Meta’s first pair of smart glasses with a display made me ask a lot of questions, and I’m not sure I like the potential answers.
My first reaction when I put on Meta’s $800 Ray-Ban Display was excitement. As frivolous as it may seem to have yet another screen in your life, there’s something that happens when you basically glue a display to your eyeball. You transform from a person with glasses to, like, a spy, or a cyborg—a cyborg spy! Yeah, that’s it. Ghost in the Shell fans will get it.
When I initially donned these smart glasses at Meta Connect, I smiled because this was what I felt had been missing from my previous Ray-Ban smart glasses experience. A big, bright, full-color screen—the one thing people always wanted to know about when I showed them my deflatingly screenless Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses.
That little dose of magic is even further heightened by Meta’s Neural Band, a small wristband that, when slipped over your hand, reads the electrical signals in your arm, allowing you to navigate the Meta Ray-Ban Display with a series of finger pinches and thumb swipes.
The only other experience I can liken this combo to is the first time I used Apple’s Vision Pro, which creates a similar kind of magic, sans wrist-worn wearable. In the Vision Pro and Meta’s Ray-Ban Display, you’re using technology the same way a wizard casts a spell, waving your hand to make the computer do the things computers do, which, if you’ve watched as much sci-fi and fantasy as I have, is pretty f*cking rad.
Weirdly, I’m reminded of my grandma (my nonna, actually; sorry for being Italian), when I first showed her how to use a computer mouse on my family’s PC when I was a kid. You move this little plastic thing on a desk, and it moves something on a screen! Groundbreaking! It seemed silly to me at the time, but now, as I get older… I get it. Inputs and screens are exciting, no matter how jaded we get with the experience of using them.
So, there it is. Excitement; that was my first reaction to the Meta Ray-Ban Display. My first reaction. It’s not, however, my last.A see change
If you’re like most people, the first thing you’re probably dying to know about the Meta Ray-Ban Display is how they actually look when they’re on your face.
The titular display part of the Meta Ray-Ban Display is a 90Hz (30Hz minimum) 600 x 600-pixel full-color screen with a 20-degree field of view in the bottom-right corner of the right lens. The good news about having a screen in that area specifically is that it doesn’t obstruct your vision when you’re walking around and doing stuff. The bad part? Well, every time you look at it, you’re looking down and away as though you’re worried a snake might slither in and lunge at you. It’s not what I would call a natural resting face (let’s call it resting Meta face), but let’s be honest, there is nothing natural about walking around with a screen strapped to your eyeball.
The screen inside the Meta Ray-Ban Display is also very bright, with a max brightness of 5,000 nits. This might not seem like a stat you want to pay attention to, but believe me, in a pair of smart glasses, it’s critical. I’ve used less bright screens in other pairs, and they’re hard to see outside. And if you’re spending $800 (before tax) on a pair of smart glasses, you’d better be able to use them while you’re walking around in the real world.
In terms of style, you should know that all Meta Ray-Ban Display have transition lenses by default. That may seem like a bummer if transitions aren’t your thing, but it makes sense, since the screen needs to be effective indoors and out, and the only way to do that is by giving it contrast in direct sun. Conversely, it also provides see-through lenses indoors so you don’t go stepping on your cat or something. I find the screen to be very visible even in direct sun, probably because of the added contrast from the transition lenses. Also, you can buy these with prescription lenses, so that’s good news for those reading this from behind a pair of regular glasses.
But just because the Meta Ray-Ban Display are bright does not mean the screen is perfectly sharp. I find the screen to be sharp enough to satisfy the dream I had in my head of what a pair of display smart glasses from Meta would look like, but others might be less enthused. I also noticed that some people might see the screen differently than I do. One colleague in my office described the screen as “shaky,” though I wouldn’t describe it that way at all. Others said they struggled to see it or that it was disorienting.
One thing I definitely found disorienting is that the lenses in the Meta Ray-Ban Display are actually mirrored. This, I assume, is part of the construction of the “geometric waveguides,” which is what the display tech inside the smart glasses is called. Geometric waveguides are special because they use mirrors to cut down on visual artifacts by reflecting light instead of splitting it like diffractive waveguides in other smart glasses. It also makes it so the screen is hard to see from the other side, which, by the way, is true. People probably aren’t going to know your screen is on unless you’re in a dark area and the brightness is turned up.
The benefits of using a geometric waveguide are clear, but it can also be distracting at times, since you can see behind you if you look to the right, or even sometimes when you’re looking straight ahead. I do feel like my visibility actually decreases when I’m wearing the Meta Ray-Ban Display, probably more than when I wear other smart glasses with a screen in them.
That being said, I find the screen to be up to snuff, if not the highest resolution in the world, but I highly recommend you go see for yourself before buying a pair. Luckily, Meta is requiring people to get sized for wristbands in-store anyway, but hey, maybe you’re considering buying them aftermarket! And, if you are, I would suggest… not. The lesson of the screen, if there is one to be had, is that, though your experience may vary. It is surprisingly bright, if not always sharp or hi-res. Ultimately, the screen is just a part of the picture; it’s also about what you can do on said screen, and on that front, the possibilities are… not endless.So… now what?
As cool as controlling a UI by waving your fingers in the air is, that thrill (for most at least) probably won’t last forever, and when it fades, you’re going to wonder to yourself, “Okay, so what now?” In Meta’s case, the “what now” part consists of a few things, and I really mean a few.
You’ve got bread-and-butter phone-type stuff like messaging, which encompasses Meta’s first-party messaging apps like WhatsApp or Messenger on Facebook and Instagram. It also, thank god, works with both iOS and Android, allowing you to both send and receive messages from your phone. In the smart glasses display, all of those notifications can be shown as they roll in, popping up as a bubble. You can also opt, via the Meta AI app (where you’ll have to connect Instagram, WhatsApp, and your phone) to have messages read out loud through the built-in speakers. Personally, I find that feature to be a little annoying. You have a screen now; you might as well use it.
As you might imagine, the Meta Ray-Ban Display are more integrated with Instagram and WhatsApp than they are with your phone. For example, in the Instagram app, you can even watch Reels that are sent to you via DMs, which is a nice touch if you want to catch up with that one friend who spams you with memes while you’re commuting on the subway. Sending pictures via your phone, however, is a little less clean. In iOS, pictures show up as a link that the person has to tap in order to see the picture. It’s a small hurdle, but one that creates just a little bit more friction than a first-party gadget would.
Mostly, though, the friction isn’t a dealbreaker. Messaging someone from the Meta Ray-Ban Display connected to your phone (in my case iOS) is pretty simple, though you still have to use the voice assistant on the smart glasses to do so. I tried texting my colleague, Ray Wong, for example, by saying “Text Ray,” and fortunately, Meta AI asked me, “Which Ray?” After that, I was able to use my thumb to select the correct one and then pinch “dictate” to say my message out loud, which in this case was, “I’m texting you from my stupid glasses.” I was even able to respond with a thumbs-up emoji after Ray texted back, “You look like a dork.”
There’s nothing revolutionary about being able to send and receive messages with smart glasses, but I will say being able to see notifications as they roll in is a novel experience, and the ease with which you can respond feels more refined than you’d expect from a category of device that feels like it’s only existed for five minutes.
Outside of messaging, there’s also video calling, which works about the same as it did on the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 1 and 2 AI smart glasses, though with a new video calling feature via WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram that shows your POV from the Meta Ray-Ban Display’s camera. This obviously is not an ideal way to video chat, but if you’re trying to show someone something, it could be useful. I’m not really sure how the Meta Ray-Ban Display would ever overcome the fact that there’s not a camera pointed at your face for a more natural video calling experience, either. A Meta-made version of Apple’s spatial Personas in the Vision Pro, maybe? I certainly hope they’d be more high-res than its Horizon Worlds avatars.
I tried video calling my partner through Instagram to test the feature out, and the results were… low-res.
