Are we really ready for Meta’s new Ray-Bans?
With any new device category comes a whole host of novel and sometimes exhaustingly complex questions. Smartphones, for example, no matter how mundane they seem right now, are still nagging us with existential quandaries. When should we use them? How should we use them? What in God’s name happens to us when we use them, which, last I checked, is literally all the time?
These are important questions, and most of us, even if we’re not spending all day ruminating on them, tackle the complexity in our own way, setting (or resetting) social norms for ourselves and other people as we trudge along. The only thing is, in my experience, we tend to ask these questions mostly in retrospect, which is to say after the cat (or phone, or smartwatch, or earth-shattering portal into the online world) is out of the proverbial bag. It’s easy to look back and say, “That was the time we should have thought about this,” and when I put Meta’s new smart glasses with a screen on, I knew that the time, for smart glasses in particular, was now—like, right f**king now.
In case you missed it, Meta finally unveiled the Meta Ray-Ban Display, which are its first smart glasses with an in-lens display. I flew out to Meta headquarters for its annual Connect conference to try them, and the second I put them on, it was clear: these are going to be big. It probably seems silly from the outside to make a declaration like that. We have screens everywhere all the time—in our hands, on our wrists, and sometimes, regrettably, in our toasters. Why would smart glasses be any different? On one hand, I get that skepticism, but sometimes function isn’t the issue; it’s form. And when it comes to smart glasses, there is no other form like it.
Meta’s Ray-Ban Display aren’t just another wearable. The screen inside them opens up an entirely new universe of capabilities. With these smart glasses and Meta’s wild new “Neural Band,” a wristband that reads the electrical signals in your arm and translates them to inputs, you’re able to do a lot of the stuff you normally do on your phone. You can receive and write messages, watch Reels on Instagram, take voice calls and video calls, record video and take pictures, and get turn-by-turn navigation. You can even transcribe conversations that are happening in real time. You’re doing this on your face in a way that you’ve never done it before—discreetly and, from my experience, fairly fluidly.
If there were any boundaries between you and a device, Meta’s Ray-Ban Display are closing them to a gap that only an iPhone Air could slide through.
