? - these glasses need to be online, I guess they do so with a phone and bluetooth connection nearby ? So that's the glasses, the band and the phone, oh and the glasses case, seems a lot to carry. - pedestrian navigation seems to be rolled out per city, so it's not like having gmaps available right out of the box.
The fact that it’s FB that can see through your eyes doesn’t make this any better.
Well that and it being a meta product.
Though I don't feel comfortable having more Meta in my life.
With a normal car dashboard, you're much more aware you're not seeing the road while checking your speed, and you don't actually see the speedometer moving while you're looking at the road, so it can't accidentally catch your attention.
Of course, none of this will matter in the vast majority of cases. But driving safety is all about the tail end, when you're slightly tired or when someone in front of you does something unexpected and maybe illegal, or someone jumps on the road - these are the times where accidents are avoided, and a HUD might well hurt rather than help for these cases.
Literally all the data they could possibly need to build 3D models of your face for even better facial recognition, along with plenty of data to train models on. When that data eventually leaks, it will be interesting.
It's insane that anyone puts up with it.
I’m happy to let them prove out the tech, and if/when a company enters the market with a compelling product that I can trust, I will consider that competing product.
Less those bastards get of anything I control (data, finances, time) the better.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Careless_People
Meta delenda est.
Hands-free while cooking (not having to touch my phone with messy hands) is not a bad thing either.
I fully expect the AI to suck initially and then over many months of updates evolve to mostly annoying and only occasionally mildly useful.
However, the live stage demo failing isn't necessarily supporting evidence. Live stage demos involving Wifi are just hard because in addition to the normal device functionality they're demoing, they need to simultaneously compress and transmit a screen share of the final output back over wifi so the audience can see it. And they have to do all that in a highly challenging RF environment that's basically impossible to simulate in advance. Frankly, I'd be okay with them using a special headset that has a hard-wired data link for the stage demo.
That's...interesting. You'd think they'd dial the temperature to 0 for you before the demo at least. Regardless, if the tech is good, I'd hope all the answers are at least decent and you could roll with it. If not....then maybe it needs to stay in R&D.
Pitches can be spun, data is cherry picked. But the proof is always in the pudding.
This is embarrassing for sure, but from the ashes of this failure we find the resolve to make the next version better.
People nowadays want to disconnect from technology more, not to have it even closer.
But it’s uncomfortable for me because it requires my eyes to refocus from distant to close and back when I glance at it, which isn’t needed with an actual mirror. So I don’t use the feature.
If you ask any of those 4 billion people if they know WhatsApp is related in anyway to Meta, your answers will be split between "no" and "what's a Meta?"
I use Whatsapp daily (as does everyone I know) and there's no way I'm buying anything from Meta.
but i understand the concern! sometimes it’s sketchy haha. Like riding a bicycle.
Do you think someone's comment history link is an obscure secret no one can access?
> Clearly this is not the case (..)
Oh really? Please explain in your own words why you believe this is not the case.
Beat Saber as a social party experience with friends in the same room, sure, that's fun... but for day to day gaming the amount of people who want to play VR games on the regular is nearly zero.
If they really want to lean into the VR use case that people want, its porn, but I suspect they won't put that front and center.
I've been involved with two VR projects that were ultimately cancelled because, while we developed a sexy tech demo that showed the potential, building things out into something sustainable required too many resources and took too much time to maintain.
I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
I had really expected a different "only one"
The live captioning with directional audio seems like it could be a huge win for people who are hard of hearing, especially given the display is invisible so is much more natural to use in real life than say a smart phone or a VR headset with passthrough.
Another thing that's cool is the neural band. It looks like it's a more robust and flexible implementation of what Apple is doing with hand tracking.
But generally the idea that you can interact with the glasses silently with your hands to your side while wearing what effectively looks like a normal pair of glasses is incredible. I think this this is the first time we've seen an implementation of AR in which a large group of people could see value in it.
Also the fact Meta was first to market with a solid implementation of AR and not Apple or Google is also notable. I think I would have doubted their ability to pull something like this off a few years ago.
There are ways to do stuff like this.
Zuckerberg handling it reasonably well was nice.
(Though the tone at the end of "we'll go check out what he made later" sounded dismissive. The blame-free post-mortem will include each of the personnel involved in the failure, in a series of one-on-one MMA sparring rounds. "I'm up there, launching a milestone in a trillion-dollar strategic push, and you left me @#$*&^ my @#*$&^@#( like a #@&#^@! I'll show you post-mortem!")
It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do classical handwriting to text conversion.
If you created the account early in the Quest2's life, or hit the wrong button in the UI, your Meta account will end up linked to your Facebook account.
You might be able to unlink the Facebook account from your Meta account at https://accountscenter.meta.com/accounts, though I don't know if you can still reach the page.
At least they released an update in 2021 that allows people to "root" the device so it won't rely on the cloud services anymore -- a pretty rare occurrence for abandoned products!
Edit: even for touch LG Prada was first.
Aside from maybe the personal computer, they were not the first to any of those. BlackBerry/Palm/Windows Mobile devices all existed prior to the iPhone; the LG Prada was announced prior to the iPhone and had a similar form factor. Many tablet PCs existed before the iPad. Many Bluetooth earbuds existed prior to the AirPods.
They did a much better job of integrating each of these into a cohesive experience, but they absolutely had predecessors in each category.
How much can they do before some people think twice? Or are they all employees?
The rise of smart accessories (especially watches) should tell you that a lot of people don't want to disconnect
For all my numerous complaints about Google
Instagram. Critical to life. Naah.
As a site that ranked how hot girls were?
It wasn’t 2023: Last post 11 months ago, last comment 8 months ago, which is a typical level of lurking
An idea that I've had before is like 'augmented curated experiences' for all kinds of things--for example imagine playing a Magic the Gathering (or similar) card game, and watching your cards come to life on the board in hologram-esque 3D. Or while watching a sports match, being able to pull up the stats or numbers of any players, or flip through channels of POV camera from helmets. Car navigation that shows you what turns to make by augmenting lanes or signs with highlighting. Brick and mortar stores having a live wayfinding route to products in their store based on your grocery list, recognizing and highlighting items you like.
live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.
Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09255-w
yes the Myo was a similar, earlier, and less capable technology also based on EMG sensing.
Mad props to the presenter for holding it together though.
My comment was in the context of "Meta has a brand issue" which is absolutely true.
For those like me who weren’t familiar with the moniker, it refers to Marques Keith Brownlee, a YouTuber who reviews technology devices.
Hard to imagine nearly two decades later, but for a brief moment in time, it was cool to be on Facebook.
Of course, you could make all sorts of traditional top-down or isometric games work well without motion sickness - but no one is going to pay for VR to play Civilization or Star Craft or Baldur's Gate 3, since these would be fundamentally the exact same experience as playing on PC or console, but with a display strapped to your head.
But since I moved I didn't want to screw the base stations in to the walls again and haven't played in a long time. I feel like I probably still would like VR gaming but haven't been tempted enough to buy any of the newer systems since it seems like Meta has fully captured the market and it all seems pretty distasteful now.
This is the kind of thing that buries VR ideas. It's very cute in a demo, but as an actual product, the cost of coming up with 3D models and animations for all MTG cards currently being played is many orders of magnitude more than the total number of people who would pay for this. Ultimately this is completely unnecessary fluff for the game, like chess games where the pieces actually fight: irrelevant, and it actually detracts from the game because it interrupts the flow of what you're actually doing.
Edit0: ie without internet access the ai is unable to produce an answer other than some prerecorded ones I guess
In the live showcase the presenter even mentions that the wifi must have been bad for the ai to repeat the answer
For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work, prerecorded is the way to go
There's a few other companies/startups working on this too, but a lot of the glasses they're producing are very ugly. There's a couple that didn't look bad, but from what I'm seeing Meta's are a combination of the best-looking ones and best display so far, and I'll be very curious to see the reviews.
Not doing it live would've been an embarrassment. I don't think the thought ever crossed anyone's mind, of course we'd do it live. Sure the machines were super customized, bare bones Windows installs stripped back to the minimum amount of software needed for just one demo, but at the end of the day it sure as hell was real software running up there on stage.
Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in progress I guess.
I doubt it has enough accuracy for a virtual keyboards (since keyboards require precise absolute input and it measures relative), besides, most people aren't experienced with single-hand typing.
A bespoke gesture based shorthand would be optimal, but then users would need to spend months learning this new shorthand.
But (almost) everyone already has experience with handwriting, which is a single hand relative input method. It's the easiest option for people to quickly pick up and enjoy.
Though, it's far from perfect, you can see he is struggling to trick his muscle memory into writing without a pen, and he needs to do it on a solid surface (I'm not sure if that's a technology limitation, or a muscle memory limitation).
They are all <checks notes>
"dumb fucks." -- Mark Zuckerberg, 2004 personal correspondence documented in https://www.theregister.com/2010/05/14/facebook_trust_dumb/
That's funny because the ones sold on my street are $10 and they definitely have the rayban logo
They account for 30% of the global market. They own key brands, license key premium names, and control key distributors like sunglass hut and LensCrafters.
Their cost to manufacture vs sale price shows a clear ability to price like a monopoly. As does their ability to box out competitors.
The $10 look alikes are not identical. They generally are cheaper materials, not polarized or coated, etc.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/metas-ray-ban-smart-g...
Top-shelf wireless earbuds aren't from Apple. Same for smart watches.
And without free movement, you can't build any of the mainstream game genres. You can't build and get people excited in a Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed or Fortnite or Elden Ring or Zelda where movement works like Riven, the sequel to Myst. Valve actually tried with the first Half-Life game in a decade, and even that didn't work.
Add to this massive gameplay limitation the second massive issue that you can't get a mass audience to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a peripheral without which they can't play your 70-80 dollar game.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19567011
And a quora link (sorry):
https://www.quora.com/If-floating-point-addition-isnt-associ...
[1] sEMG data:
https://fb-ctrl-oss.s3.amazonaws.com/generic-neuromotor-inte...
[2] Code for exploring surface electromyography (sEMG) data and training models associated with Reality Labs' paper:
https://github.com/facebookresearch/generic-neuromotor-inter...
Again, you are getting confused by branding vs monopoly. They sell luxury goods and can mark them at wild premiums, same as Hermès and Ferrari. None of them are monopolies. Very far from it.
No, it doesn't. It shows there exists demand for their products at that price point.
>As does their ability to box out competitors.
They have none. Anyone can go to various websites and order cheaper sunglasses that work just as well, or go to Costco and buy them for $25.
In the glasses is just a client to the ai. Like there is no ai in your phone when you talk to chatgpt, you are querying it and it will not keep talking to you if you cut off the wifi
The prerecorded responses I speculated about would have been things like "i'm having some connectivity problems, I'm unable to chat at this time, I'll let you know when I'm back." - the same kind of prerecorded things your earbuds tell you when they're low on power.
Unless you think they've added some inference logic on the device to slightly re-state the last answer they got from the cloud, it's clear that the glasses were connected and receiving the same useless answer from the cloud.
* side note, but it can also sound like "pear" to me this second time
I own a pair of Meta glasses, and the response when they don't have connectivity is "this function is not available at this time".
So unless you have a rare medical condition AND you're buying plastic lens glasses, I think you're worrying for nothing.
Edit0: and what are you even doing? Where do you think this is going?