Meta Ray-Ban Display
147 comments
·September 18, 2025aacook
JKCalhoun
They have a brand problem. Absolutely no way I buy anything from Meta.
lurking_swe
> Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular headphones since you can still hear the world around you
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?
garbawarb
I wouldn't want to wear earbuds while doing anything active, the chance of them falling out is too high.
alex1138
One thing with technology is "iron sharpens iron" - I'm sure as advances in batteries (although I imagine there comes a point where that stops) occur it will have downstream effects of making all these things better
...unless part of the package for the improvements are things like "more likely to catch fire"
jayd16
I was a bit disappointed to see it was a single display and no mention of AR. Even if it wasn't stereoscopic you could still have world locked visuals.
But I realized this is a pretty clever move. Only allowing a fixed, inset screen really hides any issues with display field of view.
wronglebowski
The live demo of this is brutal. https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
zmmmmm
If you watch it carefully, he preempts the AI with "What do I do first" before it even answered the first time. This strongly suggests it did this in rehearsal to me and hence was far more than just "bad luck" or bad connectivity. Perhaps the bad connectivity stopped the override from working and it just kept repeating the previous response. Either way it suggests some troubling early implications about how well Meta's AI work is going to me, that they got this stuck on the main live demo for their flagship product on such a simple thing.
llmthrow0827
All the VR/AR/XR demos are so insanely trivial and yet still manage to be much more difficult than current methods of doing things. Like, really, cooking?
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?
SchemaLoad
These companies are reaching really hard for use cases while ignoring the only ones VR actually works well for. If they just went all in on gaming it would be a much better product than trying to push AI slop cooking help.
TIPSIO
If you’ve ever used the current Meta Ray Ban and AI, this almost exactly happens when the connection is bad. Pure confusion but the AI still tries to give you an answer.
I bet the device hardware is small/cheap and susceptible to interference
stavros
I have the Meta glasses and I've never noticed this, and don't even understand why it could be the connection's fault. The AI gets your audio and your image, if it gives the wrong answer, it's because the AI went wrong. How would the bad connection ever affect it?
krustyburger
Even if it’s small/cheap, if the item is scanned multiple times this will prevent any electrical infetterence.
m3kw9
next time they need 1 public and 1 private router and shut the public off right before the demo.
explorigin
I've done live demos of AI. Even with the same queries, I got a different answers than my 4 previous practice attempts. My demos keep me on my toes and I try to limit the scope much more now.
(I didn't have control over temperature settings.)
joshdavham
For those who didn't pick up on it, they were being sarcastic about the issue being wifi related haha
bigtones
That was not sarcasm. They were being serious.
stavros
It didn't sound like sarcasm at all to me?
303uru
It’s the WiFi, ya sure.
klik99
This is why Jobs spent months prepping for each presentation.
But hey, at least it's not all faked
gretch
When I was at Meta (then facebook), people lived and died by the live demo creedo.
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.
Anon1096
Yep I hope that mindset never dies. Meta is one of the last engineering-first companies in big tech and willing to live demo something so obviously prone to mishaps is a great sign of it. It's not unlike SpaceX and being willing to iterate by crashing Starships for the world to see. You make mistakes and fix them, no big deal.
gcr
why did they choose to air this live?
For an internal team sure absolutely, but for public-facing work, prerecorded is the way to go
SoftTalker
I saw Jobs give a demo of some NeXT technology and the system crashed and rebooted right in the middle of it. He just said “oops” and talked around it until the system came back up.
neilv
"At least it's not faked" was my main reaction, too. Some other big-tech AI-related demos the last couple years have been caught being faked.
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!")
postalcoder
i love jobs but i do remember the “everybody please turn off your laptops” presentation.
live demonstrations are tough - i wish apple would go back to them.
paxys
Totally agree. Up until a few years ago failures during live demos on stage used to be a mark of authenticity, and companies playing recordings was always written off as exaggerated or fake. Now all of Apple's keynotes are prerecorded overproduced garbage.
garbawarb
I appreciate the live demo but I'm suprised they didn't at least have a prerecorded backup. I wanted to see how video calls work!
m3kw9
so when I talk but not to it, it may response like i accidentally say siri? Except is every time?
Philpax
I'd be the first one to buy these if they weren't made by Meta. I've wanted a pair of smartglasses for a very long time, and these seem like the first viable pair in terms of capabilities - aside from the thickness, which I can live with.
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.
paxys
I saw the keynote, and while everything about the glasses was more or less as expected, seeing Zuck easily navigate the interface and type 30 words per minute while barely moving his fingers was a true WTF moment. If they can actually make the neural interface work that well then Meta has won this round.
bemmu
Exactly, felt like the wristband was the big thing. I don't want the glasses, but I'm somewhat curious if it'd be useful as an extra input device when using a computer.
yakz
Doesn’t that make the wrist accessory the important part? The chunky glasses look like they’re still too early, not enough tech.
paxys
That's why they are sold as a pair. The glasses are simply a screen strapped to your face. How to control it was always the real problem to be solved (and no, voice was never the answer).
jayd16
It's still certainly early adopter tech. We have the technology for stereo vision and augmented reality. It's just a matter of getting the display and battery and compute bill of materials in order now that they have the screen and a feasible input path.
zmmmmm
i was disappointed they didn't say you could connect it to other devices too. I would buy it just as a bluetooth keyboard!
cflewis
How does the finger thing work? What's he doing? I saw him tippy-tappy but it didn't seem like he's moving through some invisible keyboard.
dagmx
It’s tracking the EMG signals that trigger your finger tendons. Doing that it knows how your fingers are moving.
It can therefore translate it to a handwritten stroke and then do classical handwriting to text conversion.
jwrallie
It was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.
encoderer
I can’t find this demo. Am I blind??
paxys
https://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/
Skip to around 53:00
babelfish
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0
SchemaLoad
>Meta Ray-Ban Display glasses are designed to help you look up and stay present. With a quick glance at the in-lens display, you can accomplish everyday tasks—like checking messages, previewing photos, and collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts
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.
drdaeman
> 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.
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 it's a real issue.
SoftTalker
Exactly. It is bad enough trying to talk to someone with earbuds in and this just seems 10x worse. Zero chance I would buy something like this or try to talk to someone wearing them.
zhyder
Neural band is huge, glad they're shipping it already rather than waiting (years?) for a production version of Orion (the full AR glasses they demo'd a year ago together with this neural band). TheVerge found the controls great, even tried an alpha of handwriting for text input: https://youtu.be/5cVGKvl7Oek
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.
klik99
I believe the wristband came from this acquisition: https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/23/20881032/facebook-ctrl-la...
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.
jayrhynas
CTRL-Labs themselves acquired the wristband tech from North/Thalmic, who pivoted into smart glasses for a few years before being acquired by Google.
> 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.
teleforce
> measured electromyography, or EEG
Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?
spot
surface!
spot
nope. the technology was invented by CTRL-labs, and at Meta after the acquisition.
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.
jorvi
Disney is about to have a serious talk with Facebook. Disney Research has had a prototype on gesture detection via wristband electric sensing tech since 2012: https://youtu.be/E4tYpXVTjxA?t=2m8s
spot
not the same tech at all.
neilv
What do people think about the (almost hidden) cameras in glasses?
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?
paxys
There's a pretty bright light that turns on when the camera is recording, and if you try and cover the light the camera won't work. Their existing glasses are pretty popular and there haven't been big compaints about it. If you really wanted to do secret recordings there are plenty of better and cheaper glasses in the market for it.
bix6
> you can accomplish everyday tasks—like checking messages, previewing photos, and collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts — all without needing to pull out your phone.
Why do I need to pay $800 for this? I already paid a grand to have a phone disrupt my every waking moment!
gumby271
Sorry, is "collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts" just a casual everyday task we're all doing? I must be missing out!
ww520
A Ray Ban sunglasses can run up to $500 already.
imachine1980_
this include the band which is also pushing the envelope of HCI mark writing clip https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfmPX0hba7ulSVL2MyVaS60I0IPm-CQU...
jayd16
Now you can wear clothes without pockets.
null
iammrpayments
I’m 99% sure that EMG band is collecting several biomarkers and sending them all to facebook headquarters, get ready to get mattress ads when your HRV goes down.
kstrauser
Very interesting.
And also, I hereby ban them in our office. Thou shalt not wear spyware while looking at the screens that contain our company IP.
paxys
Do you also ban cellphones in your office? And email? Text messaging?
If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.
kstrauser
I'm not unreasonably worried about my coworkers, compared to a software-controlled camera they'd be wearing on their heads and pointing at our code, internal docs, customer information, etc.
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.
AceJohnny2
Indeed. Time and time again Facebook/Meta has secretly or openly breached privacy boundaries for their own gain. They cannot be trusted with user data.
dylan604
at a company I used to work at, yes, very much so. our personal devices were checked into a locker with security before entering the secured part of the building. you were free to come back out to use it when you needed during the day. the USB ports to our workstations were covered with epoxy. the desktops didn't actually connect to the internet, so email/etc used a remote citrix connection to isolate networks. any network transfer over a set size would send notices. to be honest, it was glorious to be without the device. the shit part was everyday when leaving the office you had to have your bags searched.
moralestapia
So, no smartphones in your office?
It seems like there are a lot of negative comments about Meta's glasses which is surprising to me as a regular user. I bought these both in clear and sunglasses and I love them. I've recorded some of the most amazing videos of my baby with them. Listening to music is fantastic as it's different from regular headphones since you can still hear the world around you — I've even done a few longer bike rides with them and it's been great. I haven't enabled any of the AI or smart features on the glasses, although I've been meaning to give it a try. Some things I don't love about them is the proprietary charging cases, the battery life seems to degrade over time (not totally certain though), and they're sensitive to sweat. Overall I think they show a ton of promise.