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.
I would probably buy a pair once there’s some progress on an alternative firmware for those. The price is (hopefully) subsidized, so putting Meta in red while getting some cool tech would be nice. (Same reason I own a Quest 3.)
This is my #1 issue. I simply don’t trust them and I don’t know that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point. They’ve been violating my trust for decades.
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.
"rebranding" takes more than saying "oh, now we are 'meta'" FB launched with great positive repetitional aura, but, at least to me, they have worn that away bit by bit over the years to the point where it becomes hard to earn back,.
The vast majority of users knew nothing about Facebook‘s origins until The Social Network. In the mid-to-late 2000s, the perception was of simply a much better designed, much more exclusive alternative to Myspace.
Hard to imagine nearly two decades later, but for a brief moment in time, it was cool to be on Facebook.
To the larger public they were the opposite of that... a clean, uncluttered alternative to MySpace that had none of its social baggage, in spite of its DNA which was clearly unknown during the early phases of social media.
I would buy something from them, but until I know I could wear them safely at work while developing, using the bathroom, driving, and watching TV at home, and that I’d want to do that without being distracted all day by texts, etc., I wouldn’t wear them. I have to wear glasses, so they’d have to be clear, prescription glasses with reasonable small and stylish frames. This product isn’t for me, and I don’t see how it makes sense to continue spending money on this boondoggle, which is effectively a massively expensive human-testing project to help them develop reasonable-looking glasses. I love Ray-Ban glasses, but not this style or size, and not with these features.
> 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?
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"
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.
Crazy to me - isn't it a no-brainer to fake the interactions and store them on the showcase glasses to fallback in case something went wrong - and calling that with a prompt like "what do i do first"
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?
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.
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
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?
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.)
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.
One of my internships was preparing Bill Gate's demo machines for CES. I setup custom machine images and ran through scripts to make sure everything went off w/o a hitch (I was doing just the demos for Tablet PC, each org presumably had their own team preparing the demos!)
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.
The same unwarranted sense of confidence that tells them this product is worth making tells them that they can easily pull off a live demo. This is called "culture fit"
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.
"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!")
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.
Typical Meta product. I used to believe and wasted money on multiple generations of Quest & Ray-bans. I expect this device to be unsupported at launch, just like Quest Pro was
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.
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.
they've been bragging about how good that neural wristband is for years. It's strange they haven't ventured to make a smartwatch with it. Maybe because Zuck has been so focused on AR/VR
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).
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.
>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.
I do think we're in for a bit of a reality check on how human attention works.
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.
Isn't it a general rule of driving (or operating any sufficiently dangerous machinery) to keep the eyes on the road, constantly reminding oneself to do so, so the attention is kept where it is needed? I mean, in theory. In practice, I see people deep in their damn phones all the time - and it's scary - but I think that's more of an attitude (social) issue than a display (technology) problem.
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.
> 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 this technology introduces anything new to this issue.
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.
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.
I had one of those Thalmic Myo armbands 12ish years ago. Used it a couple of times and then forgot about it. From memory, there were only a few gestures available to program, and anything I could think to sync them to was just as easily handled with keyboard shortcuts (show desktop, close window, change workspace, etc).
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
> 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!
There's no monopoly. You can buy identical glasses on the side of the street for $10. Except you aren't going to get the RayBan logo, and that's what people are paying for.
The main reason I avoid cheap sunglasses is that if they only dim in the visible spectrum, your pupil dilates and lets in more UV light than it would have otherwise, damaging the retina. Not that the full spectrum protection explains away the entire premium, but it is a reason not to go for bottom of the barrel ones sold on street corners.
Technically not a monopoly but colloquially I disagree.
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.
True for the $10 ones. But you can get very nice sunglasses with coating and polarizing lenses for way less than RayBan. RayBans are nice glasses too but you are mostly paying for the name.
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.
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.
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.
Yes. I work on a trading floor. Personal tech is a big issue in the world of private equity, investment banking, capital markets, law, medicine, proprietary research, coding, national defense, homeland security, most government roles, law enforcement, and may other professions. An employee may try to steal IP, but in the case of regulated industries, they can wind up in jail very quickly for doing so. This is no joke, and there is no room for sloppy move-fast-and-break-things jackassery.
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.
Is anyone else seeing concerns about where this technology is heading --
(A) Are we going to consume food prepared by a human so incompetent that he needs Live AI to tell him what ingredient to put and how much ... and that too an AI so unreliable that it can't tell whether the bowl is empty, let alone what ingredients are in it.[1]
In what world is this a sane marketing proposition?
(B) Distracted driving due to smartphones is at least detectable -- how do we escape distracted driving because of smart glasses?
When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech they are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Who should take the lead on saying: wait a minute we need some common sense boundaries around this ... some ground rules around responsible use of technology.
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.
Fwiw i don’t have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp) and am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban glasses.
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.
This is very cool; It seems likely to be the next step in human computer interaction. I could see Meta (or someone else) adding cellular features and a small screen to the wristband and getting rid of a phone entirely.
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?
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.
I'm really not a fan of them. There's already too much recording going on on a daily basis. I would personally avoid anyone wearing these. They say the mandatory LED activation prevents the issue, but I still don't trust it, and find it very off putting either way.
Well, Apple might be Cooked (pun very much intended). Tim is apparently very focused on AI glasses, but here is Meta with display-enabled glasses a year before Apple is planning to release anything.
We all love to say this, but everyone forgets: Apple has never beaten competitors by being the first – they’ve beaten them by being the best.
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.
I think it's a "yes but" here. AI is the first transition point since the smartphone. Apple knows how to make hardware, and knows how to make software. I am extremely unconvinced Apple has a clue about what to do with AI.
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.
To be fair, Meta is also not the first company to launch smart glasses with a display.
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.
What does wins even mean, then? Apple doesn't dominate a market. They make competitive hardware that integrates well with its ecosystem. If there's a market for smart glasses they'll probably use the same strategy.
No- they beat them by squatting on the most generic logical human friendly style so that other companies can't copy the most natural conception. They're copyright colonialists.
People keep saying this, but it is absolutely not true.
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 (Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music Connect, AirPower, Airport).
They were first in phone with touch interface and no keyboard. In terms of other capabilities/apps there were other phones much more powerful and capable.
They absolutely were not first to the smart phone, that was blackberry. It's just that blackberry sucked. They were first to PC but I don't think they were first to laptop.
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.
I'm not sure I'll ever get over my concerns about making people around me uncomfortable to ever don one myself, but I hear the non-display ones are breakthrough assistive devices for impaired folks and this one might be too with the captioning.
I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs to use them in polite company.
I do see them being recognized more and sometimes banned (eg i saw a video of a strip club stopping someone with those glasses from entering). But otherwise… meh? We already know everyone around us is carrying incredibly high powered cameras in their pockets.
I think continuing to go for the classic Ray-Ban look is a mistake. I don't think this product is enticing to the Ray-Ban crowd at this point. Ray-Bans are for looking effortlessly cool, not maybe secretly filming people, it's a wolf in sheep's (bulging) clothing. I would go for more steampunk goggles. Get nerds and hobbyists really excited about it. Create a new lane.
I don't think these look like classic Ray-Bans. It looks like someone selected Wayfarers and then ran stroke path 30px. They're basically the clip art version of Ray-Bans.
A version that is just plainly nerdy (and more comfortable) might not be a bad idea; maybe call it the developer version or something to avoid any association with fashion or luxury.
I tried to record every day things with my action cam and I always feel like a weirdo with a box hanging off, I think these would help me not care about that as much,
Out of curiosity, for what purpose? Do you go back and watch your videos of everyday things? Share them with friends? With photography (and most visual media) the secret seems to be to take many many photos, or draw many many pictures, or shoot tons of video, and then curate and edit meticulously to find just the very best parts. Do you really get much value out of recording lots of day to day video? Is this part of some kind of art project?
The biggest thing stopping me from getting these is knowing that a derivative of Meta's Orion AR prototype will release to manufacturing in the next few years, and this just feels like a stop-gap.
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.
The nice thing about AR/VR is that a better version will always come out in a couple of years so you can always wait. I love VR as a concept and some years late I bought a Valve Index and am considering a Bigscreen 2 but really the best thing to do is always wait.
This is beginning to mirror the evolution of the Smart Phone.
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.
I really hope that Apple is working on this. It seems like they have at least some of the framework through the Vision; if they fire that team/abandom this software its gonna be a huge mistake.
Apple really plays the long game. More than 10 years ago, on a now defunct website for AAPL investors, there was an Apple employee who inadvertently blurted out about how his work at Apple was related to researching saccades & micro-saccades, the small rapid eye movements of the eye, as it never stays completely still, even during “fixation".
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.
That is also true of most smartphones. Smartphone batteries can be replaced, but specialty equipment and training is required. It's the same problem here, but much worse: they have to pack a significant amount of hardware into the space available. Even if they wanted to, it's unlikely that they could offer user-serviceable batteries.
TWS are better comparison. Smartphone battery need to be changed in 3-5 years and should cost < $50. People throw them away because new one is better and they have money.
Someone help me understand why the Ray-Ban branding? Meta should be able to make the frames themselves. Ray-Ban doesn't seem to be a strong enough brand that Meta couldn't go it solo and build a glasses brand themselves.
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.
I refuse to buy hardware from Meta again. I bought two Portal TV from them and it discontinued and not supported within two years. Now I have two junks in my drawer. :(
> 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
I think the tech is really cool. But I was actually hoping for a device that does the whole "phone strapped to my face" thing without actually looking like one. I mean if I'm already staring at my screen, why not make it easier?
I continue to be amazed by people rushing to give away even more of their personal data to a large corporation, especially one with Meta's privacy-challenged history.
This is getting closer to the ideal product, but I’m gonna wait for the one from Apple that I know it will be well-tested and integrate with my device. I’m sure it’s coming in the next few years. I can only imagine the pain that will come with trying to get the half-baked Meta ecosystem to cooperate with my iPhone.
This is what no one else can seem to understand. The iPad was created in Apple's labs before the iPhone. But Jobs and other staff made the decision to wait several years to launch the phone until the tech caught up to the ambition. They had a certain ascetic they wanted in addition to the hardware and it required time.
In this case, it looks like opposite. The tech is finally getting there, but the design team has no sense of making a daily wear product that people should reasonably want to wear. If I imagine a large population of people wearing these daily, it's going to look like middle and high school students from the 70s and 80s in yearbook photos.
What's awful is that I'm one of the most fashion ignorant people I know. I wear the same type of shirts and shoes because they're comfortable not stylish. And my glasses are as minimal frame as possible because I don't want a large mass of matter sitting on my face. Even that being said, this product just reminds me of my buddy's army photo of him wearing the Army issued glasses. Not good.
Yup. I can go to any other of billions of domains in the world and just see the url, but because Google and Apple have a special compensatory friendship we can't do that.
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.
Huge respect to Zuck and co; I much rather authentic demos where stuff goes pear than some glossy marketing spiel by a non-technical exec.
Also, I didn't know this demo was taking place until afterwards, meta really should do more to publicise their demos, especially given they're actually making cool new stuff, unlike a lot of other big tech companies who are more about rent-seeking, advertising and enshitifying than inventing.
I could not be less interested. As the world determine their relationship with their phone needs distance, Zuck has decided everyone wants a phone on their face. Doubt it.
It seems like a pattern that Meta hardware usually sells relatively well, but then struggles with user retention. It happened with the Quest and so far it's happening with the glasses too. People like the idea of the products much more than the reality of actually using them.
It's not so much the hardware, it's the lack of software to use with the hardware. Nobody wants to wait until real hardware exists and risk losing consumer interest, yet they risk losing consumer interest with these half baked products. Sibling comment claims a killer app, but there hasn't truly been a killer app that makes people willing to use the product all the time. The new wears off, and then the use just craters.
OTOH, for me the Quest killer app is Ace. I can practice pistol shooting any time I want, which keeps me using the headset every day. For the glasses, the killer app might be translation. Now, I couldn't say if that will 'translate' into widespread user retention, or — like Ace — only really keep a smaller community engaged (I don't think most users need translation services on a regular basis).
So this is like Alexa in glasses with a band that lets you do things without speaking? Sounds like a cool technology. I can see how it is useful for sport (bike riding, running, etc; hopefully people don't use it while driving), but to be honest, not something I'm too excited about buying. It feels more of the same.
As a theoretical matter, this is some nifty stuff. Hats off to everyone involved, as a simple matter of engineering.
As a practical matter, this feels too Orwellian. I don't want necessarily want to emit that much information (he said, looking at his Galaxy smart phone and watch) all the time.
I feel like this and this (https://www.visor.com/) are going to converge into the same thing. If you really think about it, the average person will only ever use AR glasses for hands free camera, mic/headphone, and to see notifications. If they get really good, then a map overlay of the world. But real productivity will require it to start converging into a bigger visor type headset that is definitely not the same bulky VR form factor. The bulky VR form factor is DOA ergonomically for productivity imho.
Lastly, I don't put it past humanity to actually be interested in seeing ad overlays throughout the world because it's just ... cool, at least at first.
Killer feature for me:
I'd like to see that 3D marker in the world that I need to walk towards like a video game.
Are you countering that's the name of a device that does this, or the name of the device that isn't sold any more? I didn't think ML ever made it to anything viable. They just gave great demo
The Magic Leap 1 and 2 were commercially available to some degree, but they were not successful. I can't speak to their PPD, but I can't imagine it was that amazing.
The HoloLens devices might be another set of candidates.
It's fine. I still don't have a need for this in my life, and it's impractical as a replacement (good luck keeping them on once you start sweating) - you're still going to need your phone.
So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets, both of which I now need to wear?
You'll still need to have a phone, yes, but if the glasses reduce the number of times you pull it out of your pocket then I'd consider them worthwhile. Same as a smartwatch.
I am getting Phillips CDI vibes. It takes me back to a mid 90s infomercial where products will built by marketing departments and companies with cash to splash. There is just no bottom up cool factor. At all.
The wrist thing is kind of cool but he has to set his arm down to type 30wpm so maybe in a few iterations it’ll be more compelling.
The glasses seem pointless to me for now. I’m surprised he didn’t add a booty zoom in view. We thought of that idea way back in middle school. Seems like something he’d vibe with.
I grew up on the internet, I know what the CD-i is. Smart glasses are cool. For $800, I'd get one tomorrow if someone had a reproducible jailbreak. I own an Oculus Quest that was worth every dime.
Too often HN threads devolve into the same tired comparisons about laserdisks and Palm Pilots. The only precedent we have for a product like this failing is Vision Pro, and this is nothing like that. Your comment was jumping to a conclusion that I think many would disagree with.
Just in case someone is working on this type of thing. I will easily pay $1000 for an open source glasses thingy that has a monochrome laser display projecting directly onto my retina. IIRC Bosch and Intel have tried this before and the prototypes never went anywhere so there's probably a really good hardware reason why it's not happening but I want that more than any other hardware, it doesn't even have to be both eyes.
(admittedly with the recent Android news perhaps non-exploitative mobile computing is about to be dead and buried but shit, I'd lug around a backpack module everywhere running linux if it came to that)
It's quite difficult to do that safely, as it turns out! I would love a virtual retinal display, but I assume there's a good reason that nobody has managed to ship one in the last two decades.
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.
They have a brand problem. Absolutely no way I buy anything from Meta.
I would probably buy a pair once there’s some progress on an alternative firmware for those. The price is (hopefully) subsidized, so putting Meta in red while getting some cool tech would be nice. (Same reason I own a Quest 3.)
This is my #1 issue. I simply don’t trust them and I don’t know that there is a realistic path to build that trust at this point. They’ve been violating my trust for decades.
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.
Why do you think they rebranded? They are chasing after Gen Z, brainwashing that clean slate.
"rebranding" takes more than saying "oh, now we are 'meta'" FB launched with great positive repetitional aura, but, at least to me, they have worn that away bit by bit over the years to the point where it becomes hard to earn back,.
You'd be amazed how many <25s have no idea Meta owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
> 25s have no idea either!
> FB launched with great positive repetitional aura
As a site that ranked how hot girls were?
The vast majority of users knew nothing about Facebook‘s origins until The Social Network. In the mid-to-late 2000s, the perception was of simply a much better designed, much more exclusive alternative to Myspace.
Hard to imagine nearly two decades later, but for a brief moment in time, it was cool to be on Facebook.
To the larger public they were the opposite of that... a clean, uncluttered alternative to MySpace that had none of its social baggage, in spite of its DNA which was clearly unknown during the early phases of social media.
Ok, I was trying to give as much benefit of the doubt as possible. You are 100% correct of course...
Meta has a Musk/Tesla problem
I would buy something from them, but until I know I could wear them safely at work while developing, using the bathroom, driving, and watching TV at home, and that I’d want to do that without being distracted all day by texts, etc., I wouldn’t wear them. I have to wear glasses, so they’d have to be clear, prescription glasses with reasonable small and stylish frames. This product isn’t for me, and I don’t see how it makes sense to continue spending money on this boondoggle, which is effectively a massively expensive human-testing project to help them develop reasonable-looking glasses. I love Ray-Ban glasses, but not this style or size, and not with these features.
Well, your loss. My Oculus Quest remains the best $400 I ever spent on consumer tech.
Almost everyone I know who got a quest stopped using it after a week.
It's a fun toy, but gets boring pretty quickly.
I use mine for flight simming. The screen looks great for the price, and lets me stream games like DCS World from my desktop.
Far as fun toys go, the Quest sits head-and-shoulders over my Nintendo Switch.
> 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?
I wouldn't want to wear earbuds while doing anything active, the chance of them falling out is too high.
I've run many hundreds of hours with two variations of AirPods and they've never once fallen out
Has not been an issue for me (walking, jogging, basketball practice)
but i understand the concern! sometimes it’s sketchy haha. Like riding a bicycle.
I use shockz for running - stable and your ears are totally unobstructed.
they also don't have an app store and are a closed platform which is a big downside.
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"
The live demo of this is brutal. https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
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.
Crazy to me - isn't it a no-brainer to fake the interactions and store them on the showcase glasses to fallback in case something went wrong - and calling that with a prompt like "what do i do first"
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?
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.
VR gaming seems like it is a bit of a niche, though. I think they want to sell glasses in quantities more like cellphones than gaming peripherals.
I agree they are reaching (and not finding) for an application.
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
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?
The ai is in the cloud
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
Even if it’s small/cheap, if the item is scanned multiple times this will prevent any electrical infetterence.
I don’t even think that’s a word!
next time they need 1 public and 1 private router and shut the public off right before the demo.
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.)
It’s the WiFi, ya sure.
This is why Jobs spent months prepping for each presentation.
But hey, at least it's not all faked
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.
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.
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
If it was pre-recorded we’d know it was staged and that assume they didn’t have a working product.
Their actual result was pretty bad, but, ya know, work in progress I guess.
One of my internships was preparing Bill Gate's demo machines for CES. I setup custom machine images and ran through scripts to make sure everything went off w/o a hitch (I was doing just the demos for Tablet PC, each org presumably had their own team preparing the demos!)
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.
The same unwarranted sense of confidence that tells them this product is worth making tells them that they can easily pull off a live demo. This is called "culture fit"
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.
"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!")
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.
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.
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!
Considering there's no camera pointing to your face they can't be all that interesting.
For those who didn't pick up on it, they were being sarcastic about the issue being wifi related haha
That was not sarcasm. They were being serious.
It didn't sound like sarcasm at all to me?
so when I talk but not to it, it may response like i accidentally say siri? Except is every time?
Typical Meta product. I used to believe and wasted money on multiple generations of Quest & Ray-bans. I expect this device to be unsupported at launch, just like Quest Pro was
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.
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.
they've been bragging about how good that neural wristband is for years. It's strange they haven't ventured to make a smartwatch with it. Maybe because Zuck has been so focused on AR/VR
Doesn’t that make the wrist accessory the important part? The chunky glasses look like they’re still too early, not enough tech.
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).
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.
i was disappointed they didn't say you could connect it to other devices too. I would buy it just as a bluetooth keyboard!
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.
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.
It was hard to see, but it looked like handwriting to me.
yep. whatever else you say, Meta's willingness to throw some tech out there is thrilling from a geek / tech perspective.
I can’t find this demo. Am I blind??
https://www.facebook.com/Meta/videos/1927325824791552/
Skip to around 53:00
YouTube link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0
YouTube link with time mark: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80s0chTOsK0&t=3210
>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.
I do think we're in for a bit of a reality check on how human attention works.
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.
Isn't it a general rule of driving (or operating any sufficiently dangerous machinery) to keep the eyes on the road, constantly reminding oneself to do so, so the attention is kept where it is needed? I mean, in theory. In practice, I see people deep in their damn phones all the time - and it's scary - but I think that's more of an attitude (social) issue than a display (technology) problem.
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.
> 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 this technology introduces anything new to this issue.
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.
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.
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.
> measured electromyography, or EEG
Should be EMG, but is it normal EMG or sEMG?
surface!
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.
I had one of those Thalmic Myo armbands 12ish years ago. Used it a couple of times and then forgot about it. From memory, there were only a few gestures available to program, and anything I could think to sync them to was just as easily handled with keyboard shortcuts (show desktop, close window, change workspace, etc).
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
not the same tech at all.
> 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!
Sorry, is "collaborating with visual Meta AI prompts" just a casual everyday task we're all doing? I must be missing out!
A Ray Ban sunglasses can run up to $500 already.
Love me some luxottica monopoly pricing!
There's no monopoly. You can buy identical glasses on the side of the street for $10. Except you aren't going to get the RayBan logo, and that's what people are paying for.
> You can buy identical glasses on the side of the street for $10. Except you aren't going to get the RayBan logo
That's funny because the ones sold on my street are $10 and they definitely have the rayban logo
It’s usually the build quality which is usually noticeable by other people looking at it and how they’ll break in a week from light wear
The main reason I avoid cheap sunglasses is that if they only dim in the visible spectrum, your pupil dilates and lets in more UV light than it would have otherwise, damaging the retina. Not that the full spectrum protection explains away the entire premium, but it is a reason not to go for bottom of the barrel ones sold on street corners.
Technically not a monopoly but colloquially I disagree.
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.
True for the $10 ones. But you can get very nice sunglasses with coating and polarizing lenses for way less than RayBan. RayBans are nice glasses too but you are mostly paying for the name.
this include the band which is also pushing the envelope of HCI mark writing clip https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxfmPX0hba7ulSVL2MyVaS60I0IPm-CQU...
Now you can wear clothes without pockets.
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.
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.
Do you also ban cellphones in your office? And email? Text messaging?
If an employee wants to steal your IP, they will.
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.
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.
Yes. I work on a trading floor. Personal tech is a big issue in the world of private equity, investment banking, capital markets, law, medicine, proprietary research, coding, national defense, homeland security, most government roles, law enforcement, and may other professions. An employee may try to steal IP, but in the case of regulated industries, they can wind up in jail very quickly for doing so. This is no joke, and there is no room for sloppy move-fast-and-break-things jackassery.
Fortunately this is no longer true in most US government roles.
RU kidding? You don't think a monitoring for loyalty is happening right now?
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.
So, no smartphones in your office?
Edit: Lmao, fake downvotes while another comment which is essentially the same gets upvoted. The veil has been lifted :D.
Is anyone else seeing concerns about where this technology is heading --
(A) Are we going to consume food prepared by a human so incompetent that he needs Live AI to tell him what ingredient to put and how much ... and that too an AI so unreliable that it can't tell whether the bowl is empty, let alone what ingredients are in it.[1]
In what world is this a sane marketing proposition?
(B) Distracted driving due to smartphones is at least detectable -- how do we escape distracted driving because of smart glasses?
When people eventually crash cars or walk into traffic or fall into pits -- no tech company will so much as acknowledge that the tech they are pushing so hard might have something to do with it.
Who should take the lead on saying: wait a minute we need some common sense boundaries around this ... some ground rules around responsible use of technology.
[1] Failed demo of Live AI - https://x.com/ns123abc/status/1968469616545452055
Dont worry. The market decides what we want and we just wont go for it
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.
Fwiw i don’t have a facebook/instagram account (have whatsapp) and am still able to use all functionality in my Meta Rayban glasses.
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.
This is very cool; It seems likely to be the next step in human computer interaction. I could see Meta (or someone else) adding cellular features and a small screen to the wristband and getting rid of a phone entirely.
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?
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.
I'm really not a fan of them. There's already too much recording going on on a daily basis. I would personally avoid anyone wearing these. They say the mandatory LED activation prevents the issue, but I still don't trust it, and find it very off putting either way.
They've had the camera glasses part for a few years now.
But currently not very popular.
there are millions in the wild ... so maybe not super popular but it's above penetration of anything you would call a niche product
Millions in the wild, but mostly sitting in a drawer.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/metas-ray-ban-smart-g...
That's about gen 1, gen 2 is vastly more successful
Tested has a hands on plus interview with Boz (their CTO) https://youtu.be/1jDorDsi9JM?si=O1_g9Z-rgGjyVER3
Well, Apple might be Cooked (pun very much intended). Tim is apparently very focused on AI glasses, but here is Meta with display-enabled glasses a year before Apple is planning to release anything.
Source: https://www.macrumors.com/2025/05/21/apple-smart-glasses-eve... or some other Mark Gurman leak
We all love to say this, but everyone forgets: Apple has never beaten competitors by being the first – they’ve beaten them by being the best.
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.
I think it's a "yes but" here. AI is the first transition point since the smartphone. Apple knows how to make hardware, and knows how to make software. I am extremely unconvinced Apple has a clue about what to do with AI.
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.
They also don’t own a search engine, yet google pays them $20B annually
To be fair, Meta is also not the first company to launch smart glasses with a display.
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.
What does wins even mean, then? Apple doesn't dominate a market. They make competitive hardware that integrates well with its ecosystem. If there's a market for smart glasses they'll probably use the same strategy.
No- they beat them by squatting on the most generic logical human friendly style so that other companies can't copy the most natural conception. They're copyright colonialists.
People keep saying this, but it is absolutely not true.
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 (Airpods Max, Homepod, Maps, MobileMe, Ping, Music Connect, AirPower, Airport).
They were first in phone with touch interface and no keyboard. In terms of other capabilities/apps there were other phones much more powerful and capable.
Edit: even for touch LG Prada was first.
They absolutely were not first to the smart phone, that was blackberry. It's just that blackberry sucked. They were first to PC but I don't think they were first to laptop.
Sure you can go back well before blackberry to find even earlier versions of the smartphone but the type we all use today was introduced by Apple.
...what?
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.
I'm not sure I'll ever get over my concerns about making people around me uncomfortable to ever don one myself, but I hear the non-display ones are breakthrough assistive devices for impaired folks and this one might be too with the captioning.
I wonder how the etiquette will evolve for people with legitimate needs to use them in polite company.
I do see them being recognized more and sometimes banned (eg i saw a video of a strip club stopping someone with those glasses from entering). But otherwise… meh? We already know everyone around us is carrying incredibly high powered cameras in their pockets.
I think continuing to go for the classic Ray-Ban look is a mistake. I don't think this product is enticing to the Ray-Ban crowd at this point. Ray-Bans are for looking effortlessly cool, not maybe secretly filming people, it's a wolf in sheep's (bulging) clothing. I would go for more steampunk goggles. Get nerds and hobbyists really excited about it. Create a new lane.
I don't think these look like classic Ray-Bans. It looks like someone selected Wayfarers and then ran stroke path 30px. They're basically the clip art version of Ray-Bans.
Ray-Buns.
A version that is just plainly nerdy (and more comfortable) might not be a bad idea; maybe call it the developer version or something to avoid any association with fashion or luxury.
Use cases: 1: FPV "how-to" videos are marginally easier to make, though GoPro remains a thing...
2: Users get to look like the nerd emoji
3: The rest seems like creepy-spying-on-friends-or-strangers kinds of things. Any constructive suggestions? I'm willing to be enlightened...
I tried to record every day things with my action cam and I always feel like a weirdo with a box hanging off, I think these would help me not care about that as much,
Out of curiosity, for what purpose? Do you go back and watch your videos of everyday things? Share them with friends? With photography (and most visual media) the secret seems to be to take many many photos, or draw many many pictures, or shoot tons of video, and then curate and edit meticulously to find just the very best parts. Do you really get much value out of recording lots of day to day video? Is this part of some kind of art project?
The biggest thing stopping me from getting these is knowing that a derivative of Meta's Orion AR prototype will release to manufacturing in the next few years, and this just feels like a stop-gap.
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.
The nice thing about AR/VR is that a better version will always come out in a couple of years so you can always wait. I love VR as a concept and some years late I bought a Valve Index and am considering a Bigscreen 2 but really the best thing to do is always wait.
Every piece of tech has a better version a year or two away. If you keep waiting then you are never going to buy anything.
This is beginning to mirror the evolution of the Smart Phone.
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.
I really hope that Apple is working on this. It seems like they have at least some of the framework through the Vision; if they fire that team/abandom this software its gonna be a huge mistake.
Apple really plays the long game. More than 10 years ago, on a now defunct website for AAPL investors, there was an Apple employee who inadvertently blurted out about how his work at Apple was related to researching saccades & micro-saccades, the small rapid eye movements of the eye, as it never stays completely still, even during “fixation".
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.
Still no way to replace battery, so in 3 years tops this thing is e-waste.
That is also true of most smartphones. Smartphone batteries can be replaced, but specialty equipment and training is required. It's the same problem here, but much worse: they have to pack a significant amount of hardware into the space available. Even if they wanted to, it's unlikely that they could offer user-serviceable batteries.
TWS are better comparison. Smartphone battery need to be changed in 3-5 years and should cost < $50. People throw them away because new one is better and they have money.
Seems like Apple should get the wristband tech so people can type on their watches.
Someone help me understand why the Ray-Ban branding? Meta should be able to make the frames themselves. Ray-Ban doesn't seem to be a strong enough brand that Meta couldn't go it solo and build a glasses brand themselves.
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.
At first I was shocked by the price, but now I just sort of want it. If they opened the OS it would be AMAZING.
AI Glasses With an EMG Wristband available Sept 30 for $799
I refuse to buy hardware from Meta again. I bought two Portal TV from them and it discontinued and not supported within two years. Now I have two junks in my drawer. :(
cries in Oculus Go :(
> 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
I think the tech is really cool. But I was actually hoping for a device that does the whole "phone strapped to my face" thing without actually looking like one. I mean if I'm already staring at my screen, why not make it easier?
Pretty cool hardware. Count me in if and when it supports interesting software.
There's the rub isn't it? We've been doing AR for over ten years at this point and I can't name a single blockbuster app besides Pokemon Go.
Fight the future !
https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs?si=nTLQO4G2OIPcMkwX
I continue to be amazed by people rushing to give away even more of their personal data to a large corporation, especially one with Meta's privacy-challenged history.
This is getting closer to the ideal product, but I’m gonna wait for the one from Apple that I know it will be well-tested and integrate with my device. I’m sure it’s coming in the next few years. I can only imagine the pain that will come with trying to get the half-baked Meta ecosystem to cooperate with my iPhone.
Interesting tech, but the item is completely without any attractive style. Look up "army birth control glasses"
(Sorry about the google search link. Apple and Google go out of their way to hide the url when doing searches on Google from mobile Safari.)
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=046dc2c9c0fa6748&udm=2...
This is what no one else can seem to understand. The iPad was created in Apple's labs before the iPhone. But Jobs and other staff made the decision to wait several years to launch the phone until the tech caught up to the ambition. They had a certain ascetic they wanted in addition to the hardware and it required time.
In this case, it looks like opposite. The tech is finally getting there, but the design team has no sense of making a daily wear product that people should reasonably want to wear. If I imagine a large population of people wearing these daily, it's going to look like middle and high school students from the 70s and 80s in yearbook photos.
What's awful is that I'm one of the most fashion ignorant people I know. I wear the same type of shirts and shoes because they're comfortable not stylish. And my glasses are as minimal frame as possible because I don't want a large mass of matter sitting on my face. Even that being said, this product just reminds me of my buddy's army photo of him wearing the Army issued glasses. Not good.
>Apple and Google go out of their way to hide the url when doing searches on Google from mobile Safari.
What? It's only 2 clicks away. You can click the copy button after hitting the share button. /s
Yup. I can go to any other of billions of domains in the world and just see the url, but because Google and Apple have a special compensatory friendship we can't do that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCDWKdmwhUI
regina dugan's f8 keynote 8 years ago
where they announced they were working on a 'haptic vocabulary' for a skin interface as well as noninvasive brain scanning technologyu\
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.
Looks like there were some bloopers during the demo: https://x.com/nearcyan/status/1968473003592990847
Huge respect to Zuck and co; I much rather authentic demos where stuff goes pear than some glossy marketing spiel by a non-technical exec.
Also, I didn't know this demo was taking place until afterwards, meta really should do more to publicise their demos, especially given they're actually making cool new stuff, unlike a lot of other big tech companies who are more about rent-seeking, advertising and enshitifying than inventing.
I could not be less interested. As the world determine their relationship with their phone needs distance, Zuck has decided everyone wants a phone on their face. Doubt it.
My neighbour is gonna buy this one as well and I bet it’s going to end up in the same junk drawer as the last one.
It seems like a pattern that Meta hardware usually sells relatively well, but then struggles with user retention. It happened with the Quest and so far it's happening with the glasses too. People like the idea of the products much more than the reality of actually using them.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/3/23818462/meta-ray-ban-stor...
It's not so much the hardware, it's the lack of software to use with the hardware. Nobody wants to wait until real hardware exists and risk losing consumer interest, yet they risk losing consumer interest with these half baked products. Sibling comment claims a killer app, but there hasn't truly been a killer app that makes people willing to use the product all the time. The new wears off, and then the use just craters.
Good point.
OTOH, for me the Quest killer app is Ace. I can practice pistol shooting any time I want, which keeps me using the headset every day. For the glasses, the killer app might be translation. Now, I couldn't say if that will 'translate' into widespread user retention, or — like Ace — only really keep a smaller community engaged (I don't think most users need translation services on a regular basis).
The camera access is limited to Meta, no 3rd party developers. For privacy reasons. Meta ♥ privacy
So this is like Alexa in glasses with a band that lets you do things without speaking? Sounds like a cool technology. I can see how it is useful for sport (bike riding, running, etc; hopefully people don't use it while driving), but to be honest, not something I'm too excited about buying. It feels more of the same.
As a theoretical matter, this is some nifty stuff. Hats off to everyone involved, as a simple matter of engineering.
As a practical matter, this feels too Orwellian. I don't want necessarily want to emit that much information (he said, looking at his Galaxy smart phone and watch) all the time.
Possibly I'm trending Luddite in my dotage.
I feel like this and this (https://www.visor.com/) are going to converge into the same thing. If you really think about it, the average person will only ever use AR glasses for hands free camera, mic/headphone, and to see notifications. If they get really good, then a map overlay of the world. But real productivity will require it to start converging into a bigger visor type headset that is definitely not the same bulky VR form factor. The bulky VR form factor is DOA ergonomically for productivity imho.
Lastly, I don't put it past humanity to actually be interested in seeing ad overlays throughout the world because it's just ... cool, at least at first.
Killer feature for me:
I'd like to see that 3D marker in the world that I need to walk towards like a video game.
Visor is largely vaporware (to put it mildly). It’s the form factor Apple is aiming with version 2 or 3 of Vision Pro
It’s a very different experience to passthrough, no matter how small you make the glasses, so I’m not sure there’s a clear path to convergence
>The only wave guide device out there with > 42 pixels per degree (ppd) is a giant headset that isn’t sold commercially anymore.
Magic Leap.
Are you countering that's the name of a device that does this, or the name of the device that isn't sold any more? I didn't think ML ever made it to anything viable. They just gave great demo
The Magic Leap 1 and 2 were commercially available to some degree, but they were not successful. I can't speak to their PPD, but I can't imagine it was that amazing.
The HoloLens devices might be another set of candidates.
CapitalOne Meta Ray-Ban Display, brought to you by Costco.
It's weird that they give a figure for PPV but not FOV. That tells me that the FOV must be pretty terrible
The Verge's article says it's 600x600 over a 20 degree FOV.
nobody is gonna use this, it's the Humane device except on a glasses.
Pretty disappointed that prescription is limited to -4/+4!
It's fine. I still don't have a need for this in my life, and it's impractical as a replacement (good luck keeping them on once you start sweating) - you're still going to need your phone.
So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets, both of which I now need to wear?
Nah. Not happening.
Neat gestures though.
> So that means this is just adding 2 more gadgets
Yeah, I see where this is going. (And here I am wanting less gadgets.)
You'll still need to have a phone, yes, but if the glasses reduce the number of times you pull it out of your pocket then I'd consider them worthwhile. Same as a smartwatch.
It's cool in theory, but frankly my mental health is significantly improved if I don't stare at a screen all day.
I'm getting Macworld 2007 vibes
I am getting Phillips CDI vibes. It takes me back to a mid 90s infomercial where products will built by marketing departments and companies with cash to splash. There is just no bottom up cool factor. At all.
reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhZdWvnF3do
> There is just no bottom up cool factor. At all.
That's just like, your opinion, man.
The wrist thing is kind of cool but he has to set his arm down to type 30wpm so maybe in a few iterations it’ll be more compelling.
The glasses seem pointless to me for now. I’m surprised he didn’t add a booty zoom in view. We thought of that idea way back in middle school. Seems like something he’d vibe with.
Did you watch the video link and compare? Curious what you think? Or are you just trolling? I bring substance and you bring negging
I grew up on the internet, I know what the CD-i is. Smart glasses are cool. For $800, I'd get one tomorrow if someone had a reproducible jailbreak. I own an Oculus Quest that was worth every dime.
Too often HN threads devolve into the same tired comparisons about laserdisks and Palm Pilots. The only precedent we have for a product like this failing is Vision Pro, and this is nothing like that. Your comment was jumping to a conclusion that I think many would disagree with.
This is very impressive for a first version of the AI glasses from Meta.
Zuck really has cracked this one.
To Downvoters:
Give credit where credit is due.
I think you are going to realize in a few years why tens of billions was poured into Reality Labs and Oculus.
Version 2 or 3 of these glasses is going to set Meta ahead of the rest (except at least Apple).
Pre-release discussion yesterday:
Meta RayBan AR glasses shows Lumus waveguide structures in leaked video - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45266215 - Sept 2025 (124 comments)
English link: https://www.meta.com/blog/meta-ray-ban-display-ai-glasses-co...
Updated, thanks!
considering meta is short for metadata, this opens up whole new avenues of data harvesting
Just in case someone is working on this type of thing. I will easily pay $1000 for an open source glasses thingy that has a monochrome laser display projecting directly onto my retina. IIRC Bosch and Intel have tried this before and the prototypes never went anywhere so there's probably a really good hardware reason why it's not happening but I want that more than any other hardware, it doesn't even have to be both eyes.
(admittedly with the recent Android news perhaps non-exploitative mobile computing is about to be dead and buried but shit, I'd lug around a backpack module everywhere running linux if it came to that)
Apple is rumoured to have tried this and caused eye damage as a result: https://macdailynews.com/2017/04/20/leaked-document-details-...
It's quite difficult to do that safely, as it turns out! I would love a virtual retinal display, but I assume there's a good reason that nobody has managed to ship one in the last two decades.
No display but perhaps you can support these guys and hope they get there:
https://mentra.glass/